Designing a Preservation Survey: The Digital Library of Georgia

Since the mid-1990s, libraries have been digitizing cultural-heritage resource materials for access purposes. The digital medium provides additional opportunities for innovative approaches to scholarship and the creation of new collections through the aggregation of geographically distributed materials of similar provenance or theme. According to Donald Waters, formerly head of the Digital Library Federation, “the promise of digital technology is for libraries to extend the reach of research and education, improve the quality of learning, and reshape scholarly communication.” Accordingly, the cultural-heritage community has widely embraced digitization

Preserving and Disseminating Emerging Forms of Digital Scholarship in Academic and Research Libraries: The EDS Report

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Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description

The process of documenting and describing the world's languages is undergoing radical transformation with the rapid uptake of new digital technologies for capture, storage, annotation and dissemination. However, uncritical adoption of new tools and technologies is leading to resources that are difficult to reuse and which are less portable than the conventional printed resources they replace. We begin by reviewing current uses of software tools and digital technologies for language documentation and description. This sheds light on how digital language documentation and description are created and managed, leading to an analysis of seven portability problems under the following headings: content, format, discovery, access, citation, preservation and rights. After characterizing each problem we provide a series of value statements, and this provides the framework for a broad range of best practice recommendations.Comment: 8 page

The Dutch deposit of electronic publications (DNEP) - 1995-2000

In 1993 the Internet took off with the introduction of HTML and the first browser (Mosaic1). Two years later, in 1995, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek decided to start a series of experiments and projects which would lead to a deposit system for Dutch Electronic Publications. In the same year the Koninklijke Bibliotheek made a policy decision to include electronic material into its deposit. That marked the start of the Dutch Deposit for Electronic Publications (DNEP2). Both as an operational service and at the same time as a test-bed for research into digital archiving. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek has a staff of 254.5 FTE3. The ICT-department has 15 FTE (about 6%).The ICT-department is responsible for the systems management of the operational systems, for the support of the end-users and for research and development. Apart from the R&D done in the ICTdepartment the Koninklijke Bibliotheek also has a department of library research (see the website4 of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek for more information). In the first few years a lot of experiments were done. Various hardware and software was tested and research was done on issues such as metadata, the number of electronic publications available, how to process them in the library etc. At the end of 1998 the Koninklijke Bibliotheek decided that the time was ripe to make the next step. This was the implementation of the DNEP on a large scale and as part of the normal workflow inside the library departments

Digital Repository Adoption in New York City Research Institutions

As more scholarly and research materials are created in digital formats, institutions charged with managing, preserving, and disseminating these materials are increasingly adopting specialized software tools and environments created to fulfill these functions. Concurrently, subscriptions to serials databases provided by academic publishers are increasingly prohibitive and problematic. This paper surveys the adoption of digital institutional repositories by research institutions in the New York City region as of the Spring of 2009, and concludes that in spite of their potential advantages these systems are still not widely applied toward addressing the issues of preservation and access to their fullest potential

DEJA : A Year in Review

The MIT Libraries' proposed to the Mellon Foundation to plan a preservation archive for dynamic electronic journals (DEJA : a Dynamic E-Journal Archive) that would be reliable, secure, enduring, and sustainable over the long term. The Foundation's own request for proposals had previously laid out that it was interested in preserving the wealth of research electronic journals currently available to the scholarly community before it was too late

Relational database preservation through XML modelling

Digital Archives are complex structures composed of human resources, state of the art technologies, policies and data. Due to the heritage keeping role that archives assume in our society, it is important to make sure that, the data that is produced by our organizations is preserved accordingly in order do document is activity and provide evidence of their activities. Information stored in an archive must be treated differently than other types of information because it is kept with the purpose of providing evidence of some organizations activity. Due to this fact some properties should be preserved for long periods of time: integrity, liability and authenticity. The preservation of this information extremely complex as digital objects are far from being stable. They are software and hardware dependent. Normally, their auto-preservation period is about 5 years. In this context digital preservation practices become very important and should be part of the institution's planning. The problem is how to keep digital objects in such a way that their information is accessible long past their auto-preservation period. RODA (Repository of Authentic Digital Objects) is a joint venture between public administration and academic researchers that aims to become the public administration repository. A repository where users can rely on digital objects authenticity and where digital objects are expected to endure long beyond the 5 years expectation. For the first prototype three kinds of digital objects were considered: text documents, still images and relational databases. We will focus this paper on the relational databases component. Relational databases ingestion is accomplished by migrating the original database to an XML representation. This representation (DBML - database markup language) was defined according to a series of requisites, trying to preserve database content, database structure and database attributes. Throughout the paper we will discuss the creation of DBML and report its application to some real case studies.(undefined