Digital Preservation System Research Articles

Digital Preservation of Du Fu Thatched Cottage Memorial Garden

The Xishu Historical and Cultural Celebrity Memorial Gardens are representatives of southwestern regional gardens in China. Du Fu Thatched Cottage is one of the typical examples of these gardens, with exceptional memorial, historical, and cultural significance. However, compared to other gardens in China, few research has been conducted on their digital preservation and construction connotation. In this study, the digital model of Du Fu Thatched Cottage was obtained by terrestrial laser scanning and total station technology, and its memorial analysis and preservation were studied digitally. Using three levels of point, line, and surface analysis, we examined how to digitally deconstruct the commemorative elements of Du Fu Thatched Cottage that included the memorial theme, gardening components, and design philosophy of the garden space. The study revealed the memorial space core of the Historical and Cultural Celebrity Memorial Gardens in Xishu and proposed a strategy for building a digital preservation system. The research will help to digitally protect the Du Fu Thatched Cottage and analyze methods to memorialize other traditional gardens.

Some Considerations On The Archival Storage In Digital Preservation of Records

Starting from the assumption that the carrier is no longer an intrinsic part of digital record (though still a necessary presence for the record to exist), the paper seeks to critically examine the role of storage in digital preservation of records. Is the carrier/storage area a topic of concern for archivists or it is rather a topic for IT professionals? Is longevity of carrier an important archival topic? Is the size of storage an important pre-requisite for a digital preservation system? The examination of these questions will consider both theoretical approaches and personal experiences of the author.

Automating the packaging and ingest processes to preserve bulk digital collections

Providing support to ingest and access bulk collections requires early planning around access and exploring methods that are specific to the data attributes. This paper explores the motivations, constraints and methods that have been employed in the development and implementation of dual automation-based solutions for processing and ingesting large-scale collections into a digital preservation system at the Yale University Library. Implementing dual methods has allowed for the use of multiple technology stacks, close collaboration between preservation staff and subject specialists, and a considerable increase in throughput.

The Road to Partnership: a Stepwise, Iterative Approach to Organisational Collaboration in RDM, Archives and Records Management

Research data management (RDM) sits at the confluence of a number of related roles. The shape an RDM confluence takes depends on several factors including the nature of an organisation and the research that it undertakes. At St George’s, University of London, the UK’s only university dedicated to medical and health sciences education, training and research, RDM has been intricately interwoven with organisational information governance roles since its inception. RDM is represented on our institutional Information Governance Steering Group and our Information Management Team consisting of information governance, data protection, freedom of information, archives, records management and RDM.
 This paper reports on how RDM, archives and records management have collaborated using a step-wise, iterative process to streamline and harmonise our guidance and workflows in relation to the stewardship, curation and preservation of research data. As part of this we consistently develop, conduct and evaluate small projects on managing, curating and preserving data. We present three projects that we collaborated on to transform research data services across each of our departments:
 
 planning for, conducting and reporting on interviews with wet laboratory researchers
 advocating, building a case for and delivering a university-wide digital preservation system
 ongoing work to recover, preserve and facilitate access to a unique national health database
 
 Learnings from these projects are used to develop our guidance, improve our activities and integrate our workflows, the outcomes of which may be further evaluated. Learnings are also used to improve our ways of working together. Through deeper integration of our activities and workflows, rather than simply aligning aspects of our work, we are increasingly becoming partners on research data stewardship, curation and preservation. This approach offers several benefits to the organisation as it allows us to build on our related knowledge and skills and deliver outcomes that demonstrate greater value to the organisation and the researchers we support.

Normalising migration: Reacting to the failure of a digital preservation platform

Since 2006, the University of Florida participated in the Florida Digital Archive (FDA), the mission of which was to provide a cost-effective, long-term preservation repository for digital materials in support of teaching, learning, scholarship and research in the state of Florida. Managed by the Florida Academic Library Services Cooperative (FALSC), FDA used the Dark Archive in the Sunshine State (DAITSS) repository software. Developed with Institute of Museum and Library Services grant funding, the DAITSS system was designed to implement active preservation strategies based on format transformations including forward migration, normalisation and localisation. During autumn 2018, FALSC announced that the sunsetting of FDA would take place in June 2019. This paper discusses how the University of Florida Libraries, with its large digital collection, responded when its statewide digital preservation system was shut down and it had only months to transition. It will discuss challenges in managing the technology infrastructure response while adhering to digital preservation best practices.

