International Journal of Digital Curation
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Editorial
Get PDFKevin Ashley, Chief Editor, introduces Volume 6, Issue 2 (2011) of the International Journal of Digital Curation
Responding to the Call to Curate: Digital Curation in Practice at Penn State University Libraries
Get PDFThis paper describes how the Pennsylvania State (Penn State) University Libraries and the university’s central information technology organization, Information Technology Services, are putting into practice key tenets of digital curation through the newly established Content Stewardship program, a joint strategic initiative to implement stewardship services for the university. First, we provide an account of the planning, preparation, and prototyping that informed the initial year of the program. Second, we report on the hiring of a Digital Collections Curator and a Digital Library Architect and how they are advancing the program by putting digital curation into practice, which includes the work of community building. Finally, we address the organizational context of curation in practice, in particular with respect to the challenges of starting and sustaining a stewardship services program for all of Penn State
An Institutional Approach to Developing Research Data Management Infrastructure
Get PDFThis article outlines the work that the University of Oxford is undertaking to implement a coordinated data management infrastructure. The rationale for the approach being taken by Oxford is presented, with particular attention paid to the role of each service division. This is followed by a consideration of the relative advantages and disadvantages of institutional data repositories, as opposed to national or international data centres. The article then focuses on two ongoing JISC-funded projects, ‘Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research’ (Eidcsr) and ‘Supporting Data Management Infrastructure for the Humanities’ (Sudamih). Both projects are intra-institutional collaborations and involve working with researchers to develop particular aspects of infrastructure, including: University policy, systems for the preservation and documentation of research data, training and support, software tools for the visualisation of large images, and creating and sharing databases via the Web (Database as a Service)
Where the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Meet Format Risk Management: P2 Registry
Get PDFThe Web is increasingly becoming a platform for linked data. This means making connections and adding value to data on the Web. As more data becomes openly available and more people are able to use the data, it becomes more powerful. An example is file format registries and the evaluation of format risks. Here the requirement for information is now greater than the effort that any single institution can put into gathering and collating this information. Recognising that more is better, the creators of PRONOM, JHOVE, GDFR and others are joining to lead a new initiative: the Unified Digital Format Registry. Ahead of this effort, a new RDF-based framework for structuring and facilitating file format data from multiple sources, including PRONOM, has demonstrated it is able to produce more links, and thus provide more answers to digital preservation questions - about format risks, applications, viewers and transformations - than the native data alone. This paper will describe this registry, P2, and its services, show how it can be used, and provide examples where it delivers more answers than the contributing resources. The P2 Registry is a reference platform to allow and encourage publication of preservation data, and also an examplar of what can be achieved if more data is published openly online as simple machine-readable documents. This approach calls for the active participation of the digital preservation community to contribute data by simply publishing it openly on the Web as linked data
Migration to Intermediate XML for Electronic Data (MIXED): Repository of Durable File Format Conversions
Get PDFData Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), the Dutch scientific data archive for the social sciences and humanities, is engaged in the Migration to Intermediate XML for Electronic Data (MIXED) project to develop open source software that implements the smart migration strategy concerning the long-term archiving of file formats. Smart migration concerns the conversion upon ingest of specific kinds of data formats, such as spreadsheets and databases, to an intermediate XML formatted file. It is assumed that the long-term curation of the XML files is much less problematic than the migration of binary source files and that the intermediate XML file can be converted in an efficient way to file formats that are common in the future. The features of the intermediate XML files are stored in the so-called Standard Data Formats for Preservation (SDFP) specification. This XML schema can be considered an umbrella as it contains existing formal descriptions of file formats developed by others. SDFP also contain schemata developed by DANS, for example, a schema for file-oriented databases. It can be used, for example, for the binary DataPerfect format, that was used on a large scale about twenty years ago, and for which no existing XML schema could be found. The software developed in the MIXED project has been set up as a generic framework, together with a number of plug-ins. It can be considered as a repository of durable file format conversions. This paper contains an overview of the results of the MIXED project
“You made it, you take care of it”: Data Management as Personal Information Management
