Long-term Digital Preservation Research Articles

Digital curation and long-term digital preservation in libraries

For over twenty years public institutions and foundations committed in cultural heritage curation and preservation worked up methodologies, strategies and techniques for long-term digital preservation of digital resources. Thanks to a relevant number of initiatives and services carried on by international institutions and specialized agencies, public and private libraries reached a high level of awareness in this field which requires continuous adaptation due to the constant evolution of publishing industry and the rapid emergence of Open Science. After a quick review of digital preservation milestones, this article looks at some emerging trends and issues which characterize the constant transformation of digital preservation landscape. Dynamic generated digital contents and Open Science to fulfil findability, accessibility, interoperability and reuse (FAIR) of digital assets are engaging new challenges for existing digital preservation services. Digital curation and digital preservation are deeply merged and proceed in parallel to assure long-term usage of digital resources and data. How to select and deploy digital preservation platforms is another complex area where Cloud services can offer the opportunity to reduce the costs of technical infrastructures maintenance and management. Policy and decision making institutional levels need more awareness to draw up digital preservation strategies and to activate services to assure digital contents and data long-term access and reuse. Finally the paper suggests to promote “digital preservation by design” as a new base rule to be applied since the conception of every project and initiative in the cultural heritage, scientific and academic contexts.

Preserving digital data without an archive: Illuminating the path towards digital preservation through knowledge of essential requirements and strategies

The planned publication shall provide an understanding of the concepts and principles of digital long-term preservation (or archiving) of research data. On one hand, it shall serve as a manual for researchers who don't have access to a trusted or certified digital repository and will provide information on the measures to take for preserving and sustainably disseminating research data. On the other hand, the publication will provide an overview of the technical requirements for the implementation of a service for the long-term preservation of data, as well as non-technical necessities like workflows and policies. The need for archiving will be contextualised by presenting the driving principles of good scientific practice.

Проблемы и перспективы организации долговременного сохранения цифрового культурного наследия

Long-term digital preservation aims to ensure that the digital content of traditional socio-cultural insti-tutions (libraries, museums, archives, etc.) remains accessible to user communities for a long period of time and for future generations. The article considers the problems and prospects of organizing long-term digital storage of electronic information resources. It is proposed to use for solving the problems of long-term digital preservation approaches focused on the reference model of the open archival information system (OAIS), de-scribed in the ISO 14721:2012 standard. To describe events/actions with a document during archival storage, it is proposed to use the PREMIS metadata model.

Techniques of Preserving the Rich Cultural Heritage Managed by Digitization

The protection of historical sites is increasingly crucial to our way of life. This inheritance helps us understand our forefathers and their production and living practises. The fast progress of 3D technology has made it possible to more accurately portray this aspect of existence. By using cutting-edge technology, our priceless intangible and material cultural legacy may be protected for future generations. These tools allow for the recording, retrieval, and display of cultural artefacts. It's not only man-made structures that are considered. Skills like acting, craftsmanship, and storytelling that have been handed down through the ages are examples of our intangible cultural heritage (ICH). This kind of culture is often lost as a result of the quick progress of civilisation and the widespread movement of people. For this reason, protecting ICH is crucial in the modern world. It is important to record and safeguard cultural heritage materials so that they may be used by future generations and enjoyed by a wide audience. In order to comprehend how criteria for digitization, availability, and preservation are implemented in the digital process, this study surveys and discusses relevant academic literature. Additionally, it investigates the potential for establishing national standards for the long-term digital preservation as well as retrieval of cultural assets.

Time is a thief of memory

This paper is based upon a presentation during the session ‘The Version of Record under Attack! The Dark Side of the Scholarly Publishing Universe’ at the 17th APE Conference. It discusses the complex challenges of long-term digital preservation and how CLOCKSS is collaborating with publishers, libraries, and other stakeholders to preserve digital scholarship over the coming centuries.

The status of the digital preservation policies and plans of the institutional repositories of selected public universities in Kenya

Institutional repositories (IRs) have a leading role in providing long-term access to the research output of universities. This study assessed the capabilities of institutional repositories in Kenya to support long-term preservation of digital content by reviewing digital preservation policies and plans. Data was collected through face-to-face interviews from 19 respondents drawn from three public universities that were identified by their registration in OpenDOAR, ROARMAP and the number of items in their repositories. Additional data was acquired through analysis of documents such as open access policies and mandates, as well as institutional websites. Findings revealed that the organizations were poorly prepared to support long-term digital preservation. Policies were inadequate and plans to support the implementation of the policies were lacking. The study concluded that although the IRs were to undertake digital preservation, they lacked clearly defined actions from plans and policy. This article offers recommendations, including identifying digital preservation goals that will guide policy formulation and multi-stakeholder involvement in the policy-making process. Effort should also be made to create awareness of the relationship between digital content selection and its successful long-term preservation.

