Digital Preservation Activities Research Articles

Are you Ready? Assessing Whether Organisations are Prepared for Digital Preservation

In early 2009 the Planets project undertook a survey of national libraries, archives, and other content-holding organisations in Europe to better understand the organisations' digital preservation activities and needs, and to ensure that Planets' technology and services are designed to meet them. Over 200 responses were received including a cross-section of major libraries and archives especially in Europe. The results provide a snapshot of organisations' readiness to preserve digital collections for the future. The survey revealed a high level of awareness of the challenges of digital preservation within organisations. Findings indicated that approximately half of those organisations surveyed have taken measures to develop digital preservation policies and to budget for it, while a majority have incorporated digital preservation into their organisational planning. Organisations predict that within a decade they will need to store large quantities of data in a wide range of formats from a variety of sources; three quarters of them are looking to invest in a solution within the next two years. However, the findings also point to varying degrees of readiness. Organisations with a digital preservation policy are significantly further advanced in their work to preserve digital collections for the long-term than others.

Cost Model for Digital Preservation: Cost of Digital Migration

The Danish Ministry of Culture has funded a project to set up a model for costing preservation of digital materials held by national cultural heritage institutions. The overall objective of the project was to increase cost effectiveness of digital preservation activities and to provide a basis for comparing and estimating future cost requirements for digital preservation. In this study we describe an activity-based costing methodology for digital preservation based on the Open Archice Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. Within this framework, which we denote the Cost Model for Digital Preservation (CMDP), the focus is on costing the functional entity Preservation Planning from the OAIS and digital migration activities. In order to estimate these costs we have identified cost-critical activities by analysing the functions in the OAIS model and the flows between them. The analysis has been supplemented with findings from the literature, and our own knowledge and experience. The identified cost-critical activities have subsequently been deconstructed into measurable components, cost dependencies have been examined, and the resulting equations expressed in a spreadsheet. Currently the model can calculate the cost of different migration scenarios for a series of preservation formats for text, images, sound, video, geodata, and spreadsheets. In order to verify the model it has been tested on cost data from two different migration projects at the Danish National Archives (DNA). The study found that the OAIS model provides a sound overall framework for the cost breakdown, but that some functions need additional detailing in order to cost activities accurately. Running the two sets of empirical data showed among other things that the model underestimates the cost of manpower-intensive migration projects, while it reinstates an often underestimated cost, which is the cost of developing migration software. The model has proven useful for estimating the costs of preservation planning and digital migrations. However, more work is needed to refine the existing equations and include the other functional entities of the OAIS model. Also the user-friendliness of the spreadsheet tool must be improved in future versions of the model. The CMDP is presently closing its second phase, where it has been extended to include the OAIS Functional Entity Ingest. This has also enabled us to adjust the theoretical model further, especially regarding the accuracy and precision of the model and in relation to the underlying parameters used in the equations, such as migration frequency and format complexity. Understanding the nature of digital preservation cost is prerequisite for increasing the overall efficiency, and achieving first quality for preservation of cultural heritage materials.

The Human Face of Digital Preservation: Organizational and Staff Challenges, and Initiatives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

The process of setting up a digital preservation repository in compliance with the OAIS model is not only a technical challenge: libraries also need to develop and maintain appropriate skills and organizations. Digital activities, including digital preservation, are nowadays moving into the mainstream activity of the Library and are integrated in its workflows.The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) has been working on the definition of digital preservation activities since 2003. This paper aims at presenting the organizational and human resources challenges that have been faced by the library in this context, and those that are still awaiting us.The library has been facing these challenges through a variety of actions at different levels: organizational changes, training sessions, dedicated working group and task forces, analysis of skills and processes, etc. The results of these actions provide insights on how a national library is going digital, and what is needed to reach this longstanding goal.

Control objectives for DP: Digital preservation as an integrated part of IT governance

Digital Preservation, often seen as information management with a long-term mission, is recognized as an independent research area, but the field’s maturity is still evolving. Reference models and compliance criteria for archival systems are being developed, but the more general perspective of Governance, Risk and Compliance has yet to be fully considered. In particular, Digital Preservation can take advantage of the powerful tools for structuring processes to exercise control, assign responsibilities, and quantify goal achievements, provided by IT Governance. This paper presents an integrated vision for Digital Preservation that aligns key organizational preservation processes with a leading framework for IT Governance. Based on a high-level capability model, we define control objectives for core Digital Preservation processes, present a reference assignment of responsibilities and accountabilities to typical Digital Preservation stakeholders, and discuss a maturity model for Digital Preservation processes. The resulting processes are related to key IT Governance processes. This integrated process model enables organizations with a long-term vision on the value of digital information to sustain and govern their Digital Preservation activities.

