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.

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.

NTT Data Digitizes Vatican Library Manuscripts for Online

NTT Data Digitizes Vatican Library Manuscripts for Online. Jun Hongo. Blog: Wall Street Journal, Japan Realtime. Oct 28, 2014.
NTT Data signed an initial agreement with the Vatican to work on about 3,000 of the approximately 80,000 manuscripts owned by the library, which was established in 1475. Some of the items it holds date back to the 2nd century. There are about 50 staff members working on the project, at a cost of about $21.3 million. The finished manuscripts are available online.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Edward R. Murrow's audio essays with the famous -- and not-so-famous -- have been digitized and put online

Edward R. Murrow's audio essays with the famous -- and not-so-famous -- have been digitized and put online. Computerworld. Lucas Mearian. July 12, 2013.
Over 800 oral essays from Edward R. Murrow's 1950s radio series, This I Believe, have been placed online for public use by Tufts University. The audio collection comes from almost 800 reel-to-reel tape recordings "that were nearly lost forever due to natural wear and tear from more than 50 years in less than ideal storage." The engineers captured the analogue recordings using a 96K, 24-bit high resolution WAV format.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Reel to Real: Sound at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Reel to Real: Sound at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Pitt Rivers Museum website. April 2013.
Reel to Real is the archival sound project at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. [One of my favorite museums.] It describes methods used to digitize wax cylinders, reel to reel tapes, audio cassettes and other formats in the Museum's ethnographic sound archive. Also included are examples of the archival sounds from the collections.  This has been done to connect the sounds with "wider collections and to engage diverse audiences".

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval: a Consumer-oriented Standard

The Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval: a Consumer-oriented Standard.  James A. Jacobs, James R. Jacobs. D-Lib Magazine. March/April 2013.
"Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval" (DSSOA) is a proposed way to describe the accuracy and completeness of digital objects that were created from printed books and other non-digital originals. It indicates that the original has been digitized completely and with 100% accuracy. This seal of approval may be applied to a digitized version of an analog original when it accurately replicates the original. To do this, two criteria must be met and verified:

1. Completeness. All pages of the original are fully and completely reproduced.
2. Accuracy. The original layout and appearance are preserved. All text is legible and there is no visual degradation when compared to the original.

The seal of approval, with a Statement of Verification,  can be applied by those responsible for the digital objects at any stage of the life cycle. The Statement of Verification must describe the methodology used and confirm 100% compliance. A "digital surrogate" in this context is a complete, accurate, digital replica of a bibliographically-identified, analog original item. The seal of approval  may be applied to a specific item or to a collection when all items in the collection meet the criteria.  The criteria may be used by organizations that create, manage, preserve, or deliver digital content. They may apply it to items that they curate as a way of communicating to their user-communities the completeness and accuracy of digital surrogates. The article also  addresses metadata elements, requirements and exceptions. This may not be appropriate or necessary for all digitization projects or collections.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Getting the whole picture: Finding a common language between digital preservation and conservation

Getting the whole picture: Finding a common language between digital preservation andconservation. Douglas Elford, et al. 7th AICCM Book, Photographs, and Paper Symposium. August 29-31, 2012. [PDF]

Slides: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/nlasp/article/viewFile/2458/2924

http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/nlasp/article/viewArticle/2458

• In spite of the intangible and at times ephemeral nature of digital collections, the fundamental purpose driving both digital preservation and conservation are conceptually quite similar.
• collection policies that suit digital content in the networked environment are, for the most part, yet to be put into practice.
• While some new approaches to collecting digital materials in a proactive manner (including more frequently and via semi-automated mechanisms) are required, it is imperative that the field of digital preservation also borrows from long-established collection and conservation processes and practices that have been refined over decades by preservation professionals
• Acquiring, managing, preserving and providing access to digital culture is a challenge that is faced by all cultural and heritage organisations worldwide  digital preservation is driven by the ongoing long-term access of a digitised item or born-digital collection, whereas preservation strategies for tangible collections are determined by the immediate needs of the item to ensure its stability and longevity, though digital preservation practices could learn and borrow from conservation processes.
• Websites are also inherently time sensitive and ephemeral in nature
• Authenticity of collection items is an influential factor in conservation work. Determining the authenticity of digital objects is equally as important. Considerable effort should be undertaken to ensure that the integrity and authenticity of an item are maintained. 
• Preservation strategies should enhance rather than compromise access to collections. This is also applicable in the digital realm. Before access to digital content can be provided to users, active management and ongoing preservation of digital content is necessary.
• A successful digital preservation policy would also address the preservation needs of digital items created by an institution itself, such as photographs from digitisation programs.
• National Library of Australia uses the Prometheus workflow system, and have developed Mediapedia, an online knowledge-base resource for identifying physical and digital carriers and their associated dependencies.
• Active digital preservation is yet to become mainstream practice in many cultural organisations

  

Digital Preservation Matters.

