Investing in Curation. A Shared Path to Sustainability. Final RoadMap.

Investing in Curation. A Shared Path to Sustainability. Paul Stokes. The 4C project. March 9, 2015.
Digital curation involves managing, preserving and adding value to digital assets over their entire life cycle. Actively managing digital assets maximizes their value and reduces the risk of obsolescence. The costs of curation is a concern to stakeholders. The final version of the road map is now available; it starts with a focus on the costs of digital curation, but the ultimate goal is to change the way that all organizations manage their digital assets.

The vision: Cost modeling will be a part of the planning and management activities of all digital repositories.

• Identify the value of digital assets and make choices
• Value is an indirect economic determinant on the cost of curating an asset. The perception of value will affect the methods chosen and how much investment is required.
• Content owners should have clear policies regarding the scope of their collections, the type of assets sought, the preferred file formats.
• Establish value criteria for assets as a component of curation, understanding that certain types of assets can be re-generated or re-captured relatively easily, thereby avoiding curation costs
• Demand and choose more efficient systems
• Requirements for curation services should be specified according to accepted standards and best practices.
• More knowledgeable customers demanding better specified and standard functionality means that products can mature more quickly.
• Develop scalable services and infrastructure
• Organizations should aim to work smarter and be able to demonstrate the impact of their investments.
• Design digital curation as a sustainable service
• Effective digital curation requires active management throughout the whole lifecycle of a digital object.
• Curation should be undertaken with a stated purpose.
• Making curation a service further embeds the activity into the organization's normal business function.
• Make funding dependent on costing digital assets across the whole lifecycle
• Digital curation activity requires a flow of sufficient resources for the activity to proceed.
• Some digital assets may need to be preserved in perpetuity but others will have a much more predictable and shorter life-span.
• All stakeholders involved at any point in the curation lifecycle will need to understand their fiscal responsibilities for managing and curating the asset until such time that the asset is transferred to another steward in the lifecycle chain.
• Be collaborative and transparent to drive down costs
• Each organization is looking to realize a return on their investment.
• If those who provide digital curation services can be descriptive about their products and transparent about their pricing structures, this will enhance possible comparisons, drive competitiveness and lead the market to maturity.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Infokit: Digital file formats

Infokit: Digital file formats. Matt Faber. JISC. March 6, 2015.
JISC has released a new infokit resource on Digital file formats. The infokit presents an overview of the current state of digital file formats for still images, audio and moving images, and it is looking toward future formats, and shifts to new formats from previously popular formats.
Choosing the right file format is important to successfully creating, digitizing, delivering, and preserving the digital media objects:

• The format helps define the quality of a digital object. 
• Using poorly supported formats that may restrict or block use will hinder file distribution
• Selecting a proprietary format with a short shelf life, or a compressed format that irreversibly loses data will hamper digital preservation
• Selecting the right format for a project should not be taken lightly

Maintenance of digital media files is an ongoing process. This kit is to:

• Provide a comprehensive understanding of what a file format is 
• The considerations in choosing the correct format for your project
• Provide quick and practical answers to ‘what file format should I use for…? 
• Help identify uncommon digital file formats.
• Provide in-depth technical information about the digital files and file format properties.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Oops! Article preserved, references gone

Oops! Article preserved, references gone. Digital Preservation Seeds. February16, 2015.
A blog post concerning the article Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot.  References in academic publications justify the argument. Missing references are a significant problem with the scholarly record because arguments and conclusions cannot be verified. In addition, missing or incomplete resources and information will devalue national and academic collections. The Significance method can be used to determine the value of collections. There is currently no robust solution, but a robustify script can direct broken links to Memento. The missing references problem emphasizes that without proper context, preserved information is incomplete.
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Data on the Web Best Practices

Data on the Web Best Practices. W3C First Public Working Draft. 24 February 2015.
This document provides best practices related to the publication and usage of data on the Web. Data should be discoverable and understandable by humans and machines and the efforts of the data publisher recognized.This will help the interaction between the publishers and users.

Data on the Web allows for the existence of multiple ways to represent and to access data which is a challenge. Some of the other challenges include: metadata, formats, provenance, quality, access, versions, and preservation. The Best Practices proposed should help data publishers and data consumers overcome the different challenges faced during the data life cycle on the web. The draft proposes best practices for each one of the described challenges.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications. Comments Requested.

Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications.  Library of Congress website. February 26, 2015.
Comments and feedback requested by March 31, 2015.
Because of the dynamic, ever-changing nature and availability of formats, the Library plans to revisit the specifications annually. Reviewing the specifications annually will permit the Library to keep pace with developments in the creative world, so that changes to the Format Specifications, although made frequently, can be made in small increments. Input and feedback are greatly encouraged and welcomed.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Cloud Storage and Digital Preservation: New guidance from the National Archives

Cloud Storage and Digital Preservation: New guidance from the National Archives. Laura Molloy. Digital Curation Centre. 13 May, 2014.
The use of cloud storage in digital preservation is a rapidly evolving field and this guidance explores how it is developing, emerging options and good practice, together with requirements and standards that archives should consider. Digital preservation is a significant issue for almost all public archives. There is an increasing demand for storage of both born-digital archives and digitised material, and an expectation that public access to this content will continue to expand. Five detailed case studies of UK archives that have implemented cloud storage solutions

Digital preservation can be defined as: “the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary, beyond the limits of media failure or technological and organisational change”. The challenges are urgent but can be taken one step at a time; you can address current technology and needs while ensuring that the content can be passed on to the next generation. With cloud storage there are many positives and negatives that must be considered. The article reviews many of these. When establishing your needs: Identify what are the ‘must have’ needs and what are the ‘wants’. Define your requirements and decide on the required capabilities rather than a specific technology, implementation, or product.

• We should be concerned about the security of data, wherever it is stored, but it would be unrealistic to suggest that most cloud services are inherently less secure than most local data centres.
• Adoption of a digital preservation strategy utilising cloud computing inevitably brings with it a range of legal questions.
• Cloud storage services can achieve significant economies of scale.
• Cloud services are typically considered to be operational rather than capital expenditure

Digital Preservation Matters.

Why Digital Storage Formats Are So Risky

Why Digital Storage Formats Are So Risky.  Matthew Woollard.  Lifehacker. 25 February 2015.
While it may seem that digital files last forever, the growing digital sphere faces enormous losses. Even Google has been unable to ensure access for its archive of digital content. Technical solutions already exist, but they’re not well known and relatively expensive.

How much are we prepared to pay to ensure that digital content that exists today will be usable in the future? We need to think about the value of the content and decide if it is worth keeping. Determining the value can be difficult. However, "re-use is a significant benefit from preserving data and adds value." Besides economic value, there are also cultural and intellectual reasons for preserving data. An example of preservation of data from the middle ages can be seen with scribes that used wax tablets for temporary records, and parchment for permanent records.

The chances of born-digital material being usable in 100 years will be considerably improved by actively taking steps now to ensure the preservation of the items. Effective digital preservation relies on the activities of the creator as well as the archivist. It is important to make decisions about providing context, the types of formats to use, how to organize the material, and resolving rights issues to avoid future problems. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Why we should all think about data preservation

Why we should all think about data preservation. Stephanie Taylor. School of Advanced Study. February 19, 2015.
The SHARD project, which ended in 2012, identified  four basic principles of digital preservation for researchers:

1. Start early: The sooner you start thinking about what to preserve, how to do it, and when, the greater the chance of avoiding problems. Early planning means involving everyone in a research project in the discussion to help identify additional issues.
2. Explain it: Context provides meaning and is vital in digital preservation. There is little point in preserving material and data without context.
3. Store it safely: Backups are not preservation. It needs multiple copies in different locations. Use open source file formats and be careful how you and others handle and access files. Select carefully the files to be preserved.
4. Share it: Sharing your research material and data is beneficial.  In one way or another, the main reason to carry out preservation at all, on any level, is to be able to share your work with others, now and in the future.

Many things are being lost or threatened because no one saw a good reason to preserve them until it was almost too late.  The Data Preservation Online Training resource guides students through the reasons to preserve and share data and challenges that they might face.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Threeding Uses Artec 3D Scanning Technology to Catalog 3D Models for Bulgaria’s National Museum of Military History

Threeding Uses Artec 3D Scanning Technology to Catalog 3D Models for Bulgaria’s National Museum of Military History. Bridget Butler Millsaps. 3D Printer & 3D Printing News. February 20, 2015.
The National Museum of Military History is collaborating on a 3D scanning technology to preserve physical pieces of history by creating 3D digital models. With the scans, the museum can create a virtual museum. It also plans to share the models online and allow the public to use 3D printing images to print replicas of the artifacts.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Enjoy your digital films and videos while you can... before they disappear

