Term Archive Research Articles

Archiving Family Memories - Photos, Negatives, Slides And Movie Film

We will discuss the myriads of challenges faced by a consumer in digitization, restoration and long term archival of their personal visual assets - photos, negatives, albums, video tapes and movie film. Special emphasis on preservation of B&W negatives and movie film which see the most abrasion damage. We will present a workflow and solution for duplication of degrading old photo albums in order to enable distribution and sharing of family legacy photos.

Disinterring the Present: Science Fiction, Media Technology and the Ends of the Archive

This article examines the relationship between the actual and fictional archive and science fiction. It highlights the role of technological obsolescence and anachronism as it appears in the writing of JG Ballard and Jacques Derrida in order to argue that the process of media transition, destruction and disinterment are integral to representations of the imaginary archive. The author examines Derrida’s deconstruction of Freud’s archive in order to identity his use of ‘retrospective science fiction’ and underline the term’s importance in addressing media transition in relation to the archive. It then takes the archived remains of Ballard’s unfinished short story in the Vermilion Sands collection to link the phenomenology of writing technology with processes of collecting, construction, disinterment and destruction. It concludes that Derrida’s retrospective science-fiction model might be reversed to consider the archive in terms of its post-archival function.

Documentation of Cultural Heritage Objects

EXTENDED ABSTRACT:The first and important phase of documentation of cultural heritage objects is to understand which objects need to be documented. The entire documentation process is determined by the characteristics and scope of the cultural heritage object. The next question to be considered is the expected outcome of the documentation process and the purpose for which it will be used. These two essential guidelines determine each stage of the documentation workflow: the choice of the most appropriate data capturing technology and data processing method, how detailed should the documentation be, what problems may occur, what the expected outcome is, what it will be used for, and the plan for storing data and results. Cultural heritage objects require diverse data capturing and data processing methods. It is important that even the first stages of raw data capturing are oriented towards the applicability of results. The selection of the appropriate working method can facilitate the data processing and the preparation of final documentation. Documentation of paintings requires different data capturing method than documentation of buildings or building areas. The purpose of documentation can also be the preservation of the contemporary cultural heritage to posterity or the basis for future projects and activities on threatened objects. Documentation procedures should be adapted to our needs and capabilities. Captured and unprocessed data are lost unless accompanied by additional analyses and interpretations. Information on tools, procedures and outcomes must be included into documentation. A thorough analysis of unprocessed but accessible documentation, if adequately stored and accompanied by additional information, enables us to gather useful data. In this way it is possible to upgrade the existing documentation and to avoid data duplication or unintentional misleading of users. The documentation should be archived safely and in a way to meet the needs of potential users. Inadequate archiving may cause irreversible damage to documents. It is unreasonable to store data in a format which could not be read by future generations. In spite of high capacity of data bases the aspect of long term archiving of analogue documents should not be neglected. The past is being stored for the future, including different methods of storing various types of historical archives.

Testing the Temporal Ability of Landsat Imagery and Precision Agriculture Technology to Provide High Resolution Historical Estimates of Wheat Yield at the Farm Scale

The long term archiving of both Landsat imagery and wheat yield mapping datasets sensed by precision agriculture technology has the potential through the development of statistical relationships to predict high resolution estimates of wheat yield over large areas for multiple seasons. Quantifying past yield performance over different growing seasons can inform agricultural management decisions ranging from fertilizer applications at the sub-paddock scale to changes in land use at a landscape scale. However, an understanding of the magnitude of prediction errors is needed. In this study, we examine the predictive wheat yield relationships developed from Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) acquired Landsat imagery and combine-mounted yield monitors for three Western Australian farms over different growing seasons. We further analysed their predictive capability when these relationships are used to extrapolate yield from one farm to another. Over all seasons, the best predictions were achieved with imagery acquired in September. Of the five seasons reviewed, three showed very reasonable prediction accuracies, with the low and high rainfall years providing good predictions. Medium rainfall years showed the greatest variation in prediction accuracy with marginal to poor predictions resulting from narrow ranges of measured wheat yield and NDVI values. These results demonstrate the potential benefit of fusing together two high resolution datasets to create robust wheat yield prediction models over different growing seasons, the outputs of which can be used to inform agricultural decision making.