 
 

Metadata Clean Sweep: A Digital Library Audit Project

Metadata Clean Sweep: A Digital Library Audit Project. R. Niccole Westbrook, et al.
As digital library collections grow in size, metadata issues such as inconsistencies, incompleteness and quality become increasingly difficult to manage over time.  This was a project by library school interns and full-time staff to alleviate poor recall, poor precision and metadata inconsistencies across digital collections. Access to content is the primary goal of the metadata of a digital library. Successful metadata maintenance must include both correction of found mistakes and correction to practices that lead to those mistakes.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound.

Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound. Richard Wright. DPC Technology Watch Report 12-01. March 2012. [PDF]
This excellent report is for anyone with responsibility for collections of sound or moving image content and an interest in preservation of that content. For audiovisual materials, digitization is critical to the survival of the content because of the obsolescence of playback equipment and decay and damage of physical items, whether analogue or digital.

The basic technology issue for audio/visual content is to digitize all items on the shelves, either for preservation or access. The risk of loss is high. Another issue is moving content from the current media to digital files. A third issue is preserving the digital files. This report describes the techniques for preservation planning, digitization and digital preservation of audiovisual content, and describes the technologies.  Preservation of these materials is difficult because they are physically, culturally, and economically different.
Explanation of signals and carriers. "Digital technology produces recordings that are independent of carriers. Carrier independence is liberation". Digital preservation of the digitized signal means to preserve the numbers, but also the technology to decode the numbers. ‘Maximum integrity’ means keeping the full quality of the audio and video. As far as possible, the new preservation copy should be an exact replica of the original: the content should not be modified in any way’. This may be difficult to achieve.

The two basic kinds of preservation action are: 1) changing the audiovisual content within a collection, or normalization; 2) changing the system that holds the collection.
There are four main factors in an analogue or digital conservation program:

1. packaging (wrappers), handling and storing;
2.  environmental conditions;
3.  protecting the masters; and
4.  condition monitoring, maintaining quality.

The four PrestoPRIME requirements for effective access to time-based media are:

1. granularity: division of the content into meaningful units;
2. navigation: the ability to select and use just one unit,
3. citation: the ability to cite a point on the time dimension of an audio or video file, with a permanent link
4. annotation: the ability of a user of content to make time-based contributions

Other topics include access rights, implications for small collections or institutions. The digitization standards, encoding, wrapper and metadata are all agreed and well documented.  There is no reason for the basic encoding to ever be changed, though wrappers may eventually become obsolete. All archives need to be aware of the risk of loss of embedded metadata. Finally, surveys have shown that in universities there is a major problem of material that is scattered, unidentified, undocumented and not under any form of preservation plan.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The secrets of Digitalkoot: Lessons learned crowdsourcing data entry to 50,000 people (for free).

The secrets of Digitalkoot: Lessons learned crowdsourcing data entry to 50,000 people (for free). Tommaso De Benetti.  Microtask. June 16, 2011.
National Library of Finland launched a project called Digitalkoot, which was a test of crowdsourcing with 50,000 volunteers.  The aim was to digitize the National Library’s archives and make them searchable over the internet. The volunteers input data that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software struggles with (for example documents that are handwritten or printed in old fonts). Digitalkoot relies on machines, humans and a gaming twist.

Digital Preservation Matters.

National Archives Digitization Tools Now on GitHub

National Archives Digitization Tools Now on GitHub. NARAtions. October 18, 2011.
The National Archives has begun to share applications developed in-house to facilitate digitization workflows. These applications have significantly increased the productivity and improved the accuracy and completeness of the digitization.Two digitization applications, “File Analyzer and Metadata Harvester” and “Video Frame Analyzer” are publicly available on GitHub.

