The Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2008)

The Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects was held at the British Library on September 29–30, 2008, with the theme “Joined Up and Working: Tools and Methods for Digital Preservation”. Topics ranged from the technical foundations of digital preservation through preservation system architectures to the organizational and policy issues facing the custodians of digital resources. There were also sessions dedicated to dealing with particular types of content, training needs, and methods for auditing needs and services

Research and development in digital preservation: an international review

The article presents a survey of international research studies and development in digital preservation, devoting a section to the situation in Spain. The author outlines applications in areas such as institutional repositories, administrative records, personal archives, aerospace industry and museum archives, but the greatest attention is given to digital preservation applications in libraries and archives. The pre-eminent role of certain libraries and the national archives and records of certain countries is evident in an analysis of the protagonists of this research, as well as the emerging role of software companies. The major lines of research include the integration of tools to create integrated preservation systems

One for Many: A Metadata Concept for Mixed Digital Content at a State Archive

The Landesarchiv (State Archive) of Baden-Württemberg has designed and implemented a metadata concept for digital content covering a heterogenous range of digital-born and digitised material. Special attention was given to matters of authenticity and to economic ingest and dissemination methods under the requirements of a public archive. This paper describes the outcome of metadata discussions during the implementation period of the DIMAG repository. It treats integration of the repository’s architecture with the archival classification concept, measures for long-term accessibility, the creation of adapted metadata placement, and provisions for exchange with other applications for ingest and use. The deliberately short list of metadata elements is included in this paper. Some existing standards have been evaluated under a real use environment; this paper also introduces modifications applied to them in the project context

Assisted Emulation for Legacy Executables

Emulation is frequently discussed as a failsafe preservation strategy for born-digital documents that depend on contemporaneous software for access (Rothenberg, 2000). Yet little has been written about the contextual knowledge required to successfully use such software. The approach we advocate is to preserve necessary contextual information through scripts designed to control the legacy environment, and created during the preservation workflow. We describe software designed to minimize dependence on this knowledge by offering automated configuration and execution of emulated environments. We demonstrate that even simple scripts can reduce impediments to casual use of the digital objects being preserved. We describe tools to automate the remote use of preserved objects on local emulation environments.  This can help eliminate both a dependence on physical reference workstations at preservation institutions, and provide users accessing materials over the web with simplified, easy-to-use environments. Our implementation is applied to examples from an existing collection of over 4,000 virtual CD-ROM images containing thousands of custom binary executables

Digital Curation and Costs: Approaches and Perceptions

The production of large volumes of scientific information, considering its cost, requires approaches that ensure its maintenance, reuse and recovery. These concerns prompted the emergence of digital curation. We intend to discuss the relevant thinking concerning the costs of digital curation. This means addressing the definition of the concept and the issue of costs, based on the studies related to cost models. A literature review was conducted using B-On and RCAAP as research sources, exploring the perceptions of the authors regarding the digital curation and its costs. The views expressed were organized around a scheme based on the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) lifecycle and the reference model Open Archival Information System (OAIS). It is proposed a systematization of digital curation issues bridging the DCC life cycle view of the digital object curation to the OAIS reference model approach, using a cross view seized by cost models and plan/data management policies

The Use of PDF/A in Digital Archives: A Case Study from Archaeology

In recent years the Portable Document Format (PDF) has become a ubiquitous format in the exchange of documents; in 2005 the PDF/A profile was defined in order to meet long term accessibility needs, and has accordingly come to be regarded as a long-term archiving strategy for PDF files. In the field of archaeology, a growing number of PDF files – containing the detailed results of fieldwork and research – are beginning to be deposited with digital archives such as the Archaeology Data Service (ADS). In the ADS’ experience, the use of PDF/A has had benefits as well as drawbacks: the majority of PDF reports are now in a standard format better suited to longer-term access, however migrating to PDF/A and managing and ensuring reuse of these files is intensive, and fraught with potential pitfalls. Of these, perhaps the most serious has been an unreliability in PDF/A conformance by the wide range of tools and software now available. There are also practical and more theoretical implications for reuse which, as our discipline of archaeology alongside so many others rapidly becomes digitized, presents us with a large corpus of ‘data’ that is human readable, but may not be amenable to machine-based technologies such as NLP. It may be argued that these factors effectively undermine some of the perceived cost benefit of moving from paper to digital, as well as the longer-term sustainability of PDF/A within digital archives