Invest to Save: Report and Recommendations of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation

Digital archiving and preservation are important areas for research and development, but there is no agreed upon set of priorities or coherent plan for research in this area. Research projects in this area tend to be small and driven by particular institutional problems or concerns. As a consequence, proposed solutions from experimental projects and prototypes tend not to scale to millions of digital objects, nor do the results from disparate projects readily build on each other. It is also unclear whether it is worthwhile to seek general solutions or whether different strategies are needed for different types of digital objects and collections. The lack of coordination in both research and development means that there are some areas where researchers are reinventing the wheel while other areas are neglected. Digital archiving and preservation is an area that will benefit from an exercise in analysis, priority setting, and planning for future research. The WG aims to survey current research activities, identify gaps, and develop a white paper proposing future research directions in the area of digital preservation. Some of the potential areas for research include repository architectures and inter-operability among digital archives; automated tools for capture, ingest, and normalization of digital objects; and harmonization of preservation formats and metadata. There can also be opportunities for development of commercial products in the areas of mass storage systems, repositories and repository management systems, and data management software and tools.

Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship

This paper examines the impact of the emerging digital landscape on long term access to material created in digital form and its use for research; it examines challenges, risks and expectations.

The LIFE project research review: mapping the landscape, riding a life cycle

The LIFE project research review investigates both life cycle costing and digital preservation, with a view to creating a useable life cycle costing model that can be applied to digital preservation within an HE/FE environment. The general concept of life cycle costing (LCC) is explored as a cost management tool. LCC is concerned with all stages of a life cycle, from inception to retirement. “Life cycles” are used in many arenas; this broader context is also taken into account. Although not a vast amount of study has been done in this domain, specific library-based life cycle collection models are considered. These provide useful costing models, including the first application of a costing model for digital collections. Research concerning the effective management and preservation of digital materials is looked at, some of which notably endorses a life cycle approach. This line of investigation provided the most significant perspective for digital preservation life cycle costing. Records management is also discussed, insofar as records management principles have been advocated for digital information management and preservation. It thus provides further insight and has informed work in the area of life cycle management. To fully appreciate the life cycle costs associated with digital preservation it was necessary to have a reliable framework of digital preservation costs. Literature involving the precise nature of stages involved in digital preservation was examined to ensure that all the relevant cost factors were taken into account. Furthermore, it was significant to address the question of who is responsible for carrying out this work and how this should be done

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

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

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Interdisciplinary Discussions about the Conservation of Software-Based Art.

In 2015/16 Tate organised a series of virtual discussions related to the preservation of softwarebased art as part of Tate’s partnership in PERICLES, a European‐funded project which focuses on the long‐term digital conservation and preservation of digital resources, with particular focus on actively managing change and risk as part of this process. The idea for this series arose from the realisation that managing technical change in software‐based art is not only a common concern for practitioners working in the field but also of interest to the research community. A group of engaged expert practitioners and researchers were invited to consider a set of topics at the core of the conservation of software‐based artworks. Six discussion sessions were organised over a period of one year. This report summarises the outcomes of these meetings and examines some of the key points

Building information modeling – A game changer for interoperability and a chance for digital preservation of architectural data?

Digital data associated with the architectural design-andconstruction process is an essential resource alongside -and even past- the lifecycle of the construction object it describes. Despite this, digital architectural data remains to be largely neglected in digital preservation research – and vice versa, digital preservation is so far neglected in the design-and-construction process. In the last 5 years, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has seen a growing adoption in the architecture and construction domains, marking a large step towards much needed interoperability. The open standard IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) is one way in which data is exchanged in BIM processes. This paper presents a first digital preservation based look at BIM processes, highlighting the history and adoption of the methods as well as the open file format standard IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) as one way to store and preserve BIM data