On the applicability of word sense discrimination on 201 years of modern english

As language evolves over time, documents stored in long- term archives become inaccessible to users. Automatically, detecting and handling language evolution will become a necessity to meet user's information needs. In this paper, we investigate the performance of modern tools and algorithms applied on modern English to find word senses that will later serve as a basis for finding evolution. We apply the curvature clustering algorithm on all nouns and noun phrases extracted from The Times Archive (1785---1985). We use natural language processors for part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization and report on the performance of these processors over the entire period. We evaluate our clusters using WordNet to verify whether they correspond to valid word senses. Because The Times Archive contains OCR errors, we investigate the effects of such errors on word sense discrimination results. Finally, we present a novel approach to correct OCR errors present in the archive and show that the coverage of the curvature clustering algorithm improves. We increase the number of clusters by 24 %. To verify our results, we use the New York Times corpus (1987---2007), a recent collection that is considered error free, as a ground truth for our experiments. We find that after correcting OCR errors in The Times Archive, the performance of word sense discrimination applied on The Times Archive is comparable to the ground truth.

From the Streets to the Gallery: Exhibiting the Visual Ephemera of AIDS Cultural Activism

Recent curatorial attention to AIDS cultural activism and its attendant queer and feminist public art practices has highlighted issues surrounding the display of visual ephemera generating questions such as how can materials made for the street be displayed in a gallery setting? What, if any, contextualization is required? How are activist practices transformed when they become materials in an archive? Different curatorial strategies have included the presentation of original posters from the personal archives of activists (ACT UP New York: Activism, Art and the AIDS Crisis 1987–1993, 2009 and 2010) to the reprinting and enlargement of graphic designs originally utilized as posters, billboards and demonstration placards (Gran Fury: Read My Lips, 2012). Each of these exhibitions relied upon an archival aesthetic, but towards different ends: ACT UP New York organized its archive in affective terms, while Gran Fury: Read My Lips created a sociocultural presentation. This article compares these two exhibitions, and the curatorial strategies each devised in order to represent and animate the ephemera of AIDS cultural activism.

Towards understanding temporal and spatial dynamics of seagrass landscapes using time-series remote sensing

The spatial and temporal dynamics of seagrasses have been well studied at the leaf to patch scales, however, the link to large spatial extent landscape and population dynamics is still unresolved in seagrass ecology. Traditional remote sensing approaches have lacked the temporal resolution and consistency to appropriately address this issue. This study uses two high temporal resolution time-series of thematic seagrass cover maps to examine the spatial and temporal dynamics of seagrass at both an inter- and intra-annual time scales, one of the first globally to do so at this scale. Previous work by the authors developed an object-based approach to map seagrass cover level distribution from a long term archive of Landsat TM and ETM+ images on the Eastern Banks (≈200 km2), Moreton Bay, Australia. In this work a range of trend and time-series analysis methods are demonstrated for a time-series of 23 annual maps from 1988 to 2010 and a time-series of 16 monthly maps during 2008–2010. Significant new insight was presented regarding the inter- and intra-annual dynamics of seagrass persistence over time, seagrass cover level variability, seagrass cover level trajectory, and change in area of seagrass and cover levels over time. Overall we found that there was no significant decline in total seagrass area on the Eastern Banks, but there was a significant decline in seagrass cover level condition. A case study of two smaller communities within the Eastern Banks that experienced a decline in both overall seagrass area and condition are examined in detail, highlighting possible differences in environmental and process drivers. We demonstrate how trend and time-series analysis enabled seagrass distribution to be appropriately assessed in context of its spatial and temporal history and provides the ability to not only quantify change, but also describe the type of change. We also demonstrate the potential use of time-series analysis products to investigate seagrass growth and decline as well as the processes that drive it. This study demonstrates clear benefits over traditional seagrass mapping and monitoring approaches, and provides a proof of concept for the use of trend and time-series analysis of remotely sensed seagrass products to benefit current endeavours in seagrass ecology.

