Creating Preservation-Ready Web Resources

There are innumerable departmental, community, and personal web sites worthy of long-term preservation but proportionally fewer archivists available to properly prepare and process such sites. We propose a simple model for such everyday web sites which takes advantage of the web server itself to help prepare the site\u27s resources for preservation. This is accomplished by having metadata utilities analyze the resource at the time of dissemination. The web server responds to the archiving repository crawler by sending both the resource and the just-in-time generated metadata as a straight-forward XML-formatted response. We call this complex object (resource + metadata) a CRATE. In this paper we discuss modoai, the web server module we developed to support this approach, and we describe the process of harvesting preservation- ready resources using this technique

Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content

Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems to be stalled. Preservationists cannot afford specially developed technology, but must exploit what is created for the marketplace. Economic and technical facts suggest that most preservation ork should be shifted from repository institutions to information producers and consumers. Prior publications describe solutions for all known conceptual challenges of preserving a single digital object, but do not deal with software development or scaling to large collections. Much of the document handling software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or deployed for digital preservation. The daily tools of both information producers and information consumers can be extended to embed preservation packaging without much burdening these users. We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is intrinsically complicated because of human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore starts by discussing how project managers can master the many pertinent details.

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways."--P. [4] of cove

Durable Digital Objects Rather Than Digital Preservation

Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and programs that will be as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today. Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users. Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers would also avoid burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available. Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is remarkable to outsiders. Why does their progress seem stalled? Ineffective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

Durable Digital Objects Rather Than Digital Preservation

Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and programs that are as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today. Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users. Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers also avoids burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available. Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is remarkable to outsiders. Why is their progress stalled? Ineffective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

Digital Scotland, the relevance of library research and the Glasgow Digital Library Project

The Glasgow Digital Library (GDL) Project has a significance over and above its primary aim of creating a joint digital library for the citizens of Glasgow. It is also both an important building block in the development of a planned and co-ordinated 'virtual Scotland' and a rich environment for research into issues relevant to that enterprise. Its creation comes at a time of political, social, economic and cultural change in Scotland, and may be seen, at least in part, as a response to a developing Scottish focus in these areas, a key element of which is a new socially inclusive and digitally driven educational vision and strategy based on the Scottish traditions of meritocratic education, sharing and common enterprise, and a fiercely independent approach. The initiative is based at the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University alongside a range of other projects of relevance both to the development of a coherent virtual landscape in Scotland and to the GDL itself, a supportive environment which allows it to draw upon the research results and staff expertise of other relevant projects for use in its own development and enables its relationship to virtual Scotland to be both explored and developed more readily. Although its primary aim is the creation of content (based initially on electronic resources created by the institutions, on public domain information, and on joint purchases and digitisation initiatives) the project will also investigate relationships between regional and national collaborative collection management programmes with SCONE (Scottish Collections Network Extension project) and relationships between regional and national distributed union catalogues with CAIRNS (Co-operative Academic Information Retrieval Network for Scotland) and COSMIC (Confederation of Scottish Mini-Clumps). It will also have to tackle issues associated with the management of co-operation

RODA - A Service-Oriented Repository to Preserve Authentic Digital Objects

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Fedora User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-20 03:30 PM – 05:00 PMIn mid 2006, the Portuguese National Archives (Directorate-General of the Portuguese Archives) launched a project called RODA (Repository of Authentic Digital Objects) aiming at identifying and bringing together all the necessary technology, human resources and political support to carry out long-term preservation of digital materials being produced by the Portuguese public administration. As part of the original goals of RODA was the development of a digital repository capable of ingesting, managing and providing access to the various types of digital objects produced by national public institutions. The development of such repository should be supported by open-source technologies and, as much as possible, be based on existing standards. Since RODA is nearly finished, this communication aims at describing its main results.European Union; POAP; Ministry of Culture; Portuguese Republi