The Digital Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage in China: A Survey

Abstract The digital preservation of intangible cultural heritage has become a major emphasis and challenge in China. This study investigated the state of the field by examining the activities of the local Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Centers at Nanyang, Kaifeng, Xianning, Chibi, Sanming and Jingdezhen, using semi-structured interviews to document the status of digital preservation of intangible cultural heritage in China. This study found that the digital preservation system of Chinese cultural heritage has a clear structure and pluralistic components. The centers are rich in digital resources, but disordered in their storage, and are supported by policies, but weak in the area of management. It is necessary to further clarify these institutions’ rights and responsibilities, formulate storage standards, build shared platforms, and strengthen digital preservation management.

Digitization in Archives : Archivematica, a Practical Rewiev of the Software for Managing Archival Records on the Example of the Personal Fonds Rista Odavić at the Archives of Serbia

This paper presents a concrete example of using Archivematica - a digital preservation system to incorporate, organize and manage digitized materials from the Personal Fonds Rista Odavic kept by the Archives of Serbia. The practical part includes the steps required to maintain long-term access to digital memory using the content management system AtoM. Both Archivematica and AtoM systems described in this article were implemented exclusively to start working on this Fonds. In order to maintain good traceability an excel document with the description of all the steps, notes on the execution results and a macro to automatically generate DC metadata was created.

Adding emulation functionality to existing digital preservation infrastructure

This paper shows how using emulation technologies to simulate obsolete computer systems can play an integral role in the digital preservation of information. The combination of state-of-the-art emulation as a service technology with an off-the-shelf digital preservation platform can make the process straightforward for the end user. The emulation of obsolete hardware and software environments to enable information to be read, and to facilitate interaction in a way that simulates the original user experience, is a well-established part of digital preservation solutions. Excellent tools have been developed to work with emulators, but these have remained in the research domain rather than being exploited at scale. This paper explores how an emulation framework has been added to an existing digital preservation infrastructure, enabling information extracted from obsolete hardware to be held in a digital preservation system at Yale University Library (YUL), and linked to an appropriate emulator. This enables YUL to recreate the user experience of interacting with content using the original software quickly and easily. This paper shows why emulation is required and how the integration of these technologies offers the prospect of large-scale emulation as a service linked to real preserved data. It will also examine the next steps needed to make this a reality.

Digital preservation at Big Data scales: proposing a step-change in preservation system architectures

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider how digital preservation system architectures will support business analysis of large-scale collections of preserved resources, and the use of Big Data analyses by future researchers.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviews the architecture of existing systems, then discusses experimental surveys of large digital collections using existing digital preservation tools at Big Data scales. Finally, it introduces the design of a proposed new architecture to work with Big Data volumes of preserved digital resources – also based upon experience of managing a collection of 30 million digital images.FindingsModern visualisation tools enable business analyses based on file-related metadata, but most currently available systems need more of this functionality “out-of-the-box”. Scalability of preservation architecture to Big Data volumes depends upon the ability to run preservation processes in parallel, so indexes that enable effective sub-division of collections are vital. Not all processes scale easily: those that do not require complex management.Practical implicationsThe complexities caused by scaling up to Big Data volumes can be seen as being at odds with preservation, where simplicity matters. However, the sustainability of preservation systems relates directly to their usefulness, and maintaining usefulness will increasingly depend upon being able to process digital resources at Big Data volumes. An effective balance between these conflicting situations must be struck.Originality/valuePreservation systems are at a step-change as they move to Big Data scale architectures and respond to more technical research processes. This paper is a timely illustration of the state of play at this pivotal moment.

