Conducting a Self-Assessment of a Long-Term Archive for Interdisciplinary Scientific Data as a Trustworthy Digital Repository

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 03:00 PM – 04:30 PMLong-term preservation and stewardship of scientific data and research-related information is paramount to the future of science and scholarship. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary scientific data archives can offer capabilities for managing and preserving data for research, education, and decision-making activities of future communities representing various scientific and scholarly disciplines. However, meeting the requirements for a trusted digital repository presents challenges to ensure that archived collections will be discoverable, accessible, and usable in the future. Assessing whether scientific data archives meet the requirements for trustworthy repositories will help to ensure that todayâ s collections of scientific data will be available in the future. A continuing self-assessment of a long-term archive for interdisciplinary scientific data is being conducted to identify improvements needed to become a trustworthy repository for managing and providing access to interdisciplinary scientific data by future communities of users. Recommendations are offered for archives of scientific data to meet the requirements of a trustworthy repository.NAS

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.

Risk management foundations for digital libraries : DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment)

This paper proposes the use of the DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment), the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) audit toolkit for digital repositories, as a tool to ensure the preservation capabilities of digital libraries. Digital repositories lie at the heart of digital libraries: ensuring long-term sustainability of their content is a fundamental responsibility of a digital library system and environment. DRAMBORA is designed to facilitate the assessment of digital repositories’ risk exposure: it facilitates internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their capabilities, identify their weaknesses, and recognize their strengths. The toolkit represents the latest complementary development in an ongoing international effort to conceive criteria, means and methodologies for audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories. DRAMBORA already includes the ten CRL principles for digital preservation repositories. As part of the ongoing developments of the toolkit we are investigating its applicability within the digital library domain, and the identification of core principles of digital preservation that can be incorporated into the DELOS Digital Library Reference Model, to ensure that digital libraries conforming to the reference model have preservation functionality

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.

Contribuição para o conhecimento dos hábitos de impressão dos docentes/investigadores do ensino superior

Comunicação apresentada no 12.º Congresso Nacional da BAD.O advento da Internet e a evolução dos suportes documentais levou à alteração de comportamentos de pesquisa e impressão de documentos por parte dos docentes/investigadores das instituições de ensino superior (IES). Este estudo decorreu numa IES e pretende ajudar a compreender os hábitos de leitura e impressão de documentos científicos dos seus docentes/investigadores. A recolha de dados fez-se através da distribuição online de um questionário. Obtiveram-se 117 respostas. 100% dos respondentes referiram utilizar a Internet para pesquisar documentos científicos; a maioria dos docentes/investigadores faz leitura de artigos científicos em suporte digital e de livros de texto em suporte papel; não ocorreram diferenças evidentes quanto ao género e faixas etárias; a frequência de impressão concentra-se nos parâmetros Ocasionalmente e Frequentemente; a área das Ciências Sociais e Humanidades recolhe maior número de respostas no parâmetro Frequentemente; a área das Ciências Exatas e Engenharia recolhe maior número de repostas no parâmetro Ocasionalmente. Os resultados obtidos evidenciam uma percentagem elevada de docentes/investigadores a imprimir documentos que recolhe da Internet. O conhecimento dos hábitos de leitura e impressão de documentos pode ajudar à tomada de decisão sobre recursos e suportes de leitura a disponibilizar pelas bibliotecas aos docentes/investigadores das IES

A função preservação no contexto dos repositórios científicos portugueses : estudo comparativo

Comunicação apresentada no 12.º Congresso Nacional da BAD.A preservação e gestão dos documentos é uma das grandes preocupações das instituições de ensino superior (IES) e engloba os documentos de natureza administrativa bem como os documentos produzidos no âmbito das atividades de ensino e investigação, ou seja de natureza científica. No contexto das IES foram criados muitos repositórios (RI) que são sistemas de informação que permitem recuperar, armazenar e disponibilizar documentos de natureza científica, em suporte digital, num modelo de acesso aberto. Este trabalho procura contribuir para a compreensão da importância da função reservação no contexto dos RI portugueses. O estudo incidiu sobre os repositórios das IES presentes no portal do Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP). Foram analisados 36 repositórios, relativamente ao subsistema a que pertencem as respetivas IES, políticas de depósito de documentos publicadas, presença nas políticas ou nas homepages dos RI, limites temporais da produção científica depositada, tipologias documentais acolhidas. Foram ainda identificados alguns problemas. Para os dados obtidos foram efetuadas as contagens e em alguns casos, calculadas as percentagens. A maioria das Universidades e Institutos Universitários possui políticas de depósito de documentos publicadas e acessíveis nas páginas web