• File Analyzer and Metadata Harvester: This allows a user to analyze the contents of a file system or external drive and generate statistics about the contents, generate checksums, and verify that there is a one-to-one match of before and after files. The File Analyzer can import data in a spreadsheet, and can match and merge results with auxiliary data from an external spreadsheet or finding aid.
• Video Frame Analyzer: This is used to objectively analyze technical properties of individual frames of a video file in order to detect quality issues within digitized video files.  It reduced the time to do quality checks by 50%. 

Research Librarians Consider the Risks and Rewards of Collaboration.

Research Librarians Consider the Risks and Rewards of Collaboration. Jennifer Howard. The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 16, 2011.

Association of Research Libraries’ meeting discussed research and preservation projects like the HathiTrust digital repository and the proposed Digital Public Library of America, plans for which are moving ahead. Concerning the Digital Public Library of America: “Library” is a misnomer in this case, which is more of a federation of existing objects. It wouldn’t own anything. The main contribution would be to set standards and link resources.  “The user has to drive this.”

They said that it’s almost three times more expensive to store materials locally than it is to store them with HathiTrust. Researchers now also create and share digital resources themselves via social-publishing sites such as Scribd. There is a need for collection-level tools that allow scholars and curators to see beyond catalog records.

Discussed Recollection, a free platform built by NDIIPP and a company named Zepheira to give a better “collection-level view” of libraries’ holdings. The platform can be used to build interactive maps, timelines, and other interfaces from descriptive metadata and other information in library catalogs. So, for instance, plain-text place names on a spreadsheet can be turned into points of latitude and longitude and plotted on a map.

“Rebalancing the Investment in Collections,” discussed that libraries had painted themselves into a corner by focusing too much on their collection budgets. Investing in the right skills and partnerships is most critical now. “The comprehensive and well-crafted collection is no longer an end in itself.”

On person told librarians that they shouldn’t rush to be the first to digitize everything and invest in every new technology. “Everybody underestimates the cost of innovation,” he said. “Instead of rushing in and participating in a game where you don’t have the muscle, you want to stand back” and wait for the right moment.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Meeting the Challenge of Media Preservation: Strategies and Solutions.

Meeting the Challenge of Media Preservation: Strategies and Solutions." Indiana University Bloomington. September 2011. (128 page pdf.)
This excellent study is the result of a year of research and planning to address the problems an earlier report in 2009.  It looks at the preservation and conservation of audio, video, and film, including: guiding preservation principles, facility planning, prioritization, digitization methodologies, strategies for film, principles for access, technological infrastructure needs, and engagement with campus units and priorities. It is specifically for the university, but the information and recommendations are of interest to others.  Their mission is to preserve the time-based media holdings of Indiana University so that they may be accessible. They estimate their media holdings at more than 560,000 audio, video, and film objects, and nearly all on obsolete formats. And they estimate they only have a  fifteen- to twenty-year window of opportunity to digitally preserve audio and video holdings. They propose to collect rich descriptive and technical metadata to support digitization and future interpretation and management of digital content.

• The media preservation crisis impacts every institution with media collections.
• Because campus holdings are very large and time pressures great, even high-efficiency workflows may not preserve everything in time. 
• Not every recording is an appropriate candidate for long-term preservation.
• Research, instruction, curation, and public availability are core university missions supported by media preservation efforts.
• Access is the end goal of any preservation work, and it must be developed in tandem with
  media preservation efforts.
• Access to preserved holdings is critical to the success of the project and to the realization of its value to the campus.
• The vision is an era characterized by a wealth of media content preserved long term and made accessible and integrated into campus research and instruction.
• We live in a watershed moment in which acute challenges demand a coordinated effort to address dramatic technological and cultural changes in the way users access time-based media.
• Target: high resolution audio preservation and production masters—24 bit, 96 kHz sample rate.

Some recommendations are that a 10,000-square-foot Indiana Media Preservation and Access Center is built employing 25 staff: administrators, audio and video engineers, film specialists, processing technicians, and IT support. The annual output is projected at 2-3PB of data per year with a total fifteen-year target of 39PB of data storage.  The first year of work will be focused on developing solutions to the challenges posed by legacy media. The second year will begin developing management strategies and workflows for file-based born digital recordings.

