Preserving Open Access Journals: A Literature Review

This literature review addresses certain questions concerning the preservation of free, born-digital scholarly materials. It covers recent thinking on the current state of preservation efforts of born-digital materials; the range of actors involved in significant preservation initiatives of these artefacts; the perceived barriers preventing open access materials from benefiting from existing preservation efforts; initiatives that may enable local, small-scale preservation efforts to be undertaken; the challenges and opportunities posed to preservation by new models of scholarship such as open access datasets, reference sharing and annotation, collaborative authoring and community peer review. The review identifies representative international collaborative preservation initiatives, describes their goals and results, their specific preservation strategie, and their applicability to the preservation of born digital open access materials

Digital Preservation Services : State of the Art Analysis

Research report funded by the DC-NET project.An overview of the state of the art in service provision for digital preservation and curation. Its focus is on the areas where bridging the gaps is needed between e-Infrastructures and efficient and forward-looking digital preservation services. Based on a desktop study and a rapid analysis of some 190 currently available tools and services for digital preservation, the deliverable provides a high-level view on the range of instruments currently on offer to support various functions within a preservation system.European Commission, FP7peer-reviewe

Digital preservation in the Tertiary education sector : management implications

This paper assesses the future of long-term curation and preservation of digital assets with particular reference to Further Education (FE) in the UK. Reviews current requirements of digital preservation and the efforts underway to support them. Drawing on other recent work and the author's experience in a recent development project it subsequently comments on these efforts in the context of FE. Argues that the long-term curation and preservation of digital assets produced by further education colleges should not be the responsibility of those colleges

Consider the Source: The Value of Source Code to Digital Preservation Strategies

One of the major challenges in the digital preservation field is the difficulty of ensuring long-term access to digital objects, especially in cases when the software that was used to create an object is no longer current. Software source code has a human-readable, documentary structure that makes it an overlooked aspect of digital preservation strategies, in addition to a valuable component for the records of modern computing history. The author surveys several approaches to software preservation and finds that, by supporting open source initiatives, digital libraries can improve their ability to preserve access to their collections for future generations

Towards a framework for predicting whole life-cycle cost for long-term digital preservation

Estimating the costs for the whole lifecycle of long-term digital preservation (LTDP) activities ena-bles decision makers to choose carefully what data to preserve, duration of preservation and type of preservation techniques best applied for their information. To address this need, a framework is de-veloped to generate a cost model that will estimate costs for long-term digital preservation activities using storage in the cloud and taking into consideration the impact of mitigating uncertainties, espe-cially obsolescence issues on future costs. This cost estimating framework is part of the European pro-ject entitled ‘Enabling kNowledge Sustainability Usability and Recovery for Economic value’ which aims to provide a total long-term digital preservation solution for companies and public sector organi-sations interested in keeping their digital information alive for the long-term within the healthcare, fi-nancial and the clinical trials business sectors

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

Planets: Integrated Services for Digital Preservation

The Planets Project is developing services and technology to address core challenges in digital preservation. This article introduces the motivation for this work, describes the extensible technical architecture and places the Planets approach into the context of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. It also provides a scenario demonstrating Planets’ usefulness in solving real-life digital preservation problems and an overview of the project’s progress to date

Reflections on preserving the state of new media art

As part of its work to explore emerging issues associated with characterisation of digital materials, Planets has explored vocabularies and information structures for expressing the properties integral to the value of digital art. Value encompasses those qualities that must be understood and captured in order to ensure that art works’ sensory, emotional, mental and spiritual resonance remain. Facets of interactivity, modularity and temporality associated with digital art present some critical questions that the preservation community must increasingly be equipped to answer. Because digital art materials exhibit fundamental multidimensionality, validating the successful preservation of creative experience demands the explication of more than just file characteristics. Understanding relationships between objects also implies an understanding of their respective functional qualities. This paper presents a Planets’ vocabulary for encapsulating contextual and implicit characteristics of digital art, optimised for preservation planning and validation

Assessing digital preservation frameworks: the approach of the SHAMAN project

How can we deliver infrastructure capable of supporting the preservation of digital objects, as well as the services that can be applied to those digital objects, in ways that future unknown systems will understand? A critical problem in developing systems is the process of validating whether the delivered solution effectively reflects the validated requirements. This is a challenge also for the EU-funded SHAMAN project, which aims to develop an integrated preservation framework using grid-technologies for distributed networks of digital preservation systems, for managing the storage, access, presentation, and manipulation of digital objects over time. Recognising this, the project team ensured that alongside the user requirements an assessment framework was developed. This paper presents the assessment of the SHAMAN demonstrators for the memory institution, industrial design and engineering and eScience domains, from the point of view of user’s needs and fitness for purpose. An innovative synergistic use of TRAC criteria, DRAMBORA risk registry and mitigation strategies, iRODS rules and information system models requirements has been designed, with the underlying goal to define associated policies, rules and state information, and make them wherever possible machine-encodable and enforceable. The described assessment framework can be valuable not only for the implementers of this project preservation framework, but for the wider digital preservation community, because it provides a holistic approach to assessing and validating the preservation of digital libraries, digital repositories and data centres

Sending your research material into the future

A leaflet offering practical guidance for researchers on how to preserve their digital research material/data. This is one of the outputs of the JISC SHARD project, investigating research data preservation for history researchers, and related projects in the 2011-2012 JISC Digital Preservation programme