What controls precipitation δ18O in the southern Tibetan Plateau at seasonal and intra-seasonal scales? A case study at Lhasa and Nyalam

Understanding the spatial and temporal controls of precipitation δ18O in the southern Tibetan Plateau of central Asia is necessary for paleoclimate reconstructions from the wealth of regional archives (ice cores, lake sediments, tree ring cellulose, and speleothems). While classical interpretations of such records were conducted in terms of local precipitation, simulations conducted with atmospheric general circulation models enabled with water stable isotopes have suggested that past changes in south Asia precipitation δ18O may be driven by remote processes linked to moisture transport. Studies conducted at the event scale can provide constraints to assess the drivers of precipitation δ18O and the validity of simulated mechanisms. Here, we take advantage of new event precipitation δ18O monitored from January 2005 to December 2007 at two southern Tibetan Plateau stations (Lhasa and Nyalam). The drivers of daily to seasonal variations are investigated using statistical relationships with local and regional temperature, precipitation amount and convective activity based on in situ data and satellite products. The strongest control on precipitation δ18O at Lhasa during the monsoon season at event and seasonal scales is provided by the integrated regional convective activity upstream air mass trajectories, cumulated over several days. In contrast, the integrated convection appears to be the main driver of precipitation δ18O at Nyalam only in July and August, and the situation is more complex in other months. Local climate variables can only account for a small fraction of the observed δ18O variance, with significant differences between both stations. This study offers a better constraint on climate archives interpretation in the southern Tibetan Plateau. The daily data presented here also provides a benchmark to evaluate the capacity of isotopically enabled atmospheric general circulation models (iGCMs) to simulate the response of precipitation δ18O to convection. This is illustrated using a nudged and zoomed simulation with the LMDZiso model. While it successfully simulates some seasonal and daily characteristics of precipitation δ18O in the southern Tibetan Plateau, it fails to simulate the correlation between δ18O and upstream precipitation. This calls for caution when using atmospheric models to interpret precipitation δ18O archives in terms of past monsoon variability.

Listlessness in the Archive

Listlessness in the Archive

Sociocultural Functions of Film Libraries and Archives

The article surveys the sociocultural principles of the functioning of film libraries and archives in terms of the evolution of the film archive sphere, mainly as exemplified by the history of the FIAF, whose ideology and practical activity the new trends in this field reflect.

Impact of Latently Infected Cells on Strain Archiving Within HIV Hosts

Latently infected cells are a barrier to HIV eradication on therapy due to long half-lives of between 6 and 44 months. The mechanism behind this long term maintenance is unclear although bystander proliferation and asymmetric division have both been put forward for consideration in mathematical models. The latently infected cell reservoir seems to act as an archive for strains of HIV no longer dominant in the blood, such as wild-type virus when the individual is on therapy. This is particularly significant when patients wish to come off medication and wild-type virus re-emerges. We use a two target cell model capable of producing low-level viral load on therapy and include latent cells and two strains of virus, wild-type and drug resistant, to investigate the impact of two possible mechanisms of latent cell reservoir maintenance on strain archiving. We find that although short term (less than a year) archiving of viral strains is possible in a model with no mechanism for reservoir maintenance, both bystander proliferation and asymmetric division of latent cells allow archiving to occur over much longer timescales (2 or more years). We suggest that regardless of the mechanism involved, latent cell reservoir maintenance allows strain archiving to occur. We interpret our results for clinical consideration.

Scaling Astro-WISE to LOFAR long term archive

The Astro-WISE information system was developed to handle data processing for the KIDS survey. In this paper we describe the adaptation of the WISE concept to allow scaling to support archives containing tens of petabytes of stored data and the changes we introduced to accommodate the system for the LOFAR Long Term Archive. With this we provide an example of how Astro-WISE technology can be adapted to support a wider range and scale of data.

Quantitative and Sensitive Detection of Cancer Genome Amplifications from Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded Tumors with Droplet Digital PCR

For the analysis of cancer, there is great interest in rapid and accurate detection of cancer genome amplifications containing oncogenes that are potential therapeutic targets. The vast majority of cancer tissue samples are formalin fixed and paraffin embedded (FFPE) which enables histopathological examination and long term archiving. However, FFPE cancer genomic DNA is oftentimes degraded and generally a poor substrate for many molecular biology assays. To overcome the issues of poor DNA quality from FFPE samples and detect oncogenic copy number amplifications with high accuracy and sensitivity, we developed a novel approach. Our assay requires nanogram amounts of genomic DNA, thus facilitating study of small amounts of clinical samples. Using droplet digital PCR (ddPCR), we can determine the relative copy number of specific genomic loci even in the presence of intermingled normal tissue. We used a control dilution series to determine the limits of detection for the ddPCR assay and report its improved sensitivity on minimal amounts of DNA compared to standard real-time PCR. To develop this approach, we designed an assay for the fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 gene (FGFR2) that is amplified in a gastric and breast cancers as well as others. We successfully utilized ddPCR to ascertain FGFR2 amplifications from FFPE-preserved gastrointestinal adenocarcinomas.