Towards Environmentally Sustainable Long-term Digital Preservation

ARCHIVER and Pre-Commercial Procurement funding has enabled small to medium enterprises (SMEs) to innovate and deliver new services for EOSC. Within the framework of the ARCHIVER pre-commercial procurement tender, between December 2020 and August 2021, three commercial consortia competed to deliver innovative, prototype solutions for long-term data preservation. Two of them were selected to continue with the pilot phase and deliver research-ready solutions for long-term data preservation of research data, therefore filling a gap in the current European Open Science panorama.
 Digital preservation relies on technological infrastructure (information and communication technology, ICT) that can have environmental impacts. While altering technology usage can reduce the impact of digital preservation practices, this alone is not a strategy for sustainable practice. Moving toward environmentally sustainable digital preservation requires critically examining the motivations and assumptions that shape current practice. The use of scalable cloud infrastructures can reduce the environmental impacts of long-term data preservation solutions.

OpenStack Swift: An Ideal Bit-Level Object Storage System for Digital Preservation

A bit-level object storage system is a foundational building block of long-term digital preservation (LTDP). To achieve the purposes of LTDP, the system must be able to: preserve the authenticity and integrity of the original digital objects; scale up with dramatically increasing demands for preservation storage; mitigate the impact of hardware obsolescence and software ephemerality; replicate digital objects among distributed data centers at different geographical locations; and to constantly audit and automatically recover from compromised states. A realistic and daunting challenge to satisfy these requirements is not only to overcome technological difficulties but also to maintain economic sustainability by implementing and continuously operating such systems in a cost-effective way. In this paper, we present OpenStack Swift, an open-source, mature and widely accepted cloud platform, as a practical and proven solution with a case study at the University of Alberta Library. We emphasize the implementation, application, cost analysis and maintenance of the system, with the purpose of contributing to the community with an exceedingly robust, highly scalable, self-healing and comparatively cost-effective bit-level object storage system for long-term digital preservation.

Journals preserved or how to turn Diamond into JASPER

The increase in the number of digital journals has redefined the respective roles of libraries and publishers in the selection, provision and preservation of this content. A new player has emerged, i.e. the archiving agency specializing in long-term digital preservation. Open access journals are poorly preserved, as shown by two recent studies based on an analysis of titles indexed by DOAJ. This worrying finding has motivated DOAJ, CLOCKSS, Keepers Registry, Internet Archive and Public Knowledge Project to join forces to propose an archiving solution for journals without article processing charges. The JASPER project resulted in the creation of a tool and a workflow allowing the preservation of a dozen journals. The next step is to go to scale (more journals archived, more agencies involved), conditioned subject to the mobilization of external funding.

Thoughts on the long-term digital preservation of scholarly journals

Thoughts on the long-term digital preservation of scholarly journals

Document-Based Nuclear Archaeology

Deeper reductions in the nuclear arsenals will require better understanding of historic fissile material management and production. The concept of “nuclear archaeology” has been considered since the 1990s to provide the tools and methods to develop independent production estimates, primarily based on nuclear forensic techniques. Here, we propose to add a framework for reconstructing the history of a nuclear program that complements traditional nuclear archaeology techniques by examining the role of operating records to support such an effort. As a test case, we use the JEEP II reactor, a 2 MW civilian research reactor at Norway’s Institute for Energy Technology (IFE), in operation for more than fifty years, however, recently shut down permanently. We have collected, analyzed, and started to preserve the reactor’s operating records, which exist on both analog and digital media, and to simulate parts of its history using OpenMC/ONIX neutronics calculations. A particular focus of this project has been on digital data curation and preservation to confirm and maintain the integrity, authenticity, and provenance of these records. In developing guidelines for best practices that conform to existing standards for long-term digital preservation and curation, we hope this project can help lay the basis for future nuclear archaeology efforts to support nuclear arms control and disarmament.