Their guiding principles include: Curatorial Responsibility; Standards and Best Practices; Online Accessibility; Description Services; usability of metadata; copyright strategies; Access Digitizing and Preservation. Their efforts need to be combined into a trusted digital repository.  "Preservation metadata requirements need to be defined, and tools need to be developed to support audio and video preservation package validation, technical metadata capture, and repository ingest."

This is a long study but is well worth the time to read all the way through it.   This university link also includes other related materials, such as the media preservation survey, and a brochure "Our History is at Risk".

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. Library of Congress.  August 2011. [PDF]

The newsletter includes information on:

•  “Make it Work: Improvisations on the Stewardship of Digital Information,” 
• All About Archiving the Web 
• Possible uniform law on the authentication of online legal materials
• Exploring Cultural Heritage Collections With Recollection
• Recollection is a free and open source platform that lets archivists, librarians, scholars and curators create easy to navigate web interfaces (like maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) to their digital, cultural heritage collections.
• Finding digital preservation training.  The training calendar.
• Digital Time Capsules and our "Digital Afterlife"
• Creating and organizing personal digital content for future access.
• The Signal: Library of Congress blog to discuss digital stewardship in a way that is informative and appealing.
• Tending the machines
• What skills does a digital archivist or librarian need?  Skills students need to compete in the archives and libraries job market.  Expertise with programming, formats and standards is, of course, very important.  But other talents have a greater bearing on success in today’s workplace. Such as:
• an ability to understand and adapt to new ways of using technology
• eagerness to help refine how things are done
• a basic understanding of how the different system parts contribute to doing the job at hand
• ability to bridge two distinct social camps: the highly technical and the highly not-technical
• how choose among these tools and software options to meet the needs of users
• communication skills, including presentation, writing, speaking and persuading
• ability to social media and to integrate photographs, graphics and video with text to get the right message out to as many people as possible

Digital Preservation Courses & Workshops For Organizations and Institutions

Digital Preservation Courses & Workshops For Organizations and Institutions. Library of Congress. August 2011.  The Library of Congress, as part of their outreach and education efforts, provide this calendar to help people access training related to digital preservation. The calendar can be sorted by date, course, format, location, and cost. To find out more about an offering, click on its title. The list includes a number that are free and online, which include:

• Preserving Your Personal Digital Memories
• Protecting Future Access Now: Models for Preserving Digitized Books and Other Content at Cultural Heritage Organizations
• An Introduction to Digital Preservation

Digital Preservation Matters - May 7, 2010

The Library of Congress Unlocks The Ultimate Archive System. Ken Weissman. Creative COW Magazine.  7 May 2010.

Article about the Library of Congress' Film Preservation Laboratory, where they are working on the  ultimate archive system, starting with the restoration of films first printed on paper instead of film.  One of the Library's main missions is to preserve America's memory for future generations of Americans, with no end point. They have a collection of 6.3 million audio-visual and film materials.  They have a pilot project digitizing their paper print collection. They are designing the workflow and they use the concept of Preservation Index (preservation quality of a storage environment).  The plan for now is to "scan the images, restore or preserve them as needed, then run them back to film, and put the film away at 25 degrees, 30% relative humidity, for practically forever. For most people, in practice, somewhere between 600 and 2000 years is beyond forever."

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Zettabytes overtake petabytes as largest unit of digital measurement. Heidi Blake. Telegraph.co.uk.  04 May 2010.

IDC, the technology consultancy released in the annual survey of the world's digital output.  Humanity's total digital output currently stands at 8,000,000 petabytes but is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year. The rapid growth of the "digital universe" has been caused by the explosion of social networking, online video, digital photography and mobile phones. Around 70 % of the world's digital content is created by individuals, but it is stored on content-sharing websites such as Flickr and YouTube.  In 2007, they estimated that the digital universe was equivalent to 161,000 petabytes.  [The term exabyte was used previously, it is larger than a petabyte.] They estimate the digital universe over the next decade will expand by a factor of 44.  Read more about Sortabytes, Peptabytes, and Lumabytes. 

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The Sun-Times Preserves Its Photo Archive by Selling It. Michael Miner. Chicago Reader. May 6, 2010.