Streamlining digital archiving workflows at the Bentley Historical Library

In October 2016, the Bentley Historical Library, in partnership with the University of Michigan Library, received a two-year, US$355,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to enhance the interoperability of three open-source software systems: ArchivesSpace, a web application for managing archival information; Archivematica, a digital preservation system; and DSpace, a repository application that preserves and enables easy and open access to all types of digital content. The ArchivesSpace–Archivematica–DSpace Workflow Integration project integrates these systems into an end-to-end digital archives workflow, facilitating the creation and reuse of metadata among these platforms and streamlining the ingest and deposit of fully processed born-digital materials into a digital preservation and access repository. After outlining the institutional context and the Bentley’s guiding principles for digital processing, this case study discusses the effort that went into developing this workflow, including the software development process, as well as the effort that went into migrating data from legacy systems and preparing archivists and other stakeholders to adopt new tools and workflows. The case study concludes by reflecting on project outcomes and lessons learned.

E-Museums Project. Making Polish Cultural Heritage Accessible Online

Digitisation of cultural heritage held by museums in Poland has been ongoing for several years. The process faces many obstacles, but some collections have been digitised and are available online, for example through Europeana and the Google Art Project. However, the majority of digitised objects are still unavailable through the Internet. The National Institute for Museums and Public Collections (Narodowy Instytut Muzealnictwa i Ochrony Zbiorów, NIMOZ, http://www.nimoz.pl ) the state agency under the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland has been put in charge, among others, of digitisation of museum collections in Poland, as well as setting standards for collection management. NIMOZ has proposed a new E-Museums Project. The project aims to contribute to the development of the information society by facilitating access to Polish cultural heritage. The main objectives of the project are: (1) to improve access to cultural heritage housed in Polish museums, (2) to improve collection documentation, and (3) to provide a long-term digital preservation system. It is envisaged to achieve these objectives by: (1) digitising selected museum collections, (2) developing a central repository for museums' digital resources, and (3) creating a joint museum web portal. The project is being proposed under the Operational Programme called “Polska Cyfrowa” (Digital Poland) operating under both, the Polish Ministry of Infrastructure and Development and the Ministry of Administration and Digitisation. The project is scheduled to run from 2016 to 2018. It is currently the main development project in the field of digitisation and cultural heritage of the Polish national museums. The paper presents the current status of the project, its objectives, expected outcomes and future development, as well as the digitisation progress in Polish museums. Essential preparatory work on establishing theoretical and methodological bases for the project is also outlined. The latter is a result of several expert working groups, which had been appointed and coordinated by NIMOZ.

Proactive Distributed Digital Evidence Preservation with Tamper Resistance, Perfect Secrecy and High Survivability

To reduce the chance of being compromised, digital evidence must be preserved in a secure way when it is generated. The preservation must assure confidentiality, integrity, and survivability of the digital evidence. Some generic storage systems have been proposed. However, they cannot meet the critical requirements for digital evidence preservation. This paper introduces a secure distributed digital evidence preservation system (DEPS) which can preserve digital evidence generated by mission critical servers. With the novel and lightweight (n, n, n-1) secret recovery scheme we proposed, DEPS can efficiently divide each block of a digital evidence file into n shares, compress the first n-1 shares, and then construct a share-message with a sequence number and a fingerprint for each share. Only all the n shares combined together suffice for recovering the block. An adversary can neither obtain any information about the original block from a share-message, nor can he modify digital evidence without being discovered. By using intelligent replication, DEPS can dynamically duplicate and distribute each share-message to a set of distributed repositories to achieve high survivability. The security and performance analyses showed that DEPS is adequate for preserving digital evidence.

The SIMP Tool: Facilitating Digital Library, Metadata, and Preservation Workflow at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library

This article presents a case study of the Submission Information Metadata Packaging (SIMP) tool developed at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library. The Library designed this platform-independent tool to facilitate the deposit of descriptive metadata and derivative formats into CONTENTdm, the Library's current digital asset management system. It also supports the submission of technical metadata and archival content into the Ex Libris Rosetta digital preservation system. The Marriott Library deliberately developed the SIMP tool to accommodate multiple workflows and ingestion processes in a modular fashion, which allows the Library to easily modify the tool to extend its functionality to other digital asset management and preservation systems or enterprise repositories.