Analysis of Nature-Inspired Algorithms for Long-Term Digital Preservation

Digital preservation is a research area devoted to keeping digital assets preserved and usable for many years. Out of the many approaches to digital preservation, the present research article follows a new object-centered digital preservation paradigm where digital objects share part of the responsibility for preservation: they can move, replicate, and evolve to a higher-quality format inside a digital ecosystem. In the new framework, the behavior of digital objects needs to be modeled in order to obtain the best preservation strategy. Thus, digital objects are programmed with the mission of their own long-term self-preservation, which entails being accessible and reproducible by users at any time in the future regardless of frequent technological changes due to software and hardware upgrades. Three nature-inspired computational intelligence algorithms, based on the collective behavior of decentralized and self-organized systems, were selected for the modeling approach: multipopulation genetic algorithm, ant colony optimization, and a virus-based algorithm. TiM, a simulated environment for running distributed digital ecosystems, was used to perform the experiments. The results map the relation between the models and the expected object diversity obtained in short- and mid-term digital preservation scenarios. Comparing the results, the best performance corresponded to the multipopulation genetic algorithm. The article aims to be a first step in the digital self-preservation field. Building nature-inspired model behaviors is a good approach and opens the door to future tests with other AI-based methods.

Risk in trustworthy digital repository audit and certification

Risk is a foundational concept in digital preservation. While it has been examined from technical, economic, and organizational perspectives, I argue that it is also a social phenomenon. In this study I report on the results from 42 interviews with stakeholders in the Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC) system, and analysis of documents relating to the ISO 16363 standard in order to examine how standard developers, auditors, and repository staff members understand the concept of risk for digital repositories. The results of this research demonstrate that members of these three stakeholder groups identified risk in the TRAC audit and certification process in terms of specific potential threats or sources of risk, which I have organized into five main categories: finance, legal, organizational governance, repository processes, and technical infrastructure. While standard developers, auditors, and repository staff generally shared an understanding of the major sources of potential risk that face digital repositories, they disagreed about whether and how these risks can be mitigated and how mitigation can be proven. Individuals who were more removed from the day-to-day work of the repositories undergoing an audit were more likely to accept well-documented risk identification and mitigation strategies as sufficient evidence of trustworthiness, while repository staff were skeptical that documentation was sufficient evidence of risk assessment and mitigation and thus questioned whether this would translate to actual trustworthiness for long-term digital preservation.

Программные обеспечения с открытым исходным кодом как состоявшаяся система библиотек Армении

The article touches upon the importance of long-term digital preservation of Armenian cultural heritage through creation of digital repositories using Open-Source Software in Armenian libraries. The research highlights the advantages of Open-Source Software in context of providing free access to digital materials, as well as its high level of functionality in order to empower libraries with new technologies for more efficient organization and dissemination of information.

A framework for digital preservation of Indigenous knowledge system (IKS) in repositories in South Africa

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to assess the digital preservation policies and plans for long-term digital preservation in selected repositories in South Africa, with a view to develop a digital preservation framework for the preservation of Indigenous knowledge system (IKS) in South Africa.Design/methodology/approachThrough the multiple case study research design, data was obtained from eight respondents in four Indigenous Knowledge Systems Documentation Centers (IKSDCs) in institutions that are part of the National Recordal Systems (NRS) initiative across four provinces in South Africa using in-depth face-to-face interviews. Data collected was also supplemented with the content analysis of several policy documents in South Africa.FindingsThe findings reveal that there are no digital preservation policies in place in the institutions, especially long-term digital preservation for IKS. However, some of the institutions are formulating policies that will include the management of IKS collected in the institutions. This study also reveals that digital curation, policy formulation and disaster preparedness plans to some extent are measures said to be in place for the digital preservation of IKS.Research limitations/implicationsThis study focuses mainly on the NRS initiative in South Africa. Indigenous Knowledge (IK) related to traditional medicine, traditional plants and food are currently being digitized at the IKSDCs by IK recorders. This study will help in ensuring that the South African Government’s effort and investment in digitizing IKS and making them accessible online is not wasted. This study will help mitigate the risk of damage and alteration over time, either deliberately or in error.Originality/valueThis study fills a gap in the literature on the digitization and digital preservation of IKS from the context of the NRS project in South Africa. Very few studies have been carried out on the digital preservation of IKS in Africa. This study also proposed a framework for the digital preservation of IKS in South Africa.