Kopal: cooperation, innovation and services: digital preservation activities at the German National Library

Kopal: cooperation, innovation and services: digital preservation activities at the German National Library

Modelling Organizational Preservation Goals to Guide Digital Preservation

This paper is an extended and updated version of the work reported at iPres 2008. Digital preservation activities can only succeed if they go beyond the technical properties of digital objects. They must consider the strategy, policy, goals, and constraints of the institution that undertakes them and take into account the cultural and institutional framework in which data, documents and records are preserved. Furthermore, because organizations differ in many ways, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be appropriate. Fortunately, organizations involved in digital preservation have created documents describing their policies, strategies, work-flows, plans, and goals to provide guidance. They also have skilled staff who are aware of sometimes unwritten considerations. Within Planets (Farquhar & Hockx-Yu, 2007), a four-year project co-funded by the European Union to address core digital preservation challenges, we have analyzed preservation guiding documents and interviewed staff from libraries, archives, and data centres that are actively engaged in digital preservation. This paper introduces a conceptual model for expressing the core concepts and requirements that appear in preservation guiding documents. It defines a specific vocabulary that institutions can reuse for expressing their own policies and strategies. In addition to providing a conceptual framework, the model and vocabulary support automated preservation planning tools through an XML representation.

Preserving Meaning, Not Just Objects: Semantics and Digital Preservation

The ECHO DEPository project is a digital preservation research and development project funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and administered by the Library of Congress. A key goal of this project is to investigate both practical solutions for supporting digital preservation activities today, and the more fundamental research questions underlying the development of the next generation of digital preservation systems. To support on-the-ground preservation efforts in existing technical and organizational environments, we have developed tools to help curators collect and manage Web-based digital resources, such as the Web Archives Workbench (Kaczmarek et al., 2008), and to enhance existing repositories' support for interoperability and emerging preservation standards, such as the Hub and Spoke Tool Suite (Habing et al., 2008). In the longer term, however, we recognize that successful digital preservation activities will require a more precise and complete account of the meaning of relationships within and among digital objects. This article describes project efforts to identify the core underlying semantic issues affecting long-term digital preservation, and to model how semantic inference may help next-generation archives head off long-term preservation risks.

Preserving and ensuring long-term access to digitally born legal information

Written laws, records and legal materials form the very foundation of a democratic society. Lawmakers, legal scholars and everyday citizens alike need, and are entitled, to access the current and historic materials that comprise, explain, define, critique and contextualize their laws and legal institutions. The preservation of legal information in all formats is imperative. Thus far, the twenty-first century has witnessed unprecedented mass-scale acceptance and adoption of digital culture, which has resulted in an explosion in digital information. However, digitally born materials, especially those that are published directly and independently to the Web, are presently at an extremely high risk of permanent loss. Our legal heritage is no exception to this phenomenon, and efforts must be put forth to ensure that our current body of digital legal information is not lost. The authors explored the role of the United States law library community in the preservation of digital legal information. Through an online survey of state and academic law library directors, it was determined that those represented in the sample recognize that digitally born legal materials are at high risk for loss, yet their own digital preservation projects have primarily focused upon the preservation of digitized print materials, rather than digitally born materials. Digital preservation activities among surveyed libraries have been largely limited by a lack of funding, staffing and expertise; however, these barriers could be overcome by collaboration with other institutions, as well as participation in a large-scale regional or national digital preservation movement, which would allow for resource-sharing among participants. One such collaborative digital preservation program, the Chesapeake Project, is profiled in the article and explored as a collaborative effort that may be expanded upon or replicated by other institutions and libraries tackling the challenges of digital preservation.

How much does it cost? The LIFE Project - Costing Models for Digital Curation and Preservation

Digital preservation is concerned with the long-term safekeeping of electronic resources. How can we be confident of their permanence, if we do not know the cost of preservation? The LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature) Project has made a major step forward in understanding the long-term costs in this complex area. The LIFE Project has developed a methodology to model the digital lifecycle and to calculate the costs of preserving digital information for the next 5, 10 or 100 years. National and higher education (HE) libraries can now apply this process and plan effectively for the preservation of their digital collections. Based on previous work undertaken on the lifecycles of paper-based materials, the LIFE Project created a lifecycle model and applied it to real-life digital collections across a diverse subject range. Three case studies examined the everyday operations, processes and costs involved in their respective activities. The results were then used to calculate the direct costs for each element of the digital lifecycle. The Project has made major advances in costing preservation activities, as well as making detailed costs of real digital preservation activities available. The second phase of LIFE (LIFE2), which recently started, aims to refine the lifecycle methodology and to add a greater range and breadth to the project with additional exemplar case studies.

Dealing with Digital Collections: Interviews with the National Library and Selected State Libraries of Australia

Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with staff at the National Library of Australia and four state libraries to gain a clearer understanding of their approach to handling digital collections. While digitisation activity was high in all of the libraries, acquisition of born-digital material was low. All libraries reported holding material on obsolete formats that would be difficult to access. Concerns were expressed about resourcing digital preservation activities and strategies to manage technical issues. There was strong support for PANDORA and faith in its longer-term effectiveness. A closer relationship is called for among all institutions involved with acquiring and preserving digital objects so that better use is made of limited resources.