John Rogers claims to have the world's largest private collection of vintage photos, about 30 million images. The Sun-Times has sold its archive of more than a million photos and negatives to Rogers, though they retain the intellectual rights.  And Rogers is obliged to re-create the "entire library in digital searchable form".  He is doing for the Sun-Times what they wanted to do, but couldn't afford.  They estimated the processing would have taken many years and millions of dollars.  Once the photo archive is digitized the Sun-Times  will be able to tap a growing "aftermarket" for copies of old news photos.  Rogers can digitize 200,000 images a month and hoping to go to 400,000.  The creation of metadata is the expensive part. 

The Rocky Mountain News is a good example of what can happen when a newspaper folds.  The paper went out of business in February 2009.  "All those photos were given to the Denver Public Library and are sitting in a basement in storage. The library can't sell them to me, and they don't have the money to digitize them. So they'll stay in the basement. I spoke to a very nice lady at the library. I said, 'Can they be accessed by the public?' She said, 'Not at this time.' 'Will they ever be digitized?' 'We don't have the funds to do it." Instead, he bought the Denver Post, so he considers the Rocky Mountain News pictures redundant.

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New program helps secure data.  Science Alert. 28 April 2010. 

Researchers at Monash University have developed the  MyTARDIS/TARDIS program to give researchers a place to securely store research information. It also has the ability  to share the most complex of scientific data through the internet. "The program records the data generated from an experiment, catalogues it, making it searchable, and transfers it back to the home institution, where the researcher can analyse the data using MyTARDIS, then make it publicly available on the TARDIS system alongside publication of the results in a scientific journal."  [What better name?]  The software has created a central place where researchers can exchange information rapidly and securely.

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"Link Rot" & Legal Resources on the Web: A 2010 Analysis.  Sarah Rhodes. Legal Information Archive. May 2010.

The Legal Information Archive site has information about the Chesapeake Project, which contains government, policy, and legal information archived by several law libraries. 

This particular article their third annual analysis of link rot among the original URLs for archived materials.  The term "link rot" refers to a URL that no longer points to the resource that it originally did.  The link may return a not found message, or may point to a different resource. The results of their evaluation of 1,266 born-digital online titles that were harvested, link rot was found to be present in:

• 2008:   48 of 579 URLs,  8.3 %
• 2009:   83 of 579 URLs, 14.3 %
• 2010: 160 of 579 URLs, 27.9 %

A results table shows that over 90 % of the top-level domains in the sample were state-government, .org, and .gov URLs. 

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Imation launches broad line of secure removable storage devices.  Lucas Mearian. ComputerWorld.  May 3, 2010.

Imation announced a new line of products, four flash drives, two hard drives and an optical line of Blu-ray discs and removable tape cartridges, all with a range of encryption and security management tools.

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shortDOI™ Service.  Web site. International DOI Foundation.  May 6, 2010.

A new service is available to transform long DOI names , which are often very long strings. The service creates short handles of the name.  A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a persistent name that can be give to internet resources, instead of a url which can change.  The short DOI service returns a short cut that will resolve to the same object as the log DOI form. 

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Digital Preservation Matters - April 16, 2010

State Of America's Libraries Report 2010. American Library Association. April 11, 2010.

Interesting report about libraries. As the recession continues, Americans turn to libraries in ever larger numbers for access to resources for employment, continuing education, and government services. The local library has become a lifeline of resources, training and workshops. Even in the age of Google, academic libraries are being used more than ever. During a typical week in fiscal 2008, academic libraries in the United States had more than 20.3 million visits, answered more than 1.1 million reference questions, and made more than 498,000 presentations to groups attended by more than 8.9 million students and faculty, increases over the previous years. Over 43% of libraries provide access to locally produced digitized collections.

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A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information. Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. April 1, 2010. [Silverlight video.]

This page has the agenda and video presentations from A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information, a recent meeting hosted by the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.

BRTF's Featured Agenda and Presentations:

• Research Data, Daniel E. Atkins, Wayne Clough,
• Scholarly Discourse, Derek Law, Brian Schottlaender,
• Economics of Collectively-Created Content, George Oates, Timo Hannay
• Commercially-owned Cultural Content, Chris Lacinak, Jon Landau
• Economics of Digital Information, William G. Bowen, Hal R. Varian, Dan Rubinfeld
• Summary by Clifford Lynch.

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How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive. Matt Raymond. Blog. Library of Congress. April 14, 2010.

