International Journal of Digital Curation
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Strategies for the Curation of CAD Engineering Models
Get PDFProduct Lifecycle Management (PLM) has become increasingly important in the engineering community over the last decade or so, due to the globalisation of markets and the rising popularity of products provided as services. It demands the efficient capture, representation, organisation, retrieval and reuse of product data over its entire life. Simultaneously, there is now a much greater reliance on CAD models for communicating designs to manufacturers, builders, maintenance crews and regulators, and for definitively expressing designs. Creating the engineering record digitally, however, presents problems not only for its long-term maintenance and accessibility - due in part to the rapid obsolescence of the hardware, software and file formats involved - but also for recording the evolution of designs, artefacts and products. We examine the curation and preservation requirements in PLM and suggest ways of alleviating the problems of sustaining CAD engineering models through the use of lightweight formats, layered annotation and the collection of Representation Information as defined in the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. We describe two tools which have been specifically developed to aid in the curation of CAD engineering models in the context of PLM: Lightweight Models with Multilayered Annotation (LiMMA) and a Registry/Repository of Representation Information for Engineering (RRoRIfE)
Mining Contextual Information for Ephemeral Digital Video Preservation
Get PDFFor centuries the archival community has understood and practiced the art of adding contextual information while preserving an artifact. The question now is how these practices can be transferred to the digital domain. With the growing expansion of production and consumption of digital objects (documents, audio, video, etc.) it has become essential to identify and study issues related to their representation. A curaÂtor in the digital realm may be said to have the same responsibilities as one in a traditional archival domain. However, with the mass production and spread of digital objects, it may be difficult to do all the work manually. In the present article this problem is considered in the area of digital video preservation. We show how this problem can be formulated and propose a framework for capturing contextual inforÂmation for ephemeral digital video preservation. This proposal is realized in a system called ContextMiner, which allows us to cater to a digital curator\u27s needs with its four components: digital video curation, collection visualization, browsing interfaces, and video harvesting and monitoring. While the issues and systems described here are geared toward digital videos, they can easily be applied to other kinds of digital objects
Data Stewardship: Environmental Data Curation and a Web-of-Repositories
Get PDFScientific researchers today frequently package measurements and associated metadata as digital datasets in anticipation of storage in data repositories. Through the lens of environmental data stewardship, we consider the data repository as an organizational element central to data curation. One aspect of non-commercial repositories, their distance-from-origin of the data, is explored in terms of near and remote categories. Three idealized repository types are distinguished – local, center, and archive - paralleling research, resource, and reference collection categories respectively. Repository type characteristics such as scope, structure, and goals are discussed. Repository similarities in terms of roles, activities and responsibilities are also examined. Data stewardship is related to care of research data and responsible scientific communication supported by an infrastructure that coordinates curation activities; data curation is defined as a set of repeated and repeatable activities focusing on tending data and creating data products within a particular arena. The concept of “sphere-of-context” is introduced as an aid to distinguishing repository types. Conceptualizing a “web-of-repositories” accommodates a variety of repository types and represents an ecologically inclusive approach to data curation
Preservation Is Not a Place
Get PDFThe Digital Preservation Program of the California Digital Library (CDL) is engaged in a process of reinvention involving significant transformations of its outlook, effort, and infrastructure. This includes a re-articulation of its mission in terms of digital curation, rather than preservation; encouraging a programmatic, rather than a project-oriented approach to curation activities; and a renewed emphasis on services, rather than systems. This last shift was motivated by a desire to deprecate the centrality of the repository as place. Having the repository as the locus for curation activity has resulted in the deployment of a somewhat cumbersome monolithic system that falls short of desired goals for responsiveness to rapidly changing user needs and operational and administrative sustainability. The Program is pursuing a path towards a new curation environment based on the principle of devolving curation function to a set of small, simple, loosely coupled services. In considering this new infrastructure, the Program is relying upon a highly deliberative process starting from first principles drawn from library and archival science. This is followed by a stagewise progression of identifying core preservable values, devising strategies promoting those values, defining abstract services embodying those strategies, and, finally, developing systems that instantiate those services. This paper presents a snapshot of the Program\u27s transformative efforts in its early phase
UK Government Web Continuity: Persisting Access through Aligning Infrastructures
Get PDFGovernment\u27s use of the Web in the UK is prolific and a wide range of services are now available though this channel. The government set out to address the problem that links from Hansard (the transcripts of Parliamentary debates) were not maintained over time and that therefore there was need for some long-term storage and stewardship of information, including maintaining access. Further investigation revealed that linking was key, not only in maintaining access to information, but also to the discovery of information. This resulted in a project that affects the entire government Web estate, with a solution leveraging the basic building blocks of the Internet (DNS) and the Web (HTTP and URIs) in a pragmatic way, to ensure that an infrastructure is in place to provide access to important information both now and in the future
Data Without Meaning: Establishing the Significant Properties of Digital Research
Get PDFIt is well recognised that the period of time in which digital research may remain accessible is likely to be short in comparison to the period in which it will continue to hold intellectual value. Although many digital preservation strategies are effective for simple resources, it is not always possible to confirm that all of the significant properties - the characteristics that contribute to the intended meaning - have been maintained when stored in different formats and software environments. The paper outlines methodologies being developed by InterPARES, PLANETS and other projects in the international research community to support the decision-making process and highlights the work of four recent JISC-funded studies to specify the significant properties of vector images, moving images, software and learning objects
Data Curation in Climate and Weather: Transforming Our Ability to Improve Predictions through Global Knowledge Sharing
Get PDFClimate and Weather are of increasing interest to the scientific community and the general public. Data curation and stewardship are essential building blocks in the science community’s quest to better understand how natural climate and weather systems behave and how activities of human civilization are altering the natural system. Rudimentary observations of the atmosphere and ocean have been collected for over one hundred years and proxity measurements of the climate can trace our planet’s climatic history for millions of years. These observations coupled with the rapid advances in technology, such as powerful computers, rapid access to massive amounts of data, and satellite observations, have allowed innovative techniques to be used to understand and predict the planet’s climate and weather
Letter to the Editor: Re: Authentic Digital Objects
Get PDFThis letter responds to Andrew Wilson’s concerns regarding my article in IJDC 4(1) entitled “An Institutional Framework for Creating Authentic Digital Objects”. This response clears up some of the issues regarding my assertions about digital certificates, metadata, and the roles of librarians in the digital environment