Orientaciones preliminares para la preservación digital del patrimonio documental arquitectónico de Tampico

En este artículo se abordan las consideraciones para preparar un punto de partida preliminar en la planificación de actividades de preservación digital de una colección documental física, referente al patrimonio arquitectónico moderno alojada en el Archivo Histórico de Tampico (AHT) “Carlos González Salas”, de Tamaulipas, México. Se estudia desde la perspectiva de caso si la demanda de una comunidad designada y la observación de los aspectos nucleares que intervienen en las actividades de preservación digital –infraestructura organizacional, infraestructura tecnológica y recursos requeridos– contribuyen útilmente con información orientativa preliminar para la planificación de políticas, estrategias y acciones de preservación digital de colecciones documentales de interés en una comunidad específica. Se discuten consideraciones mínimas y prioritarias de preservación digital de acuerdo con la disposición de colecciones, recursos humanos, infraestructura tecnológica y organización institucional disponible en el AHT para situar qué actividades preliminares de tipo ejecutivo, operativo y técnico están a su alcance de acuerdo con las recomendaciones de buenas prácticas a nivel nacional e internacional en materia de preservación digital a largo plazo.

Preservação digital na gestão de processos administrativos de uma instituição de ensino superior: o caso dos PEAPDs da PROGEP da UFSM

Sabe-se que a evolução das tecnologias da informação foi acompanhada pelo aumento de sua importância para as organizações. Assim, este estudo buscou propor um modelo de gestão de preservação digital, em longo prazo, dos processos administrativos de exercícios anteriores de Progressão Docente da Pró-Reitoria de Gestão de Pessoas da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, para viabilizar que esses processos possam, no futuro, ser criados em formato digital e preservados em repositórios arquivísticos digitais confiáveis. Para tanto, foi realizada uma pesquisa de natureza aplicada, com abordagem quali-quantitativa. No tocante aos objetivos, pesquisa descritiva. Os resultados demonstraram que o objetivo foi cumprido, na medida em que foi desenvolvido o Modelo de Gestão de Preservação Digital, adaptado para manter a cadeia de custódia e a autenticidade dos documentos dos Processos de Exercícios Anteriores de Progressão Docente. No futuro, os documentos poderão ser produzidos nato digitais no Sistema de Informações para o Ensino. Palavras-chave: Preservação digital. Documento arquivístico digital. Autenticidade. Tecnologia de Informação e Comunicação. UFSM.

Digital preservation practices in university libraries

Purpose The purpose of the study is to investigate the digital preservation practices in institutional repositories (IRs) in Africa. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from the IRs developed in university libraries in Africa, and it was done in two phases. The phases are website investigation to identify the university libraries in Africa that have developed IR and online questionnaire. Findings Results from the study showed that the majority of IRs in Africa used DSpace software to manage their digital contents, and more than half of the IRs engage in information migration. The study also revealed that the majority of the responding institutions provide long-term digital preservation in their IR. Interestingly, the majority of the IRs has developed digital preservation policy to guide the implementation of digital preservation for IR contents. Finally, the majority of the respondents indicated that they do not have long-term funding and lack the necessary technical staff with required skills to handle and manage the IR. Research limitations/implications Because of language barriers, data were collected from only universities in English speaking countries in Africa. Practical implications The findings of this study will make librarians in universities in Africa and other developing countries understand the key issues relating to digital preservation and longevity. Originality/value The findings of this study will inform information professionals, librarians in developing countries that are planning to create IRs and provide long-term digital preservation of electronic resources in their institution.

Authenticity and Provenance in Long-Term Digital Preservation: Analysis of the Scope of Content

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian]
 Authenticity is a fundamental issue for the long-term preservation of digital objects; however, the validation of authenticity is a complex task – it requires the representation of provenance as a precondition for trust. For that matter, it is crucial to define the key conceptual elements that provide the foundation for such a complex framework. The main objective of this paper is to define how authenticity has to be managed in the digital preservation process: to identify the semantic units needed to support core preservation functions in order to ensure the trustworthiness of digital objects and ensure interoperability – i.e., the ability to exchange data between institutions. This paper presents results from the first stage of the research: the scope of authenticity and provenance content needed to support core preservation functions and ensure interoperability – the ability to exchange data between institutions and assess the added value of the Europeana and VEPIS regarding authenticity and provenance based on the adequacy of analyzed international models for authenticity and provenance.Methodology: by applying the EU 2–3–6 concept of added value for electronic publishing and qualitative content analysis of research literature, we conceptualized the Content Creation Process, which refers to the structure and meaning of authenticity and provenance. This approach enabled us to identify the scope of the content of authenticity and provenance.

Endings: Concluding, Archiving, and Preserving Digital Projects for Long-Term Usability

This report describes some of the practical solutions to the challenges of long-term digital preservation being developed by the project Endings: Concluding, Archiving, and Preserving Digital Projects for Long-Term Usability at the University of Victoria.