Get PDFThis study explores how researchers at a major Midwestern university are managing their data, as well as the factors that have shaped their practices and those that motivate or inhibit changes to that practice. A combination of survey (n=363) and interview data (n=15) yielded both qualitative and quantitative results bearing on my central research question: In what types of data management activities do researchers at this institution engage? Corollary to that, I also explored the following questions: What do researchers feel could be improved about their data management practices? Which services might be of interest to them? How do they feel those services could most effectively be implemented?In this paper, I situate researchers’ data management practices within a theory of personal information management. I present a view of data management and preservation needs from researchers’ perspectives across a range of domains. Additionally, I discuss the implications that understanding research data management as personal information management has for introducing services to support and improve data management practice
Digital Curation Education in Practice: Catching up with Two Former Fellows
Get PDFFrom 2008-2010, as part of the grant: ‘DigCCurr I: Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum’ (DigCCurr I) funded through the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a number of fellows at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) were comprehensively trained by library and archive professionals in digital curation theory and practice. This paper examines the curriculum skill areas matrix of the DigCCurr I program from the perspective of two former fellows, now employed in professional positions that utilize digital curation principles. Each fellow offers an analysis of digital curation functions and subfunctions as they relate to her current position, deriving suggestions for future iterations of the DigCCurr program and other graduate programs meant to prepare digital curators. While DigCCurr has been reported by its creators, a group of seasoned digital curation professionals and educators from around the world, this paper provides a fresh perspective from graduates of the program who are applying their newly learned digital curation skills and knowledge in the workforce
Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories: TIPR
Get PDFTowards Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR) is a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create and test a Repository eXchange Package (RXP). The package will make it possible to transfer complex digital objects between dissimilar preservation repositories. For reasons of redundancy, succession planning and software migration, repositories must be able to exchange copies of archival information packages with each other. Every different repository application, however, describes and structures its archival packages differently. Therefore each system produces dissemination packages that are rarely understandable or usable as submission packages by other repositories. The RXP is an answer to that mismatch. Other solutions for transferring packages between repositories focus either on transfers between repositories of the same type, such as DSpace-to-DSpace transfers, or on processes that rely on central translation services. Rather than build translators between many dissimilar repository types, the TIPR project has defined a standards-based package of metadata files that can act as an intermediary information package, the RXP, a lingua franca all repositories can read and write
Keeping the Game Alive: Evaluating Strategies for the Preservation of Console Video Games
Get PDFInteractive fiction and video games are part of our cultural heritage. As original systems cease to work because of hardware and media failures, methods to preserve obsolete video games for future generations have to be developed. The public interest in early video games is high, as exhibitions, regular magazines on the topic and newspaper articles demonstrate. Moreover, games considered to be classic are rereleased for new generations of gaming hardware. However, with the rapid development of new computer systems, the way games look and are played changes constantly. When trying to preserve console video games one faces problems of classified development documentation, legal aspects and extracting the contents from original media like cartridges with special hardware. Furthermore, special controllers and non-digital items are used to extend the gaming experience making it difficult to preserve the look and feel of console video games.This paper discusses strategies for the digital preservation of console video games. After a short overview of console video game systems, there follows an introduction to digital preservation and related work in common strategies for digital preservation and preserving interactive art. Then different preservation strategies are described with a specific focus on emulation. Finally a case study on console video game preservation is shown which uses the Planets preservation planning approach for evaluating preservation strategies in a documented decision-making process. Experiments are carried out to compare different emulators as well as other approaches, first for a single console video game system, then for different console systems of the same era and finally for systems of all eras. Comparison and discussion of results show that, while emulation works very well in principle for early console video games, various problems exist for the general use as a digital preservation alternative. We show what future work has to be done to tackle these problems
DMP Online: The Digital Curation Centre’s Web-based Tool for Creating, Maintaining and Exporting Data Management Plans
Get PDFFunding bodies increasingly require researchers to produce Data Management Plans (DMPs). The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has created DMP Online, a web-based tool which draws upon an analysis of funders’ requirements to enable researchers to create and export customisable DMPs, both at the grant application stage and during the project’s lifetime