Enjoy your digital films and videos while you can... before they disappear. David Shapton. RedShark Publications. February 17, 2015.
Article about fragility of digital objects. Examples how digital files can fail even when there are multiple copies. Drives can fail, systems can be obsolete. Some statements:

• paid-for cloud storage and synchronisation company that seems to be doing OK today but which might not be here at some point in the future.
• Absolutely the most important thing to remember here is that this can happen right under your nose without you realising it. It's like they way you forget things.
• We can have backup strategies. But that's clearly not enough. There's no point at all in backing up all your files so that they're stored on accessible error-free media, only to find that you don't have any applications to play them.  
• Cerf has said "that we have to not only preserve the files, but the means to decode them as well."
• we also have to preserve a working copy of the operating system that can play back the media files, and because machines go out of date, we have to preserve a working copy of the machine.
• You don't get a warning when something is about to become obsolete or unreadable. You just get an error message bringing you the bad news, or the device doesn't show up in your file system explorer. 
• Data doesn't fade away gradually. It just becomes inaccessible. But when you step back and look at a mass of data from afar, the effect is that it gradually goes away.

It may be possible to create a virtual machine with a portable language, which could help resurrect machine/software combinations. Making this work will be work and expensive. "It will have to happen because if it doesn't, our films, videos, music tracks, personal memories, and in fact the whole of our recent (and future) history, will simply disappear."

Digital Preservation Matters.

From Theory to Action: Good Enough Digital Preservation for Under-Resourced Cultural Heritage Institutions

From Theory to Action: Good Enough Digital Preservation for Under-Resourced Cultural Heritage Institutions. Jaime Schumacher, et al. Digital POWRR White Paper for the Institute of Museum and Library Services. 27 August 2014.
The Digital POWRR team is comprised of archivists, curators, librarians, and a digital humanist, from small and mid-sized Illinois institutions who know that digital content is vulnerable, but are  lacking significant financial resources and have been unable to come up with programmatic and technical solutions to mitigate the risk. Each institution produced a case study and a gap analysis, with a plan to address the obstacles.  Some institutions have created and implemented digital preservation programs; however, medium-sized and smaller organizations with fewer resources like those of the POWRR institutions are in a vulnerable position.Some statements of interest:

• "Common elements emerged from our gap analyses: a lack of available financial resources; limited or nonexistent dedicated staff time for digital preservation activities; and inadequate levels of appropriate technical expertise. Some of the case studies also mentioned a lack of institutional awareness of the fragility of digital content and a lack of cohesive policies and practices across departments as a contributing factor towards the absence of real progress." 
• Digital preservation is best thought of as an incremental, ongoing, and ever-shifting set of actions, reactions, workflows, and policies.
• the notion that it is necessary to research all available tools and services exhaustively before taking any basic steps to secure digital content is yet another misconception that often prevents any progress from occurring.
• Fortunately, practitioners can get started with simple, freely available triage tools while researching which of the more robust solutions will best suit their needs.

The group developed the POWRR tool for evaluating solutions and tools. The appendix also has recommendations for the Developer Community.

Digital Preservation Matters.

ArchivesDirect hosted service

ArchivesDirect website. February 18, 2015.
ArchivesDirect is a web based hosted service of Archivematica offered by DuraSpace for creating OAIS-based digital preservation workflows with content packages that are archived with DuraCloud and Amazon Glacier. It includes open source preservation tools, and generates archival packets using microservices, PREMIS, and mets xml files. ArchivesDirect is intended for small to mid sized institutions. Duraspace is a partnership with DSpace, Fedora, and Vivo.

Pricing and subscription plans include:
ArchivesDirect Standard (System, training, 1 TB): $11,900
ArchivesDirect Digital Preservation Assessment: $4,500
Additional Storage in Amazon S3 and Glacier: $1,000/TB/year

Digital Preservation Matters.

Rosetta and Amazon Storage

Rosetta and Amazon Storage. Chris Erickson. February 2015.
In the search for more file storage, as well as more affordable file storage, we tried Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The plan was to connect the Rosetta Digital Preservation System to the Amazon cloud storage, and evaluate it as a possible storage solution. There is a free trial. The Free Tier includes 5GB storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Request.

Setup:
I tried various configurations, but decided on a single bucket for the files. I setup buckets for the IEs and metadata, but after trying it, decided to only keep the files on Amazon. That would keep the metadata local. I had tried nested folders, but couldn't figure out how to designate that in the storage rules and definition. So I create the folders by time period.

