STELLAR (Semantic Technologies Enhancing the Lifecycle of Learning Resources): Jisc Final Report

[Project Summary] As one of the earliest distance learning providers The Open University (OU) has a rich heritage of archived learning materials. An ever increasing amount of that is in digital form and is being deposited with the University Archive. This growth has been driven by digitisation activity from projects such as AVA (Access to Video Assets) and the Fedora-based Open University Digital Library ‘a place to discover digital and digitised archival content from the OU Library, from videos and images to digitised documents’. Other digital content is being captured from web archiving activities, such as work to preserve Moodle Virtual Learning Environment course websites. An evidence based understanding is required to inform digital preservation policies, curation strategy and investment in digital library development. Following the Pre-enhancement, Enhancement and Post-enhancement methodology set out by Jisc, STELLAR adopted the model of a balanced scorecard to ascertain the value ascribed to the non-current learning materials. Four aspects were considered: Personal and professional perspectives of value; Value to the Higher Educational and academic communities; Value to internal processes and cultures; Financial perspectives of value. The outcomes of the survey indicated that stakeholders place a high value on the materials, and that they perceived them to have value in all areas evaluated. Three OU courses were chosen from the digital library for the transformation stage. These materials were enhanced and transformed into RDF, a process that required more extensive metadata expertise and effort than was expected. Following enhancement the RDF was accessed through a tool called DiscOU, created by a member of the project team from the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute. DiscOU uses both linked data and a semantic meaning engine to analyse the meaning of the text in a search query. This is matched against the meaning of the content derived from an index of the full-text of the digital library content. In the final stage stakeholders were asked through a survey and series of workshops to use the DiscOU proof-of-concept tool to assess their perception of the value of this transformation. This has revealed that overall, academics and other stakeholders in the university do believe that the value of the selected materials was positively impacted by the application of semantic technologies

In pursuit of an expressive vocabulary for preserved new media art

The status of the new media, interactive and performance art context appears to complicate our ability to follow conventional preservation approaches. Documentation of digital art materials has been determined to be an appropriate means of resolving associated difficulties, but this demands high levels of expressiveness to support the encapsulation of the myriad elements and qualities of content and context that may influence value and reproducibility. We discuss a proposed Vocabulary for Preserved New Media Works, a means of encapsulating the various information and material dimensions implicit within a work and required to ensure its ongoing availability

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.

Long-Term Preservation of Digital Records, Part I: A Theoretical Basis

The Information Revolution is making preservation of digital records an urgent issue. Archivists have grappled with the question of how to achieve this for about 15 years. We focus on limitations to preservation, identifying precisely what can be preserved and what cannot. Our answer comes from the philosophical theory of knowledge, especially its discussion about the limits of what can be communicated. Philosophers have taught that answers to critical questions have been obscured by "failure to understand the logic of our language". We can clarify difficulties by paying extremely close attention to the meaning of words such as 'knowledge', 'information', 'the original', and 'dynamic'. What is valuable in transmitted and stored messages, and what should be preserved, is an abstraction, the pattern inherent in each transmitted and stored digital record. This answer has, in fact, been lurking just below the surface of archival literature. To make progress, archivists must collaborate with software engineers. Understanding perspectives across disciplinary boundaries will be needed.

Digital curation skills in the performing arts: an investigation of practitioner awareness and knowledge of digital object management and preservation

This study examines the digital curation awareness and practice of a sample of practitioners from the UK performing arts community. Twelve performance arts practitioners from across the United Kingdom were interviewed to establish understanding of whether, why and how they create and manage digital objects in the course of their creative work. Detailed qualitative data from this series of one-to-one interviews about the actual and intended digital curation practices of these performance arts practitioners establish what they understand about sustainable management of digital objects, and also which digital curation activities they actually include in their working processes. This knowledge is supplemented with some preliminary exploration of the types of digital resources that are sought and used by performance arts practitioners, in order to understand whether there is a comparable appetite for the creation and for the reuse of digital objects in this field. Questions in the interview identify the sources used by practitioners when attempting to access digital objects created by others as part of research for their own creative work. This provides a ‘practitioner's-eye view’ of performance collections; that is to say, the resources used by practitioners as collections for research, irrespective of the formal designation or intended purpose of such resources. Here, this enquiry is set into the broader context of digital curation and preservation. The approach to the interviewing is described, findings are discussed and the presence of possible skills and knowledge gaps is presented. Concluding remarks indicate the implications of these indicative findings for the representation of performance arts practice for current and future generations, and suggest useful future areas of enquiry

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.

Putting the Text back into Context: A Codicological Approach to Manuscript Transcription

Textual scholars have tended to produce editions which present the text without its manuscript context. Even though digital editions now often present single-witness editions with facsimiles of the manuscripts, nevertheless the text itself is still transcribed and represented as a linguistic object rather than a physical one. Indeed, this is explicitly stated as the theoretical basis for the de facto standard of markup for digital texts: the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These explicitly treat texts as semantic units such as paragraphs, sentences, verses and so on, rather than physical elements such as pages, openings, or surfaces, and some scholars have argued that this is the only viable model for representing texts. In contrast, this chapter presents arguments for considering the document as a physical object in the markup of texts. The theoretical arguments of what constitutes a text are first reviewed, with emphasis on those used by the TEI and other theoreticians of digital markup. A series of cases is then given in which a document-centric approach may be desirable, with both modern and medieval examples. Finally a step forward in this direction is raised, namely the results of the Genetic Edition Working Group in the Manuscript Special Interest Group of the TEI: this includes a proposed standard for documentary markup, whereby aspects of codicology and mise en page can be included in digital editions, putting the text back into its manuscript context