Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries

Digital libraries, whether commercial, public or personal, lie at the heart of the information society. Yet, research into their long‐term viability and the meaningful accessibility of their contents remains in its infancy. In general, as we have pointed out elsewhere, ‘after more than twenty years of research in digital curation and preservation the actual theories, methods and technologies that can either foster or ensure digital longevity remain startlingly limited.’ Research led by DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) and the Digital Preservation Cluster of DELOS has allowed us to refine the key research challenges – theoretical, methodological and technological – that need attention by researchers in digital libraries during the coming five to ten years, if we are to ensure that the materials held in our emerging digital libraries are to remain sustainable, authentic, accessible and understandable over time. Building on this work and taking the theoretical framework of archival science as bedrock, this paper investigates digital preservation and its foundational role if digital libraries are to have long‐term viability at the centre of the global information society.

Critique of Architectures for Long-Term Digital Preservation

Evolving technology and fading human memory threaten the long-term intelligibility of many kinds of documents. Furthermore, some records are susceptible to improper alterations that make them untrustworthy. Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs) and Trustworthy Digital Objects (TDOs) seem to be the only broadly applicable digital preservation methodologies proposed. We argue that the TDR approach has shortfalls as a method for long-term digital preservation of sensitive information. Comparison of TDR and TDO methodologies suggests differentiating near-term preservation measures from what is needed for the long term. TDO methodology addresses these needs, providing for making digital documents durably intelligible. It uses EDP standards for a few file formats and XML structures for text documents. For other information formats, intelligibility is assured by using a virtual computer. To protect sensitive information—content whose inappropriate alteration might mislead its readers, the integrity and authenticity of each TDO is made testable by embedded public-key cryptographic message digests and signatures. Key authenticity is protected recursively in a social hierarchy. The proper focus for long-term preservation technology is signed packages that each combine a record collection with its metadata and that also bind context—Trustworthy Digital Objects.

Curating E-Mails; A life-cycle approach to the management and preservation of e-mail messages

E-mail forms the backbone of communications in many modern institutions and organisations and is a valuable type of organisational, cultural, and historical record. Successful management and preservation of valuable e-mail messages and collections is therefore vital if organisational accountability is to be achieved and historical or cultural memory retained for the future. This requires attention by all stakeholders across the entire life-cycle of the e-mail records. This instalment of the Digital Curation Manual reports on the several issues involved in managing and curating e-mail messages for both current and future use. Although there is no 'one-size-fits-all' solution, this instalment outlines a generic framework for e-mail curation and preservation, provides a summary of current approaches, and addresses the technical, organisational and cultural challenges to successful e-mail management and longer-term curation.

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 Practice in a National Legal Deposit Library

This two-part essay considers how digital culture has influenced ideas about permanence and looks at the change in collecting practice in a legal deposit library. The author asks: how is the idea of permanence, understood in cultural heritage terms, influencing digital culture and thus digital technology? The first part of the essay touches upon the concepts associated with permanence, digital culture, digital technology, social change, and cultural institutions, in relation to collecting digital cultural material. The second part of this essay focuses on the change in collecting practice of the Alexander Turnbull Library (Turnbull Library) at the National Library of New Zealand in developing its heritage collection of electronically published material with the benefit of legal deposit, with a particular focus on the change in practice to include the collection of online publications

Audiovisual research collections and their preservation

The basic problem of primary audio and video research materials is clearly shown by the survey: A great and important part of the entire heritage is still outside archival custody in the narrower sense, scattered over many institutions in fairy small collections, and even in private hands. reservation following generally accepted standards can only be carried out effectively if collections represent critical mass. Specialised audiovisual archives will solve their problems, as they will sooner or later succeed in getting appropriate funding to achieve their aims. A very encouraging example is the case of the Netherlands. The larger audiovisual research archives will also manage, more or less autonomously, the transfer of contents in time. For a considerable part of the research collections, however, the concept of cooperative models and competence centres is the only viable model to successfullly safeguard their holdings. Their organisation and funding is a considerable challenge for the scientific community. TAPE has significantly raised awareness of the fact that, unless action is swiftly taken, the loss of audiovisual materials is inevitable. TAPE’s international and regional workshops were generally overbooked. While TAPE was already underway, several other projects for the promotion of archives have received grants from organisations other than the European Commission, inter alia support for the St. Petersburg Phonogram Archive, and the Folklore Archive in Tirana, obviously as a result of a better understanding of the need for audiovisual preservation. When the TAPE project started its partners assumed that cooperative projects would fail because of the notorious distrust of researchers, specifically in the post-communist countries. One of the most encouraging surprises was to learn that, at least in the most recent survey, it became apparent that this social obstacle is fading out. TAPE may have contributed to this important development

Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Guiding Principles

Provides guidance on integrating recording, documentation, and information management of territories, sites, groups of buildings, or monuments into the conservation process; evaluating proposals; consulting specialists; and controlling implementation

The Ohio State University Libraries Audiovisual Assessment Interim Report

The 26-month audiovisual (AV) assessment took place from June 2017 to August 2019 with a focus on rare or unique audiovisual items. Curators and archivists within each unit identified collections or collecting areas for significance or research value. Approximately 65% of AV materials in seven library units has not been assessed. Upon completion, 18,389 audiovisual items in 32 distinct formats were individually assessed

Findings from the Workshop on User-Centered Design of Language Archives

This white paper describes findings from the workshop on User-Centered Design of Language Archives organized in February 2016 by Christina Wasson (University of North Texas) and Gary Holton (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa). It reviews relevant aspects of language archiving and user-centered design to construct the rationale for the workshop, relates key insights produced during the workshop, and outlines next steps in the larger research trajectory initiated by this workshop. The purpose of this white paper is to make all of the findings from the workshop publicly available in a short time frame, and without the constraints of a journal article concerning length, audience, format, and so forth. Selections from this white paper will be used in subsequent journal articles. So much was learned during the workshop; we wanted to provide a thorough documentation to ensure that none of the key insights would be lost. We consider this document a white paper because it provides the foundational insights and initial conceptual frameworks that will guide us in our further research on the user-centered design of language archives. We hope this report will be useful to members of all stakeholder groups seeking to develop user-centered designs for language archives.U.S. National Science Foundation Documenting Endangered Languages Program grants BCS-1543763 and BCS-1543828

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