Transforming and enhancing metadata for enduser discovery: a case study

This paper describes the process developed by Binghamton University Libraries to extract embedded metadata from digital photographs and transform it into descriptive Dublin Core metadata for use in the Libraries’ digital preservation system. In 2011, Binghamton University Libraries implemented the Rosetta digital preservation system (from Ex Libris) to preserve digitized and born-digital materials. At the same time, the Libraries’ implemented the Primo discovery tool (from Ex Libris) to bring together not only the digital collections in Rosetta, but also bibliographic holdings from our integrated library system and other sources. Currently, the Libraries are working with the campus photographer to preserve and provide access to 350,000+ digital images. Most of these images depict campus events, such as Homecoming, Commencement, etc. that are of historical and immediate social value to the campus community. These images are used widely in marketing and outreach materials, and on the University’s website. However, owing to volume of photographs, as well as to budgetary and other constraints, it is not possible to have library staff inspect the photographs and create a complete descriptive metadata record for each, so we needed to explore different options. Each of photographer’s images contains embedded metadata (file format, date and time stamps, location, etc.) and additionally, many of the files also contain basic descriptive information supplied by the photographer, including his name, keywords and/or a short description. Using this basic metadata as a starting point, cataloguing and systems librarians at Binghamton University Libraries were able to create an automated process to reformat and enhance the available descriptive information, crosswalk it to the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, and map keywords to controlled subject and location terms (including Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM), Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), etc.) Following the initial set-up, the only steps requiring manual intervention are extracting and identifying new keywords, updating the mapping table, running the scripts, proofreading the Dublin Core metadata once it has been produced, and lastly, depositing the images and metadata into the preservation system. Using this collection as a case study, we will demonstrate how embedded metadata can be upcycled in order to produce complete descriptive metadata records, which can then be integrated and indexed with metadata from other sources, and ultimately made discoverable by library users. After all, no matter how well a repository takes care of a file, how well it keeps, preserves or displays it, it makes no sense to put an digital object into a system if you cannot find it later. The Libraries’ workflow and portions of code will be shared; issues and challenges involved will be discussed. While this case study is specific to Binghamton University Libraries, examples of strategies used at other institutions will also be introduced. This paper should be useful to anyone interested in describing large quantities of photographs or other materials with preexisting embedded metadata.

Accumulating Metadata from Tributary Workflows for More Robust Archival Records

Metadata generation oftentimes involves not just a single source but rather a tributary system of interoperating technical processes and workflows during capture. New methods of capture such as automated extraction of technical metadata creates a more robust archival record that will improve our ability to curate digital objects.Recent development roadmaps from two well regarded open source digital preservation systems envision an integration of the Archivematica digital preservation system to prepare information packages for management and dissemination via the Fedora Commons middleware application. MSU Libraries recently piloted a proof-of-technology to transform the technical metadata output from the File Information Tool Set (FITS) utilized by Archivematica for ingesting into a Fedora Common installation. This is accomplished by transforming the metadata output of the open-source Archivematica digital preservation system into the Fedora Commons extension of METS.This interactive paper will report on possible scenarios for the integration of these two preservation tools including the management of the resultant AIP and DIP; possible changes to metadata generation, indexing and searching; as well as provide observation on the applicability to similar workflows.

Using a digital preservation system to ensure access to online digital content

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the benefits of integrating a digital preservation system into the library as a way to ensure uninterrupted access to e‐journals and e‐books.Design/methodology/approachThis paper introduces the concept of a digital preservation system, and shows how it can made to benefit end‐users through a simple integration with the online pubic access catalogue (OPAC), to ensure continuous access to a library's e‐journals and e‐books.FindingsA digital preservation system ensures that libraries continue to have access to on‐line assets once a subscription is cancelled or the publisher discontinues access. It extends the traditional library model of print journals and books on the shelf to encompass digital media. Providing end‐user access to preserved content can be simplified by integrating the online public access catalogue (OPAC) with the digital preservation system through a link resolver. End‐users can access the preserved content using an interface they already know, and the integration guards against publisher outages to provide continuous access to the library's digital collection.Practical implicationsThe techniques shown in this paper can be extended to integrating digital preservation systems with other library systems.Originality/valueThis paper illustrates a simple way for the library to ensure that end‐users have un‐interrupted access to digital assets, even if it is necessary to cancel a subscription or there is a temporary disruption in service from the publisher.