The Library of Congress is digitally archiving every public tweet made since Twitter started in 2006. "Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition." Amazing to think what we can "learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I'm certain we'll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive." The Library of Congress has been archiving information from the web since 2000. It now has more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs and political websites.

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Library of Congress: We're archiving every tweet ever made. Nate Anderson. Ars Technica. April 16, 2010.

Comments about the Library of Congress archiving tweets:

• There's been a turn toward historicism in academic circles over the last few decades, a turn that emphasizes not just official histories and novels but the diaries of women who never wrote for publication, or the oral histories of soldiers from the Civil War, or the letters written by a sawmill owner. The idea is to better understand the context of a time and place, to understand the way that all kinds of people thought and lived, and to get away from an older scholarship that privileged the productions of (usually) elite males."
• Digital technologies pose a problem for the Library and other archival institutions, though. By making data so easy to generate and then record, they push archives to think hard about their missions and adapt to new technical challenges."

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Aligning Investments with the Digital Evolution: Results of 2009 Faculty Survey Released. Roger C. Schonfeld, Ross Housewright. Ithaka. April 07, 2010. [37p. PDF]

An excellent report for academic libraries especially, Faculty Survey 2009: Strategic Insights for Librarians, Publishers, and Societies, that looks at faculty attitudes towards the academic library, information resources, and the scholarly communications system. A few quotes from the report:

• Faculty most often turn to network-level services, including both general purpose search engines and services targeted specifically to academia.
• Of all disciplines, scientists remain the least likely to utilize library-specific starting points;
• Network-level services are increasingly important for discovery, not only of monographs and journals but archival resources and other primary source collections.
• The library must evolve to meet these changing needs.
• 90% of faculty members view the library buyer role as very important, 71% and 59% now view the archive and gateway roles as very important, respectively. Archiving is the 2^nd highest role.
• Despite the reported declines in importance of all the library's roles other than as a buyer, the 2009 study saw a slight rise in perceived dependence on the library
• The declining visibility and importance of traditional roles for the library and the librarian may lead to faculty primarily perceiving the library as a budget line, rather than as an active intellectual partner.
• Faculty members most strongly support and appreciate the library's infrastructural roles, in which it acquires and maintains collections of materials on their behalf.
• Faculty members sense of the significance of long-term preservation of electronic journals has steadily increased over time
• Effective and sustainable models for the preservation of electronic journals must be developed
• Scholars, regardless of field, indicate a general preference that digital materials be preserved.
• Less than 30% of faculty members have deposited any scholarly material into a repository; nearly 50% have not deposited but hope to do so in the future
• Faculty attitudes and practices are at the strategic core. Greater engagement with and support of trailblazing faculty disciplines may help develop the roles and services to serve faculty needs into the future. The institutions that serve faculty must also anticipate them, both to ensure that the 21st century information needs of faculty are met and to secure their own relevance for the future.

Digital Preservation Matters - March 26, 2010

Archiving Britain's web: The legal nightmare explored. Katie Scott. Wired. 05 March 2010.

Websites are increasing recognized as being culturally valuable. But there are concerns about the ability to preserve them because of current copyright requirements. The British Library over the past 6 years has archived over 6,000 culturally significant websites. Currently they must contact every copyright holders of these sites, and only have a 24% response rate. Some feel there is a "'digital black hole' in the nation's memory" because of the difficulty in archiving the web sites. There is a proposal to change the law to allow the copy deposit act to include websites. Some look at an opt out option. The BBC has a "no take-down" rule.

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Canterbury Tales manuscript to be digitized. Medieval news. March 22, 2010.

The University of Manchester Library is planning to digitize the Canterbury Tales manuscript. This is part of a JISC funded project. The Centre of Digital Excellence supports universities, colleges, libraries and museums which lack the resources to digitize important works. In addition to the digitizing work, “they will also be exploring business models for the long term viability of digitisation.”

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ISO Releases Archival Standards. eContent. Mar 23, 2010.

Two documents from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) aim to provide guidelines for archiving patient information. "Health informatics-Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records-Principles" and "Health informatics-Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records-Guidelines" look at topics of records maintenance, retention, disclosure, and eventual destruction. Electronic medical data must be stored for the life of the patient; there are legal, ethical, and privacy concerns.

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Elsevier and PANGAEA Data Archive Linking Agreement. Neil Beagrie. Blog. 03 Mar 2010.

