LIFE: bibliography

The following bibliography came out of the research which formed the first phase of the joint British Library-UCL LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature) project. The references are not an exhaustive review of digital preservation activities, they are a reflection of the aims of the LIFE project. Any suggestions for additions or comments can be emailed to [email protected]

The world is all grown digital.... How shall a man persuade management what to do in such times?

Understanding and communicating the cost and value of digital curation activities has now been recognised by a number of projects and initiatives as a very important factor in ensuring the longterm survival of digital assets. A number of projects have developed costing models for digital preservation but there remains a major problem with information assets (digital or otherwise) in that their value is difficult to express in terms that are readily understood by all the stakeholders, especially those who might fund their preservation. This paper introduces a range of issues concerning information value and business models for sustained funding of digital preservation, with particular reference to the espida Project recently completed at the University of Glasgow. This project has developed a model of information value that builds on the Balanced Scorecard approach to business performance developed by Kaplan and Norton. This model casts information curation as an investment where current and ongoing expenditure is incurred in order to produce future returns, benefiting a range of stakeholders. In this formulation, value is seen as multifaceted and, from the point of view of the individual or organisation funding the curation, explicitly related to the funder’s strategic goals. It also recognises that benefits may only accrue over the long term and that there is a risk that information that is preserved may fail to deliver any return. Examples discussed in the paper concern the establishment of an institutional repository and the establishment of an e-thesis service for an educational institution. It concludes that a deconstruction of benefits of this kind can be more quickly and fully understood even by stakeholders not necessarily expert in the curation field. This facilitates the production of a well-constructed case that clearly articulates information value and the benefit that accrues from its curation, which in turn allows senior management or other funders to make funding decisions based on understandable information: the basic premise of good practice in management. This is a commonly understood idea and one that the espida methodology helps fulfil

Karin Bijsterveld and Jose van Dijck, eds. 2009. Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Sound Souvenirs is an ambitious volume, with a vision, depth, and expansiveness that stretches far beyond its mere 218 pages. Uniting the four disparate sections under the umbrella of "sound souvenirs" feels unwieldy and somewhat arbitrary at points. This collection is really four separate books in one; each of the four sections could have easily been expanded into its own anthology. The book could also benefit from expanding its scope beyond Western Europe and the United States. Overall, Sound Souvenirs is an admirable effort in the rapidly growing field of sound studies, anticipating several entry points for further exploration

Problems and Challenges in the Preservation of Digital Contents: An Analytical Study

This paper probed the issues and changelogs related to the preservation of digital contents. A literature-based approach was adopted to identify the major problems related to the preservation of these unique contents. After studying the literature, it was identified that basic principles that should be kept in mind while preserving digital contents are longevity, selection, quality, integrity, and accessibility. It was found that the most critical problems and challenges faced during the digital preservation including nature of the contents keeping the data, maintaining trust in the data, coping with the data deluge, technological obsolescence, media fragility, lack of expert and copyright & intellectual property right issues, etc. It was concluded that the libraries, archives, and information centers should be equipped with ICT facilities, and the staff has the necessary skills to handle the management of digital resources and their preservation. Moreover, sufficient funds should be allocated for the procurement and preservation of digital objects

Art Archives Digitalization in the role of Preservation and Dissemination of Knowledge in Art Higher Education Institutions in Indonesia

In 2017, through the Research and Community Service Program, the Bandung Institute of Technology funded a proposal for a data and analysis center for Indonesian visual art studies. The proposal came from the Aesthetics and the Art Sciences, part of the research group of the Faculty of Art and Design at Bandung Institute of Technology. The project subsequently developed into a digital repository containing data related to the works, studies and profiles of artists from Bandung School (now the Visual Art Study Program) from the 1940s to the 1990s. Even though new initiatives proceed at a slow pace, CIVAS (Center for Indonesian Visual Art Studies) operates two of its functions, to preserve knowledge and to disseminate knowledge as a center for archive and art studies. It also serves to build organizational memory as an institution. This research is a qualitative study using an analytical approach and applying it to a case study descriptively. To conduct an analysis, this study uses several theoretical approaches including digitization as an attempt to preserve and disseminate knowledge. This study seeks to identify the opportunities and problems faced by practitioners in digital art archiving activities especially in higher education organizations. This paper concludes that the main purpose of digitizing art archives is to produce an effective method for the disseminationof knowledge. Keywords: Digital, archiving, preservatio

Automatic evaluation of migration quality in distributed networks of converters

Migration has always played an important role in digital preservation. The most recent developments in this context introduce networks of remotely distributed converters. In this paper we propose an extension to current migration networks to enable users to: a) determine to what extent have the essential characteristics of digital objects been preserved during a migration; b) generate detailed migration reports for inclusion in the objects’ preservation metadata; and c) provide advice on the available migration paths or target formats that will best suit users’ requirements.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Preservation and Promotion of Opera Cultural Heritage: The Experience of La Scala Theatre

This paper focuses on music and music-related cultural heritage typically preserved by opera houses, starting from the experience achieved during the long-lasting collaboration between La Scala theater and the Laboratory of Music Informatics of the University of Milan. First, we will mention the most significant results achieved by the project in the fields of preservation, information retrieval and dissemination of cultural heritage through computer-based approaches. Moreover, we will discuss the possibilities offered by new technologies applied to the conservative context of an opera house, including: the multi-layer representation of music information to foster the accessibility of musical content also by non-experts; the adoption of 5G networks to deliver spherical videos of live events, thus opening new scenarios for cultural heritage enjoyment and dissemination; deep learning approaches both to improve internal processes (e.g., back-office applications for music information retrieval) and to offer advanced services to users (e.g., highly-customized experiences)

Towards an Understanding of Needs, Capabilities and Alignment Mechanisms in Digital Preservation: Results from an Explorative Case Study

Today digital information is conceived as a firm’s most important asset whose availability cannot be taken for granted. As part of an effort to sustain its availability which is threatened by expeditiously changing technologies associated with the risk of obsolete software and hardware, digital preservation (DP) provides effective means. However, to date little is known about DP in the firm. Our study is the first to fill this gap and seeks to provide a deeper understanding of a firm’s DP needs, capabilities and alignment mechanisms. We use a multiple-case design to analyze three firms and adopt the information processing theory as our theoretical lens. We find lacking decision making procedures and organizational responsibilities hampering the alignment between DP needs and capabilities facilitating a culture of information hoarding. Based on the consolidated results we suggest a set of propositions to explain DP needs, capabilities and alignment mechanisms