A Short Story about XML Schemas, Digital Preservation and Format Libraries

One morning we came in to work to find that one of our servers had made 1.5 million attempts to contact an external server in the preceding hour. It turned out that the calls were being generated by the Library’s digital preservation system (Rosetta) while attempting to validate XML Schema Definition (XSD) declarations included in the XML files of the Library’s online newspaper application Papers Past, which we were in the process of loading into Rosetta. This paper describes our response to this situation and outlines some of the issues that needed to be canvassed before we were able to arrive at a suitable solution, including the digital preservation status of these XSDs; their impact on validation tools, such as JHOVE; and where these objects should reside if they are considered material to the digital preservation process.

Extending OAI-PMH over structured P2P networks for digital preservation

Open archives initiative (OAI) allows both libraries and museums create and share their own low-cost digital libraries (DL). OAI DL are based on OAI-PMH protocol which, although is consolidated as a pattern for disseminating metadata, does not rely on either digital preservation and availability of content, essential requirements in this type of system. Building new mechanisms that guarantee improvements, at no or low cost increases, becomes a great challenge. This article proposes a distributed archiving system based on a P2P network, that allows OAI-based libraries to replicate digital objects to ensure their reliability and availability. The proposed system keeps and extends the current OAI-PMH protocol characteristics and is designed as a set of OAI repositories, where each repository has an independent fail probability assigned to it. Items are inserted with a reliability that is satisfied by replicating them in subsets of repositories. Communication between the nodes (repositories) of the network is organized in a distributed hash table and multiple hash functions are used to select repositories that keep the replicas of each stored item. The OAI characteristics combined with a structured P2P digital preservation system allow the construction of a reliable and totally distributed digital library. The archiving system has been evaluated through experiments in a real environment and the OAI-PMH extension validated by the implementation of a proof-of-principle prototype.

Building On OAIS: Processing Born-Digital Records Using Archivematica

In early 2012, the 0.8 alpha version of the Archivematica (AGPL3) open-source digital preservation system was released. This system is based on the ISO-OAIS functional model and is designed to maintain standards-based, long-term access to collections of digital objects. Using Archivematica, the City of Vancouver Archives stored its first production archival information package (AIP). Processing 50 TB of e-records from the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games revealed some limitations of the ISO-OAIS model in the areas of appraisal, arrangement and description. The project resulted in adding requirements intended to fill those gaps to Archivematica's development roadmap for its micro-services architecture and web-based dashboard.

Costs and Benefits of a Shared Digital Long-Term Preservation System

This paper describes the cost-benefit analysis of digital long-term preservation (LTP) that was carried out in the context of the Finnish National Digital Library Project (NDL) in 2010. The analysis was based on the assumption that as many as 200 archives, libraries, and museums will share an LTP system. The term ‘system’ shall be understood as encompassing not only information technology, but also human resources, organizational structures, policies and funding mechanisms. The cost analysis shows that an LTP system will incur, over the first 12 years, cumulative costs of €42 million, i.e. an average of €3.5 million per annum. Human resources and investments in information technology are the major cost factors. After the initial stages, the analysis predicts annual costs of circa €4 million. The analysis compared scenarios with and without a shared LTP system. The results indicate that a shared system will have remarkable benefits. At the development and implementation stages, a shared system shows an advantage of €30 million against the alternative scenario consisting of five independent LTP solutions. During the later stages, the advantage is estimated at €10 million per annum. The cumulative cost benefit over the first 12 years would amount to circa €100 million.