International Journal of Digital Curation
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Applying the Digital Curation Lessons Learned from American Memory
Get PDFAmerican Memory, launched in 1995, was the Library of Congress’s debut web presentation and the primary product of the National Digital Library Program. More than 700,000 described digital items in 90 collections were added to American Memory in those first five years, including content from 23 external organizations. These materials were digitized, assembled and presented without tools designed specifically for the work and before the development of approved standards for the creation, presentation, or exchange of digital content. Valuable lessons about all levels of digital curation emerged from this early foray into digital library work, and many of the issues have persisted into current digital library efforts at the Library. This article focuses primarily on lessons learned about the conceptualization, creation, receipt, and preservation actions for digital content. It describes how strategies developed early on to manage the diverse and heterogeneous digital content helped inform later practices and were applied to legacy data in an effort to ensure their sustainability, flexibility and shareability into the future
Bringing Self-assessment Home: Repository Profiling and Key Lines of Enquiry within DRAMBORA
Get PDFAs repositories of various shapes and sizes continue to appear across the digital preservation landscape, means are urgently required to facilitate their evaluation. In what remains an immature discipline there are seldom any assurances of the viability of individual preservation infrastructures, and a pragmatic, risk-averse approach is critically important. The Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) provides repository administrators with a flexible self- audit methodology and online tool, facilitating the validation of their objectives and methods and the management of intrinsic and extrinsic threats. This article introduces DRAMBORA, outlining its respective strengths and describing where it fits into a wider evaluation context
PRONOM-ROAR: Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services
Get PDFTo date many institutional repository (IR) software suppliers have pushed the IR as a digital preservation solution. We argue that the digital preservation of objects in IRs may better be achieved through the use of light-weight, add-on services. We present such a service – PRONOM-ROAR – that generates file format profiles for IRs. This demonstrates the potential of using third- party services to provide preservation expertise to IR managers by making use of existing machine interfaces to IRs
Digital Data Practices and the Long Term Ecological Research Program Growing Global
Get PDFThis paper explores data practices in a Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) setting. It describes a number of salient data characteristics that are specific to the LTER program and outlines some central features of the curation approach cultivated within the US LTER network. It goes on to identify recent developments within the international LTER program relating to data issues: increasing heterogeneities due to networking, integration of data from additional disciplines, and new technologies in a changing digital landscape. Information management experience within LTER provides one example of the recurrent balancing inherent to the work of data curation. It highlights (1) taking into account the extended temporal horizon of data care, (2) aligning support for data, science and information infrastructure, and (3) integrating site and network-level responsibilities. LTER contributes to the inquiry into how to manage the continuity of digital data and to our understanding of how to design a sustainable information infrastructure
Joint US-UK Digital Preservation Workshop, Washington, D.C., May 7-9, 2006
Get PDFA report on an invitational workshop held in Washington, D.C. on the 7-9 May 2006; organised by the Joint Information Systems Committee and the US National Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
Report from the DigCCurr 2007 International Symposium on Digital Curation, Chapel Hill, NC, April 18-20, 2007
Get PDFThis is a report from the DigCCurr (Digital Curation Curriculum) 2007 symposium held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on April 18-20, 2007. The event was organised as part of the project "Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum," funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Defining File Format Obsolescence: A Risky Journey
Get PDFFile format obsolescence is a major risk factor threatening the ongoing usefulness of digital information collections. While the preservation community has become increasingly interested in tools for assessing a wide range of risks, the National Library of Australia is developing mechanisms specifically focused on the risks of format obsolescence. The paper reports on the AONS II Project, undertaken in conjunction with the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR). The project aimed to refine and develop a software tool that would automatically find and report indicators of obsolescence risks, to help repository managers decide if preservation action is needed. The paper discusses the current mismatch between this objective and the available sources of information on file formats, and emphasises the need to take account of both local and global factors in assessing risk. The paper calls for the preservation community to engage with the further development of thinking about file format obsolescence
Migration Performance for Legacy Data Access
Get PDFWe present performance data relating to the use of migration in a system we are creating to provide web access to heterogeneous document collections in legacy formats. Our goal is to enable sustained access to collections such as these when faced with increasing obsolescence of the necessary supporting applications and operating systems. Our system allows searching and browsing of the original files within their original contexts utilizing binary images of the original media. The system uses static and dynamic file migration to enhance collection browsing, and emulation to support both the use of legacy programs to access data and long-term preservation of the migration software. While we provide an overview of the architectural issues in building such a system, the focus of this paper is an in-depth analysis of file migration using data gathered from testing our software on 1,885 CD-ROMs and DVDs. These media are among the thousands of collections of social and scientific data distributed by the United States Government Printing Office (GPO) on legacy media (CD-ROM, DVD, floppy disk) under the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) over the past 20 years
Digital Preservation and Copyright: An International Study
Get PDFThe aim of the International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation was to review current copyright and related laws and their impact on digital preservation, as well as to make recommendations to help libraries, archives and other preservation institutions sustain digital works. Study partners are based in Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. The study found that, in many cases, digital works are not being preserved in a systematic way. This is partly because digital preservation entails more difficult copyright issues than preservation of non-digital material. All the surveyed countries have some form of exception for preservation activities. However, there is inconsistency in the details between the countries’ laws and uncertainty in how they apply in the digital environment. None of the countries surveyed have a uniform national system yet for collecting digital materials. Technological protection measures and licensing arrangements may, in some cases, present significant practical barriers to preservation. Current approaches to address these barriers are ad hoc and include requesting permissions from individual rights holders and some use of model licence terms that permit preservation. Moreover, as yet, there are no effective solutions to the general issue of orphan works. Recommendations of the study include suggestions for drafting national policies and adapting laws to allow digital preservation to be undertaken as necessary, in accordance with international best practice standards, and for promoting national systems for the collection of digital materials by relevant state and national collecting institutions
DCC Workshop Report: E-mail Curation: Practical Approaches for Long-term Preservation and Access, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, April 24 - 25, 2006
Get PDFA report on the Digital Curation Centre workshop held in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in April 2006 to explore practical approaches for managing, preserving and re-using e-mail records