International Journal of Digital Curation
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Using a Core Scientific Metadata Model in Large-Scale Facilities
Get PDFIn this paper, we present the Core Scientific Metadata Model (CSMD), a model for the representation of scientific study metadata developed within the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to represent the data generated from scientific facilities. The model has been developed to allow management of and access to the data resources of the facilities in a uniform way, although we believe that the model has wider application, especially in areas of “structural science” such as chemistry, materials science and earth sciences. We give some motivations behind the development of the model, and an overview of its major structural elements, centred on the notion of a scientific study formed by a collection of specific investigations. We give some details of the model, with the description of each investigation associated with a particular experiment on a sample generating data, and the associated data holdings are then mapped to the investigation with the appropriate parameters. We then go on to discuss the instantiation of the metadata model within a production quality data management infrastructure, the Information CATalogue (ICAT), which has been developed within STFC for use in large-scale photon and neutron sources. Finally, we give an overview of the relationship between CSMD, and other initiatives, and give some directions for future developments. Â Â Â
Chronopolis Digital Preservation Network
Get PDFThe Chronopolis Digital Preservation Initiative, one of the Library of Congress’ latest efforts to collect and preserve at-risk digital information, has completed its first year of service as a multi-member partnership to meet the archival needs of a wide range of domains.Chronopolis is a digital preservation data grid framework developed by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, the UC San Diego Libraries (UCSDL), and their partners at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado and the University of Maryland\u27s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).Chronopolis addresses a critical problem by providing a comprehensive model for the cyberinfrastructure of collection management, in which preserved intellectual capital is easily accessible, and research results, education material, and new knowledge can be incorporated smoothly over the long term. Integrating digital library, data grid, and persistent archive technologies, Chronopolis has created trusted environments that span academic institutions and research projects, with the goal of long-term digital preservation.A key goal of the Chronopolis project is to provide cross-domain collection sharing for long-term preservation. Using existing high-speed educational and research networks and mass-scale storage infrastructure investments, the partnership is leveraging the data storage capabilities at SDSC, NCAR, and UMIACS to provide a preservation data grid that emphasizes heterogeneous and highly redundant data storage systems.In this paper we will explore the major themes within Chronopolis, including:a) The philosophy and theory behind a nationally federated data grid for preservation. b) The core tools and technologies used in Chronopolis. c) The metadata schema that is being developed within Chronopolis for all of the data elements. d) Lessons learned from the first year of the project.e) Next steps in digital preservation using Chronopolis: how we plan to strengthen and broaden our network with enhanced services and new customers
Bit Preservation: A Solved Problem?
Get PDFFor years, discussions of digital preservation have routinely featured comments such as “bit preservation is a solved problem; the real issues are ...”. Indeed, current digital storage technologies are not just astoundingly cheap and capacious, they are astonishingly reliable. Unfortunately, these attributes drive a kind of “Parkinson’s Law” of storage, in which demands continually push beyond the capabilities of systems implementable at an affordable price. This paper is in four parts:Claims, reviewing a typical claim of storage system reliability, showing that it provides no useful information for bit preservation purposes.Theory, proposing “bit half-life” as an initial, if inadequate, measure of bit preservation performance, expressing bit preservation requirements in terms of it, and showing that the requirements being placed on bit preservation systems are so onerous that the experiments required to prove that a solution exists are not feasible.Practice, reviewing recent research into how well actual storage systems preserve bits, showing that they fail to meet the requirements by many orders of magnitude.Policy, suggesting ways of dealing with this unfortunate situation
A Framework for Software Preservation
Get PDFSoftware preservation has not had detailed consideration as a research topic or in practical application. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework to capture and organise the main notions of software preservation, which are required for a coherent and comprehensive approach. This framework has three main aspects. Firstly a discussion of what it means to preserve software via a performance model which considers how a software artefact can be rebuilt from preserved components and can then be seen to be representative of the original software product. Secondly the development of a model of software artefacts, describing the basic components of all software, loosely based on the FRBR model for representing digital artefacts and their history within a library context. Finally, the definition and categorisation of the properties of software artefacts which are required to ensure that the software product has been adequately preserved. These are broken down into a number of categories and related to the concepts defined in the OAIS standard. We also discuss our experience of recording these preservation properties for a number of BADC software products, which arose from a series of case studies conducted to evaluate the software preservation framework, and also briefly describe the SPEQS toolkit, a tool to capture software preservation properties within a software development
Assisted Emulation for Legacy Executables