In the Rosetta Admin interface I create a File storage group, using the S3 storage plugin, and then entered the Bucket name, Secret Access Key, Access Key ID, and left the Maximum waiting time at the default. For the test, I set up a retention code for Amazon, and the storage rule used that code to determine what went to the Amazon storage. In a real storage instance, it would be better to use something that would not change, like the producer, etc.

It took a few tests to get everything in sync. The result was that Rosetta stored the content in Amazon just fine. I also tried adding content with a one day retention period, and the content was removed from Amazon after the day. A fixity check task was also able to work without a problem.

This gives us another storage option, though we decided to not use it at present.

Pricing at the time of this comparison, was:

	1 TB		50 TBs
Digital Storage Costs	Annual  Cost	20 Year Projected	Yearly  Charge	10 Year Projected	20 Year Projected	50 Year Projected
Cloud Storage
Amazon S3 - Regular	$360	$7,200	$17,706	$177,060	$354,120	$885,300
Amazon S3 - Copy / Glacier	$480	$9,600	$23,706	$237,060	$474,120	$1,185,300
Amazon S3 - Reduced & Glacier	$288	$5,760	$14,165	$141,648	$283,296	$708,240
DuraSpace - Preservation	$1,800	$36,000	$36,100	$361,000	$722,000	$1,805,000
DuraSpace - Dark copy/Glacier	$1,925	$38,500	$42,350	$423,500	$847,000	$2,117,500
DuraSpace - Enterprise Plus	$5,625	$112,500	$64,425	$644,250	$1,288,500	$3,221,250

More storage options will be considered. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Save the Voices of Tolkien, Joyce And Tennyson

Save the Voices of Tolkien, Joyce And Tennyson. Laura Clark. Smithsonian. January 14, 2015.
The British Library issued a public call for help safeguarding the over 6.5 million recordings in their archives through digital preservation. It will take around £40 million to fully fund the effort, and time is running short. The British Library’s sound archives includes audio files from Tolkien, Joyce, Florence Nightingale, Tennyson, WWI soldiers, as well as many nature sounds, oral histories and theater performances.  Thousands of others are at risk and will disappear soon if no action is taken.

Digital Preservation Matters.

AHRQ Public Access to Federally Funded Research

AHRQ Public Access to Federally Funded Research. Francis D. Chesley. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. February, 2015.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's  has established a policy for public access to scientific publications and scientific data in digital format resulting from funding through the agency. Preservation is one of the Public Access Policy's primary objectives.

The Public Access Policy includes the following objectives:

• Ensure that the public can access the final published digital documents.
• Facilitate easy public search, analysis of and access to these publications
• Ensure the attributes to authors, journals, and original publishers are maintained.
• Ensure that publications and metadata are in an archival solution.
• Ensure that all researchers receiving grants develop data management plans, describing how they will provide for long-term preservation of and access to scientific data in digital format.

Data management plans will include:

• A plan for protecting confidentiality and personal privacy.
• A description of how scientific data in digital format will be shared
• It must include a plan for long-term preservation and access to the data

The data management plans will be evaluated based on the values of long-term preservation, access, and the associated cost, and administrative burden. AHRQ will contract with a commercial repository to ensure long-term preservation and full access to the public.

Digital scientific data is defined as "the digital recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings including data sets used to support scholarly publications, but does not include laboratory notebooks, preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, plans for future research, peer reviews, communications with colleagues, or physical objects, such as laboratory specimens."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Internet future blackout: No way to preserve our data

Internet future blackout: No way to preserve our data. Lisa M. Krieger. San Jose Mercury News. February 12, 2015.

Vint Cerf spoke about the "digital vellum" needed to maintain the data that comprise text, video, software games, scientific data and other digital objects, and how to preserve their meaning.

Aiding preservation might involve "Information Centric Networking," which is based on two simple concepts -- addressing information by its name, rather than location, and adding computation and memory to the network. David Oran of Cisco Systems and Glenn Edens, research director of Palo Alto's Xerox Park, are working on that new technology.

Google is not directly involved in the digital preservation effort "although we have worked really hard at preserving the digital information of the day. We aren't planning to become the archive of the future -- although I think it would be cool." Cerf envisions libraries and governments investing in the technology needed to carry today's information into the distant future.