Archiving in the networked world: metrics for testing

PurposeThis paper aims to focus on how long‐term digital archiving systems are tested and what benchmarks and other metrics are necessary for that testing to produce data that the community can use to make decisions.Design/methodology/approachThe article reviews recent literature about digital archiving systems involving public and semi‐public tests. It then looks specifically at the rules and metrics needed for doing public or semi‐public testing for three specific issues: triggering migration; ingest rates; and storage capacity measurement.FindingsImportant literature on testing exists but common metrics do not, and too few data are available at this point to establish them reliably. Metrics are needed to judge the quality and timeliness of an archive's migration services. Archives should offer benchmarks for the speed of ingest, but that will happen only once they come to agreement about starting and ending points. Storage capacity is another area where librarians are raising questions, but without proxy measures and agreement about data amounts, such testing cannot proceed.Practical implicationsTesting is necessary to develop useful metrics and benchmarks about performance. At present the archiving community has too little data on which to make decisions about long term digital archiving, and as long as that is the case, the decisions may well be flawed.Originality/valueThe article shows that testing is key to making rational decisions about digital long term archiving systems but establishing metrics and rules by which librarians can compare the results is far from easy.

LOFAR Information System

In this paper, we present a newly designed and implemented scientific information system for the LOFAR Long Term Archive. It is a distributed multi-tier storage and data processing system that allows a number of users to process Petabytes of data. The LOFAR Information System is designed on the base of the Astro-WISE Information System. The system allows the use of the computing and storage resources of the BiGGrid combined with the metadata database along with the data access and data processing interfaces of Astro-WISE. The architecture of the system, problems solved during the implementation and scientific use cases for the system are also described.

Quantitative spectroscopy of the aurora. VI. The auroral spectrum from 275 to 815 nm observed by the OSIRIS spectrograph on board the Odin spacecraft

Terrestrial auroral spectra over the 275 to 815 nm wavelength range have been recorded by the OSIRIS imaging spectrograph on board the Odin spacecraft. The spectra are from the dark polar region and are averaged over limb tangent altitudes from 100 to 105 km. All wavelengths are exposed simultaneously, thus avoiding the effect of temporal intensity variations inherently present in spectrally scanning systems. Particular care has been taken to quantify the relative spectral sensitivity over the entire wavelength range, and there is an estimated 5% precision in the measurements. To maintain accurate on-orbit spectral calibrations, an atmospheric radiation model with multiple Rayleigh scatter is employed to regularly update the OSIRIS spectral response throughout the mission. A calibrated auroral spectrum is presented, together with matching synthetic spectra for many of the observed features, for potential use as a reference spectrum in general atmospheric research. The relative intensities of the brighter auroral band systems and atomic lines are reviewed. Finally, the observed spectrum is made freely available in digital format in long term archives.

Automated brightfield break-apart in situ hybridization (ba-ISH) application: ALK and MALT1 genes as models

Cancer diagnosis can be a complex process, which takes consideration of histopathological, clinical, immunophenotypic, and genetic features. Since non-random chromosomal translocations are specifically involved in the development of various cancers, the detection of these gene aberrations becomes increasingly important. In recent years, break-apart (or split-signal) fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) has emerged as an advantageous technique to detect gene translocations on tissue sections. However, FISH assays are technically challenging and require specialized fluorescence microscopes. Furthermore, the FISH signal is not stable for long term archiving due to photo bleaching. Our objective was to demonstrate the feasibility of brightfield break-apart in situ hybridization (ba-ISH) for anaplastic lymphoma kinase ( ALK) and mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue translocation protein 1 ( MALT1) genes as models. ALK or MALT1 break-apart probes were labeled with digoxigenin (DIG) or 2,4-dinitrophenyl (DNP) on both sides of a known gene breakpoint region and the hybridization sites were visualized with the combination of alkaline phosphatase (AP)-based blue and red detection. Therefore, normal genes are detected as purple dots by mixing blue and red colors while translocated genes are detected as isolated blue or red dots. Formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tonsil was used as control for the co-localized 5′ and 3′ probes. Gene translocations of ALK or MALT1 were detected as separate blue and red dots on ALCL and MALT lymphoma cases. Thus, ISH analyses of gene translocations can be conducted with a regular light microscope and the long term archiving of break-apart ISH slides can be achieved.