Institutional repositories, self‐archiving and the role of the library

PurposeTo raise some unresolved questions about the practical implementation and management of institutional repositories – in particular, the level of resource needed to support the process of self‐deposit into institutional repositories.Design/methodology/approachAn opinion piece based on practitioner insights into their cataloguing practice and into digital preservation issues.FindingsThat metadata creation and the formulation of digital preservation policies for institutional repositories require significant resource, if they are to be carried out well. This level of resourcing may have been underestimated hitherto in the process of proselytising for institutional repositories.Research limitations/implicationsThis practice‐based supposition could be tested more rigorously by proper research investigation.Practical implicationsSuggests that libraries and librarians are well placed to give input to the metadata and digital preservation activities inherent in building institutional repositories. They should be resourced to give more attention to such tasks.Originality/valueThe paper tries to make a strong case for librarian‐mediated deposit rather than pure self‐archiving as the future of building institutional repositories.

Building Preservation Partnerships: The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

Congress authorized the Library of Congress to undertake the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) to prevent the loss of our digital heritage. This work, as with all digital preservation activities, is challenging because of technical issues and also because traditionally there have been few effective collaborative mechanisms to leverage resources and expertise. NDIIPP aims to address both issues while also ensuring the preservation of at-risk digital content. Concrete steps have been taken recently with the establishment of eight partnership consortia, each of which has committed to working with the other and the Library on collaborative digital preservation initiatives. The eight consortia represent the formal launch of an NDIIPP national network of preservation partners. Currently, NDIIPP is exploring how best to involve states and territories in the network.

Securing the Future of Information: Digitisation and Preservation of Documents in E-format

Computers waved a (magic) wand and the whole process creation, access, delivery and preservation of information changed for the literary, scholarly, artistic, scientific and domestic community. Computers transformed the analogue world in to the digital world of 0 and 1. Digitisation came as a most wonderful and welcome tool in hands of libraries, museums, archives, societies, publishers, and others for preserving billions of paper/analogue documents in digital format for retaining their original look as well as with a point of view of their future relevance and potential. Preservation is the activity of protecting something from loss or danger. Digital preservation includes the preservation of print and non print material in digitised form for effective, efficient and purposeful use.Any library can’t digitise all its resources. What should it do? What should it preserve? Why should and for whom should it preserve? How this ever changing digitisation scenario is putting a pressure on librarians/archivists, etc. This paper is making an attempt to seek answers to these questions. This paper also explores the concept of preservation by digitisation, the need of digital preservation, and the problems of digital preservation. How digital preservation activities are being carried out by DESIDOC for its publications: Defence Science Journal, DESIDOC Bulletin of Information Technology, PST Series, etc., are described. A detailed case study of development of database of negatives of photographs taken at various events, being developed by DESIDOC by use of various software like MS Access, Corel Draw, PhotoShop, etc., is discussed. http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dbit.25.1.3646

The role of format in digital preservation

The concept of representation format permeates all technical aspects of digital repository architecture and is, therefore, the foundation of many, if not all, digital preservation activities. Digital formats need to be understood both as general classes of encodings and in the specific instances of digital objects. The Digital Library Foundation (DLF) has sponsored an initial investigation into the creation of a global digital format registry (GDRF) to maintain format representation information. Using such information, ancillary tools and services can be created for additional repository and preservation‐related functions such as format‐specific object identification, validation, and characterization. JSTOR and the Harvard University Library are cooperating on the development of an extensible format validation framework called JHOVE. This paper introduces both the GDFR and JHOVE projects.

Digital Preservation Activities in the United Kingdom - building the infrastructure

Depuis plusieurs annees, la conservation des donnees numeriques est consideree au Royaume-Uni comme un probleme de plus en plus urgent, a traiter en priorite. En 1995, le comite mixte pour les systemes informatiques (Joint Information Systems Committee ou JISC) et la British Library avaient anime un atelier a l'Universite de Warwick afin de determiner ce qui devait etre entrepris. Depuis, de nombreux efforts et progres ont ete faits, allant de pair avec la necessite croissante de depasser la recherche theorique pour passer a des efforts pratiques d'archivage. Cet article propose une vue d'ensemble des principales activites de conservation des donnees numeriques entreprises au Royaume-Uni et de l'importance de la collaboration en vue de conserver ces donnees, reconnaissant que les problemes depassent le cadre sectoriel et les frontieres geographiques. La Coalition pour la conservation des donnees numeriques, creee en fevrier 2002, vise a tirer le maximum de profit des activites entreprises individuellement et conjointement par les institutions membres, et a jouer un role de catalyseur pour entreprendre d'autres actions.