The "digital vellum" project led has been created at Carnegie Mellon University. This is how it would work: There's a digital snapshot of a document, which is then built into one giant file. Using preserved and transmitted instructions, a virtual computer pretends to be a 2015-era Mac or IBM computer, and can find the document. "If I can substantiate those bits (of a document) in another computer, years in future, then I will have created the same document -- I can reproduce what you were doing. It is a digital copy of the state of the computer you were using when you created new documents."

Rather than the current paradigm -- names, addresses and routes -- it would start with an "object," with a name, as the thing to be stored and moved. "Our current system of 'domain names' is not a stable system. The current routing system could be replaced by the information-centric system, where we keep track of everything not by where it is hosted but the information itself, by name.
Just as we need preservation of today's bits and software, our encryption systems will need to be preserved as well -- because once they're lost, so is the material that they're protecting. "We need an encryption system in which the keys never wear out and are never broken, that represents keying for hundreds of thousands of years."
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Google VP leads calls for web content preservation

Google VP leads calls for web content preservation. Caroline Donnelly. IT Pro.  13 Feb, 2015.

Vint Cerf says action is needed to preserve the content of the internet for future generations to enjoy. Historians in the future could may view the 21st century as an “information black hole” because the software and services used to access online content could become defunct over time. To protect against this, he wants to see efforts made to create a “digital vellum” that will preserve the hardware and software needed to access online content in the years to come. "If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future.” All web users are at risk of throwing their data away into a “digital black hole” in the mistaken belief that uploading content to a site or service will preserve it. “We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse than, than the artefacts that we digitised.”
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Crystal clear digital preservation: a management issue

Crystal clear digital preservation: a management issue.  Barbara Sierman. Digital Preservation Seeds.
February 1, 2015.
The book Digital Preservation for Libraries, Archives and Museums by Edward Corrado and Heather Lea Moulaison does a great job of explaining to people about digital preservation. "In crystal clear language, without beating about the bush and based on extensive up to date (until 2014) literature, digital preservation is explained and almost every aspect of it is touched upon. " It explains what digital preservation is not (backup, etc.) The point of the book is expressed by the statement:
“ensuring ongoing access to digital content over time requires careful reflection and planning. In terms of technology, digital preservation is possible today. It might be difficult and require extensive, institution-wide planning, but digital preservation is an achievable goal given the proper resources. In short, digital preservation is in many ways primarily a management issue”.
It uses the Digital Preservation Triad to symbolize the interrelated activities of

• Management-related activities,
• Technological activities and
• Content-centred activities.

The book, which is also available as an eBook, has a practical approach and emphasizes that “that digital preservation is important to the overall mission of the organization”, and not just an experimental project.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Save our Sounds

Save our Sounds. Luke McKernan. British Library.  12 January 2015.
The nation’s sound collections are under threat, from physical degradation, and also as play back devices wear out and disappear. "Archival consensus internationally is that we have approximately 15 years in which to save our sound collections by digitising them before they become unreadable and are effectively lost." The British Library collection contains over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment, from the 1880s to the present day. The Save our Sounds program has three major aims:

1. Preserve as much as possible of the nation's rare and unique sound recordings from collections across the UK
2. Establish a national radio archive to collect, protect and share with other partners
3. Invest in new technology to enable us to receive music in digital formats, working with  industry partners, to ensure their long-term preservation

The library is seeking to raise funds to help the preservation efforts, and to implement a national audit to map sound archives in the UK and to find those that are at risk.

Digital Preservation Matters.

New Expert Panel Report From Council of Canadian Academies Says Canada’s Memory Institutions “Falling Behind” in Preservation of Digital Materials

New Expert Panel Report From Council of Canadian Academies Says Canada’s Memory Institutions “Falling Behind” in Preservation of Digital Materials. Gary Price. Library Journal. February 4, 2015.
An expert panel report, Leading in the Digital World: Opportunities for Canada’s Memory Institutions, (208 pages; PDF) addresses the challenges and opportunities that exist for libraries, archives, museums, and galleries as they adapt to the digital age. Vast amounts of digital information are at risk of being lost because many traditional tools are no longer adequate in the digital age. Memory institutions face the difficult task of preserving digital files in formats that will remain accessible over the long term. Institutions to collaborate more strategically and develop interactive relationships with users. They must also be leaders within and among their respective organizations. Many of the challenges faced are rooted in technical issues associated with managing digital content, the sheer volume of digital information, and the struggle to remain relevant. Collaboration is essential for adaptation, which enables institutions to access the resources required to deliver the  services that users now expect.

Digital Preservation Matters.