International Journal of Digital Curation
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Enabling Product Design Reuse by Long-term Preservation of Engineering Knowledge
Get PDFIn the highly competitive engineering industry, product innovations are created with the help of a product lifecycle management (PLM) tool chain. In order to support fast-paced product development, a major company goal is the reuse of product designs and product descriptions. Due to the product’s complexity, the design of a product not only consists of geometry data but also of valuable engineering knowledge that is created during the various PLM phases. The need to preserve such intellectual capital leads engineering companies to introduce knowledge management and archiving their machine-readable formal representation. However, archived knowledge is in danger of becoming unusable since it is very likely that knowledge semantics and knowledge representation will evolve over long time periods, for example during the 50 operational years of some products. Knowledge evolution and knowledge representation technology changes are crucial issues since a reuse of the archived product information can only be ensured if its rationale and additional knowledge are interpretable with future software and technologies. Therefore, in order to reuse design data fully, knowledge about the design must also be migrated to be interoperable with future design systems and knowledge representation methods. This paper identifies problems, issues, requirements, challenges and solutions that arise while tackling the long-term preservation of engineering knowledge
Constructing Data Curation Profiles
Get PDFThis paper presents a brief literature review and then introduces the methods, design, and construction of the Data Curation Profile, an instrument that can be used to provide detailed information on particular data forms that might be curated by an academic library. These data forms are presented in the context of the related sub-disciplinary research area, and they provide the flow of the research process from which these data are generated. The profiles also represent the needs for data curation from the perspective of the data producers, using their own language. As such, they support the exploration of data curation across different research domains in real and practical terms. With the sponsorship of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, investigators from Purdue University and the University of Illinois interviewed 19 faculty subjects to identify needs for discovery, access, preservation, and reuse of their research data. For each subject, a profile was constructed that includes information about his or her general research, data forms and stages, value of data, data ingest, intellectual property, organization and description of data, tools, interoperability, impact and prestige, data management, and preservation. Each profile also presents a specific dataset supplied by the subject to serve as a concrete example. The Data Curation Profiles are being published to a public wiki for questions and discussion, and a blank template will be disseminated with guidelines for others to create and share their own profiles. This study was conducted primarily from the viewpoint of librarians interacting with faculty researchers; however, it is expected that these findings will complement a wide variety of data curation research and practice outside of librarianship and the university environment
An Institutional Framework for Creating Authentic Digital Objects
Get PDFIn the future, a scholar or researcher will want to know that a digital object is trusted - that it is authentic and reliable. Digital objects can be surrogates, resulting from a digitization process, or they can be objects whose only form is digital. Much has been accomplished in existing open source digital library platforms to provide capabilities for preserving digital objects including now ubiquitous features such as persistent identifiers, integrity checks, audit trails, and versioning. However, achieving a level of digital object authenticity will require a multi-dimensional approach involving policies, processes, and continued technological innovation. This paper proposes steps that the institution can take to insure the availability of authentic digital objects in the future. In this proposal, authenticity is based on definitions from archival diplomatics and relies on methods from public key cryptography for digitally signing an object with a secure time stamp. Trustworthy processes, re-definition of traditional roles, and the implementation of technologies to support authenticity are all required to meet the needs of digital scholarship. Implementation and policy issues are discussed with specific attention to transformations required of the archival institution and the professional archivist
Report on the “Digital Preservation - The Planets Way” Workshop
Get PDFA report on the Planets a “Digital Preservation – The Planets Way” workshop, which took place on June 22-24, 2009 at the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark. The workshop brought together representatives from archives, libraries, museums, academia, media and other institutions to consider the activities necessary to maintain content in the long-term and establish the methodologies and software tools developed by the EU-funded PLANETS project as a potential solution for preservation concerns. The event was the first of a series of three-day workshops that the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services) project is organizing across Europe during 2009-2010