Elsevier and the data library PANGAEA (Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data) have agreed to reciprocal linking of their content in earth system research. Research data sets deposited at PANGAEA are now automatically linked to the corresponding articles in Elsevier journals on ScienceDirect. Science is better supported through the cooperation and the flow of data into trusted archives. “This is the beginning of a new way of managing, preserving and sharing data from earth system research.”

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Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive. Brian Stelter. The New York Times. March 14, 2010.

The International Amateur Scanning League plans to upload the National Archives’ collection of 3,000 DVDs in an “experiment in crowd-sourced digitization” using a DVD duplicator and a YouTube account. This is a small demonstration that volunteers can sometimes achieve what bureaucracies can’t or won’t. the DVDs are all technically available to the public, they are hard to see unless a person visits the archive or pays for a copy. The volunteers duplicate the DVDs then upload them to YouTube, the Internet Archive Web site and an independent server.

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Uncompressed Audio File Formats. JISC Digital Media. 10 February 2010.

This looks at the main features of uncompressed audio file types, including WAV, AIFF and Broadcast WAV (BWF). “Uncompressed audio files are the most accurate digital representation of a soundwave” but they also take the most resources. Digital audio recording measures the level of a sound wave at regular intervals and records that value as a number. “This bitstream is the ‘raw’ audio data, expressing the sound wave in its closest digital analogue. “ These uncompressed audio file types are ‘wrapper’ formats that take the original data and combine it with additional data to make it compatible with other systems.

The most common is the Waveform Audio File Format (WAV), which is limited to a 4 Gb file size. The European Broadcasting Union created the Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) which is functionally identical to the WAV file except it has an extra header file for metadata. This is a recommended archive format and also has a 4 Gb file size. The European Broadcasting Union has recently added the Multichannel Broadcast Wave Format (MBWF)which combines the RF64 audio format (surround sound, MP3, AAC, etc) with a 64 bit address header and has a file size limit of 18 billion Gb. It is backwardly compatible with WAV and BWF. The Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is the native format for audio on Mac OSX.

“The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) recommend Broadcast WAV as a suitable archival format, for reasons of its wide compatibility and support, and its embedded metadata capability. For surround-sound or multichannel audio the MBWF format should be used. For archive PCM audio, bit depth should be a minimum of 24-bit, and sample rate a minimum of 48kHz to comply with IASA standards.” If compression is needed, lossless compression, which requires an additional encoding/decoding stage – codec) is the least destructive alternative. Some open-source lossless compression codecs are available, such as FLACC.

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Court Orders Producing Party to "Unlock" PDF Since Not in a "Reasonably Usable" Form. Michael Arkfeld . Electronic Discovery and Evidence - blog. February 15, 2010.

In this contractual action, the defendants disclosed 11,757-page summary in a PDF "locked" format precluding the plaintiff from being able to edit and or manage the summary without retyping it. The Court found that the defendants' locked format made it "completely impractical for use" and ordered that the defendants "unlock" the files.

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Digital Preservation Matters - January 29, 2010

Preserving Born-Digital Legal Materials…Where to Start? Sarah Rhodes . VoxPopuLII. Cornell Law School. January 10, 2010.

Article well worth reading. We have already all heard the arguments for investing in digital preservation, how the digital world is ubiquitous, how ephemeral digital data is. “There is no denying the urgent need for libraries to take on the task of preserving our digital heritage.” Law libraries have a critically important role to play in preservation. The digital preservation field will always be in a constant state of change because technology is always changing. But there has been progress in creating tools, services, and best practices.

In the law libraries that they looked at, less than 7% of the digital preservation projects involved preserving born-digital materials. The remaining 93% involved preserving digital files created by digitizing physical originals. But those who responded to the survey said, by a margin of 2 to 1, that born-digital materials were in more urgent need of preservation than print materials. This may be a problem of not knowing where to start. In selecting materials for the digital archive, each library should each library establish digital archive selection priorities based on the unique institutional mandates and the research needs of its users. There is a strong case for preserving materials that may be redundant. In addition, academic law libraries should take responsibility for preserving digital content cited within their institutions’ law reviews to ensure that future researchers will able to reference source materials, and possibly the law reviews themselves.

The article looks at standards and systems. “Digital preservation represents an opportunity in the digital age for law libraries to reclaim their traditional roles as stewards of information, and to ensure that our digital legal heritage will be available to legal scholars and the public well into the future.”