Get PDFEmulation is frequently discussed as a failsafe preservation strategy for born-digital documents that depend on contemporaneous software for access (Rothenberg, 2000). Yet little has been written about the contextual knowledge required to successfully use such software. The approach we advocate is to preserve necessary contextual information through scripts designed to control the legacy environment, and created during the preservation workflow. We describe software designed to minimize dependence on this knowledge by offering automated configuration and execution of emulated environments. We demonstrate that even simple scripts can reduce impediments to casual use of the digital objects being preserved. We describe tools to automate the remote use of preserved objects on local emulation environments. This can help eliminate both a dependence on physical reference workstations at preservation institutions, and provide users accessing materials over the web with simplified, easy-to-use environments. Our implementation is applied to examples from an existing collection of over 4,000 virtual CD-ROM images containing thousands of custom binary executables
Grammar-Based Recognition of Documentary Forms and Extraction of Metadata
Get PDFMetadata extraction is a critical aspect of ingestion of collections into digital archives and libraries. A method for automatically recognizing document types and extracting metadata from digital records has been developed. The method is based on a method for automatically annotating semantic categories such as person’s names, job titles, dates, and postal addresses that may occur in a record. It extends this method by using the semantic annotations to identify the intellectual elements of a document’s form, parsing these elements using context-free grammars that define documentary forms, and interpreting the elements of the form of the document to identify metadata such as the chronological date, author(s), addressee(s), and topic. Context-free grammars were developed for fourteen of the documentary forms occurring in Presidential records. In an experiment, the document type recognizer successfully recognized the documentary form and extracted the metadata of two-thirds of the records in a series of Presidential e-records containing twenty-one document types
An Emergent Micro-Services Approach to Digital Curation Infrastructure
Get PDFIn order better to meet the needs of its diverse University of California (UC) constituencies, the California Digital Library UC Curation Center is re-envisioning its approach to digital curation infrastructure by devolving function into a set of granular, independent, but interoperable micro-services. Since each of these services is small and self-contained, they are more easily developed, deployed, maintained, and enhanced; at the same time, complex curation function can emerge from the strategic combination of atomistic services. The emergent approach emphasizes the persistence of content rather than the systems in which that content is managemed, thus the paradigmatic archival culture is not unduly coupled to any particular technological context. This results in a curation environment that is comprehensive in scope, yet flexible with regard to local policies and practices and sustainable despite the inevitability of disruptive change in technology and user expectation
Designing Digital Preservation Solutions: A Risk Management-Based Approach
Get PDFDigital preservation aims to keep digital objects accessible over long periods of time, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of these digital objects. In such complex environments, Risk Management is a key factor in assuring the normal behaviour of systems over time. Currently, the digital preservation arena commonly uses Risk Management concepts to assess repositories. In this paper, we intend to go further and propose a perspective where Risk Management can be used not only to assess existing solutions, but also to conceive digital preservation environments. Thus, we propose a Risk Management-based approach to design and assess digital preservation environments, including:• the definition of context and identification of strategic objectives to determine specific requirements and characterize which consequences are acceptable within the identified context;• the identification, analysis and evaluation of threats and vulnerabilities that may affect the normal behaviour of a specific business or the achievement of the goals and conformance to the requirements identified in the context characterization; and, • definition of actions to deal with the risks associated with the identified threats and vulnerabilities.We generalize and survey the main requirements, threats, vulnerabilities and techniques that can be applied in the scope of digital preservation
The Use of Quality Management Standards in Trustworthy Digital Archives
Get PDFQuality management is an essential part in creating a trustworthy digital archive. The German network of expertise in Digital long-term preservation (nestor), in cooperation with the German Institute for Standards (DIN), has undertaken a small study to analyse systematically the relevance and usage of quality management standards for long-term preservation and to filter out the specific standardisation need for digital archives. This paper summarises the results of the study. It gives an overview on the differences in understanding the task “quality management” within different organisations and how they carry out appropriate measures, such as documentation, transparency, adequacy, and measureability in order to demonstrate the trustworthiness of their digital archive
Understanding the Information Requirements of Arts and Humanities Scholarship
Get PDFThis paper reports on research of scholarly research practices and requirements conducted in the context of the Preparing DARIAH European e-Infrastructures project, with a view to ensuring current and future fitness for purpose of the planned digital infrastructure, services and tools. It summarises the findings of earlier research, primarily from the field of human information behaviour as applied in scholarly work, it presents a conceptual perspective informed by cultural-historical activity theory, it introduces briefly a formal conceptual model for scholarly research activity compliant with CIDOC CRM, it describes the plan of work and methodology of an empirical research project based on open-questionnaire interviews with arts and humanities researchers, and presents illustrative examples of segmentation, tagging and initial conceptual analysis of the empirical evidence. Finally, it presents plans for future work, consisting, firstly, of a comprehensive re-analysis of interview segments within the framework of the scholarly research activity model, and, secondly, of the integration of this analysis with the extended digital curation process model we presented in earlier work