Critical choices, critical decisions: sound archiving and changing technology

In a relatively short period of time sound archivists have had to come to terms with some fundamental paradigm shifts in the way they approach sound archiving. For example, in December 1997, in response to the first recommendation of Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, the Commonwealth Government announced that the National Library would be funded to develop and manage a new oral history project. At that time the National Library's well developed sound preservation strategy was at an interim stage between digital and analogue. It involved the production of analogue reel, CD and cassette duplicates of the original DAT tape using high end digital audio workstations (DAW) designed for post production of audio materials. By the time the project had reached its completion date in 2002, reel tapes had become more difficult to purchase, CD-R stock was much cheaper and of generally lower quality, DAWs specifically for audio preservation were available, and the Library had refocused its digital preservation strategy so that it relied on the Digital Object Storage System (DOSS), an in-house digital mass storage system (DMSS). The development of DMSSs brings closer the vision of a persistent and replicable archive to which sound archivists have aspired, however it also raises many issues that were not envisaged under the earlier strategies. These include the incorporation and transfer of existing digital and analogue to the storage system, the management of adequate descriptive and preservation metadata, the management of that data, the choice of carrier from which to transfer, (preservation CD or original carrier?) and many other new dilemmas with which to wrestle. These issues, coupled with the disappearance of adequate replay equipment from the market, render critical the timing and planning of what will clearly be the last transfer from a discrete carrier to an integrated system.Australian Academy of the Humanities; Australian E-Humanities Network; Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney; School of Society, Culture and Performance, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydne

Critical choices, critical decisions: sound archiving and changing technology

In a relatively short period of time sound archivists have had to come to terms with some fundamental paradigm shifts in the way they approach sound archiving. For example, in December 1997, in response to the first recommendation of Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, the Commonwealth Government announced that the National Library would be funded to develop and manage a new oral history project. At that time the National Library's well developed sound preservation strategy was at an interim stage between digital and analogue. It involved the production of analogue reel, CD and cassette duplicates of the original DAT tape using high end digital audio workstations (DAW) designed for post production of audio materials. By the time the project had reached its completion date in 2002, reel tapes had become more difficult to purchase, CD-R stock was much cheaper and of generally lower quality, DAWs specifically for audio preservation were available, and the Library had refocused its digital preservation strategy so that it relied on the Digital Object Storage System (DOSS), an in-house digital mass storage system (DMSS). The development of DMSSs brings closer the vision of a persistent and replicable archive to which sound archivists have aspired, however it also raises many issues that were not envisaged under the earlier strategies. These include the incorporation and transfer of existing digital and analogue to the storage system, the management of adequate descriptive and preservation metadata, the management of that data, the choice of carrier from which to transfer, (preservation CD or original carrier?) and many other new dilemmas with which to wrestle. These issues, coupled with the disappearance of adequate replay equipment from the market, render critical the timing and planning of what will clearly be the last transfer from a discrete carrier to an integrated system.Australian Academy of the Humanities; Australian E-Humanities Network; Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney; School of Society, Culture and Performance, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydne

Evaluation of institutional repositories: a comparative analysis

Com a finalidade de testar a aplicação de indicadores com vista à avaliação do desempenho de repositórios institucionais, desenvolveu-se o presente estudo aplicado aos repositórios do Instituto Politécnico de Bragança (IPB), Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco e ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. Os dados recolhidos foram tratados com recurso ao SPSS. Concluiu-se que é possível aplicar indicadores de desempenho para avaliar os repositórios nas dimensões crescimento e desenvolvimento das comunidades/coleções, grau de internacionalização dos conteúdos, coleções com maior importância em termos de dimensão e autores com maior influência. Os resultados obtidos poderão contribuir para melhorar o desempenho do repositório, nas dimensões assinaladasWith the aim of testing the use of performance indications to assess the performance of scientific repositories, present study was carried out using the Scientific Repositories of three higher education institutions of Portugal. The data collected were processed using the SPSS. The study allow to conclude that it is possible to apply the same methodology to evaluate different repositories. The results obtained may help to improve the performance of the repository