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File Formats for Preservation. Malcolm Todd. DPC Technology Watch Report. December 2009.

Preserving intellectual content requires a firm grasp of the file formats used to create, store and disseminate it. Five main criteria for file format selection:

1. adoption: the extent to which use of a format is widespread
2. technological dependencies: whether a format depends on other technologies
3. disclosure: whether file format specifications are in the public domain
4. transparency: how readily a file can be identified and its contents checked
5. metadata support: whether metadata is provided within the format

These criteria should be used as a tool to create a clear preservation strategy appropriate to the repository. This must be done to manage the risk of obsolescence for the materials.

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Google Docs to allow storage of any type of file. Juan Carlos Perez. Computerworld. January 12, 2010.

Google is opening up its Docs hosted office suite so that users can store any type of file in it. It doesn’t mean that they can be worked on or edited online. File size limit has been increased to 250 MB. This is in addition to the G-drive online storage service The G-drive is alive! 1GB free, $.25/GB/year after that.

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Release of Web Curator Tool (WCT) version 1.5. Sourceforge. 2009.

The Web Curator Tool is an open-source workflow management application for archiving web sites. It is designed for use in libraries; it supports:

• Harvest Authorization: obtaining permission to harvest and make publicly accessible;
• Selection, scoping and scheduling: deciding what to harvest, how, and when;
• Description: adding basic Dublin Core metadata;
• Harvesting: downloading the selected material from the internet;
• Quality Review: ensuring the harvested material is of sufficient quality for archival purposes;
• Archiving: submitting the harvest results to a digital archive.

It was designed by the National Library of New Zealand, the British Library, and others. It is integrated with the Heritrix web crawler and supports job scheduling and the collection of descriptive metadata.

Digital Preservation Matters - 30 October 2009

Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Peter B. Hirtle, et al. October 2009. [Book and 275p. PDF]

This book can help libraries learn how they can use the internet to provide access to their collections and comply with copyright laws. The book is also available in PDF form on the website. It “addresses the basics of copyright law and the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of “risk assessment” when conducting any digitization project.” A section on ‘Digital preservation and replacement copies’ is important to read to learn more about what we can do and can’t do.

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Universities offering new perks to broke students. Carol Warner. HigherEdMorning. October 25, 2009.

An initiative in Florida makes more than 120 textbooks available to students to download for free. It also sells the books at a discount because findings show:

• 22% of students are “uncomfortable” reading from a computer screen

• 75% of students prefer to read print copy,

• 60% of students would buy a discounted book even if the textbook was available for free online.

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Microsoft opens Outlook format, gives programs access to mail, calendar, contacts. John Fontana. HigherEdMorning. October 27, 2009.

Microsoft announced it will provide patent- and license-free use rights to the format behind its Outlook Personal Folders. It will document and publish the .pst format, which is used for the email, calendar, and contact functions. This will explain how to parse the contents of the file and how to access that data from other software applications.

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iTunes for college courses? It’s true. Carin Ford. HigherEdMorning. October 24, 2009.

The University of Virginia now offers over 1,000 lectures, videos, etc. as a free digital download from iTunes U. Others have done this for a long time. But they have combined other features. An interesting feature is that if a student subscribes to a specific course, new material will be downloaded automatically to his iTunes library.

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Obama Drupal-ing around; whitehouse.gov goes open source. Richi Jennings. Computerworld. October 26, 2009.

White House has chosen Drupal, an open-source content management software, to run the whitehouse.gov Web site.

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High Volume Document Storage Creates New Headaches for Content Managers. Steve Jones. CMS Wire. Oct 26, 2009.

Digital storage centers are filling rapidly. Some look at ‘single-instance storage’ as a viable option for organizations trying to reduce digital storage requirements. Single instancing is based on the principle of keeping one copy of a digital file that multiple users share and eliminating duplication.

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Open Access to Research Is Inevitable, Libraries Are Told. Jennifer Howard. The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 15, 2009.

A panel told ARL libraries that public access to research is "inevitable," but it will take work to get there. Faculty are starting to understand that open access to research has to happen in order to have the most scholarly opportunities. The US is far behind other countries regarding access to research. Researchers who don’t have the latest research can't fully participate in the academic discussions. The National Science Foundation plans to build an international, large-scale data-curation network.