Preservation Archiving Storage Technologies

This poster presentation is intended to provide a recommendation for standards implementation and best practices for a viable, cost effective, and reliable long term archiving storage system. This solution is based on a combination of storage technologies to provide long-term viability.We will examine operating system platforms and filesystems for archive storage systems. We will examine the performance and archive capabilities of the filesystems including ZFS, Lustre, and SAM/QFS. We will also discuss the Hierarchical Storage System, or HSM, as a key software element of the archive. The HSM provides one of the key components that contributes to reliability by through data integrity checks and automated file migration. The HSM provides the ability to automate making multiples copies of files, auditing files for errors based on checksum, rejecting bad copies of files and making new copies based on the results of those audits. The HSM also provides the ability to read in an older file format and write-out a new file format thus migrating the format and application information required to ensure archival integrity of the stored content. The automation of these functions provides for improved performance and reduced operating costs.Oracle's Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager (SAM) software provides the core functionality of the recommended Archive Storage Architecture. SAM provides policy based data classification and placement across a multitude of storage devices from high speed disk, low cost disk, or tape. SAM also simplifies data management by providing centralized meta-data. SAM is a self-protecting file system with continuous file integrity checks.The digital content archive provides the content repository (or digital vault) within Sun's award winning Digital Asset Management Reference Architecture (DAM RA). DAM RA enables digital workflow and the content archive provides permanent access to digital content files. With SAM software, the files are stored, tracked, and retrieved based on the archival requirements. Files are seamlessly and transparently available to other services. SAM software creates virtually limitless capacity. Its scalability allows for continual growth throughout the archive with support for all data types. The policy based SAM software stores and manages data for compliance and noncompliance archives using a tiered storage approach with integrated disk and tape into a seamless storage solution, SAM software simplifies the archive storage. Allows you to automate data management policies based on file attributes. You can manage data according to the storage and access requirements of each user on the system and decide how data is grouped, copied, and accessed based on the needs of the application and the users. Helps you maximize return on investments by storing data on the media type appropriate for the life cycle of the data and simplifying system administration.

‘Othering’ the archive—from exile to inclusion and heritage dignity: the case of Palestinian archival memory

This paper seeks to address, from the critical perspectives of cultural heritage discourse, the issues at stake in critically apprehending the archive as both a technology of disinheritance and one of potential inclusion and re-inheritance. The first section draws on the work of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said and other critics whose work has sought to address the marginalizing capacity of dominant European/North American archival and cultural–museological institutions. The remainder of the paper grounds these conceptual–ethical issues in the context of Palestinian cultural politics and memory-work. This critical framework is used not only to draw out the absences and silences in archives and cultural institutions, and the epistemological and ‘real’ violences at play in what Derrida characterises as ‘archive trauma’, but responds to Said’s call to ‘re-read’ the colonial archive ‘contrapuntally’ in order to create an ‘othering’ of dominant archival discourse. What is needed to provoke such an ‘othering’ is a commitment to rethink the archive in terms of alternative understandings of ‘hospitality’, ‘memory-work’ and what Derrida has referred to as ‘heritage dignity’. This strategy is capable of apprehending in greater depth the moral-ethical ‘debts’ and ‘duties’ and the operational ‘responses’ and ‘responsibilities’ towards ‘inclusion’ and towards full recognition of those constituencies which have been disenfranchised or exiled outside the realms of dominant cultural–institutional discourse.

HIDDRA: a highly independent data distribution and retrieval architecture for space observation missions

Institutions such as NASA, ESA or JAXA find solutions to distribute data from their missions to the scientific community, and their long term archives. This is a complex problem, as it includes a vast amount of data, several geographically distributed archives, heterogeneous architectures with heterogeneous networks, and users spread around the world. We propose a novel architecture that solves this problem aiming to fulfill the requirements of the final user. Our architecture is a modular system that provides a highly efficient parallel multiprotocol download engine, using a publisher/subscriber policy which helps the final user to obtain data of interest transparently. We have evaluated a first prototype, in collaboration with the ESAC centre in Villafranca del Castillo (Spain) that shows a high scalability and performance, opening a wide spectrum of opportunities.