Creating Virtual CD-ROM Collections
Get PDFOver the past 20 years, more than 100,000 CD-ROM titles have been published including thousands of collections of government documents and data. CD-ROMs present preservation challenges at the bit level and in ensuring usability of the preserved artifact. We present techniques we have developed to archive and support user access to a collection of approximately 2,900 CD-ROMs published under the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) by the United States Government Printing Office (GPO). The project provides web-based access to CD-ROM contents using both migration and emulation and supports remote execution of the raw CD-ROM images. Our project incorporates off-the-shelf, primarily open-source software. The raw data and (METS) metadata are made available through AFS, a standard distributed file system, to encourage sharing among libraries
DCC&U: An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle Model
Get PDFThe proliferation of Web, database and social networking technologies has enabled us to produce, publish and exchange digital assets at an enormous rate. This vast amount of information that is either digitized or born-digital needs to be collected, organized and preserved in a way that ensures that our digital assets and the information they carry remain available for future use. Digital curation has emerged as a new inter-disciplinary practice that seeks to set guidelines for disciplined management of information. In this paper we review two recent models for digital curation introduced by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the Digital Curation Unit (DCU) of the Athena Research Centre. We then propose a fusion of the two models that highlights the need to extend the digital curation lifecycle by adding (a) provisions for the registration of usage experience, (b) a stage for knowledge enhancement and (c) controlled vocabularies used by convention to denote concepts, properties and relations. The objective of the proposed extensions is twofold: (i) to provide a more complete lifecycle model for the digital curation domain; and (ii) to provide a stimulus for a broader discussion on the research agenda
Comparison of Strategies and Policies for Building Distributed Digital Preservation Infrastructure: Initial Findings from the MetaArchive Cooperative
Get PDFThis paper discusses the importance of a particular approach to building and sustaining digital content preservation infrastructures for cultural memory organizations (CMOs), namely distributed approaches that are cooperatively maintained by CMOs (rather than centralized approaches managed by agencies external to CMOs), and why this approach may fill a gap in capabilities for those CMOs actively digitizing historical and cultural content (rather than scientific data). Initial findings are presented from an early organizational effort (the MetaArchive Cooperative) that seeks to fill this gap for CMOs. The paper situates these claims in the larger context of selected exemplars of DP efforts in both the United States and the United Kingdom that are seeking to develop effective DP models in an attempt to recognize those organizational aspects (such as the governmental frameworks, cultural backgrounds, and other differences in emphasis) that are UK and US-specific
One for Many: A Metadata Concept for Mixed Digital Content at a State Archive
Get PDFThe Landesarchiv (State Archive) of Baden-Württemberg has designed and implemented a metadata concept for digital content covering a heterogenous range of digital-born and digitised material. Special attention was given to matters of authenticity and to economic ingest and dissemination methods under the requirements of a public archive. This paper describes the outcome of metadata discussions during the implementation period of the DIMAG repository. It treats integration of the repository’s architecture with the archival classification concept, measures for long-term accessibility, the creation of adapted metadata placement, and provisions for exchange with other applications for ingest and use. The deliberately short list of metadata elements is included in this paper. Some existing standards have been evaluated under a real use environment; this paper also introduces modifications applied to them in the project context
The eXtensible Access Method (XAM) Standard
Get PDFRecent developments in the storage industry have resulted in the creation of an industry standard application programmer’s interface (API) known as XAM, the eXtensible Access Method. The XAM API focuses on the creation and management of reference information (otherwise known as fixed content). Storage vendors supporting the XAM API will provide new benefits to applications that are creating and managing large amounts of fixed content. The benefits described by this paper merit consideration and research by developers creating applications for Digital Curators
Enduring Access to Digitized Books: Organizational and Technical Framework
Get PDFThe digitization of millions of books under corporate and non-profit programs is dramatically expanding our ability to search, discover, and retrieve published materials. Accompanying this progress are cultural heritage institutions’ concerns about the long-term management challenges associated with providing enduring access to a hlarge corpus of digitized materials, especially within the confinements of copyright laws. The goal of this presentation is to describe Cornell University Library’s program to illustrate a range of organizational and technical issues involved in planning and implementing a preservation infrastructure for digitized books