Managing UIC Medical Center Policies Using DSpace

The University of Illinois at Chicago’s University Archives found that using the DSpace institutional repository software is an effective, if not elegant, solution for the submission, search, and retrieval of a set of vital university records. This case study discusses the process of using the institutional repository to manage the University of Illinois Medical Center’s electronic policies and procedures documents

Durable Digital Objects Rather Than Digital Preservation

Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and programs that will be as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today. Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users. Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers would also avoid burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available. Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is remarkable to outsiders. Why does their progress seem stalled? Ineffective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

Durable Digital Objects Rather Than Digital Preservation

Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and programs that are as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today. Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users. Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers also avoids burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available. Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is remarkable to outsiders. Why is their progress stalled? Ineffective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

The Three Commandments of Amending the Federal Rules of Evidence

The Rules have been amended many times in the forty years since they were enacted. Unlike the original drafting process, which necessarily involved consideration of the Rules as a whole, each round of amendments was limited to a specific Rule or set of Rules. This particularized focus is not myopic, but unavoidable; the Rules are numerous and complex, and the time of the Advisory Committee and Congress is limited. But after more than forty years, a broader perspective is possible. The purpose of this Article is to provide a small bit of that perspective, which this Article distills into three “commandments” for amending the Rules. After a brief history of the residual exception and a description of the proposed amendment, this Article considers the extent to which that proposal complies with these commandments

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.

Beyond OAIS : towards a reliable and consistent digital preservation implementation framework

Current work in digital preservation (DP) is dominated by the "Open Archival Information System" (OAIS) reference framework specified by the international standard ISO 14721:2003. This is a useful aid to understanding the concepts, main functional components and the basic data flows within a DP system, but does not give specific guidance on implementation-level issues. In this paper we suggest that there is a need for a reference architecture which goes beyond OAIS to address such implementationlevel issues - to specify minimum requirements in respect of the policies, processes, and metadata required to measure and validate repository trustworthiness in respect of the authenticity, integrity, renderability, meaning, and retrievability of the digital materials preserved. The suggestion is not that a particular way of implementing OAIS be specified, but, rather that general guidelines on implementation are required if the term 'OAIS-compliant' is to be meaningful in the sense of giving an assurance of attaining and maintaining an operationally adequate or better level of long-term reliability, consistency, and crosscompatibility in implemented DP systems that is measurable, verifiable, manageable, and (as far as possible) futureproofed

A practitioners guide to managing geoscience information

In the UK the Natural Environment Research Council manages its scientific data holdings through a series of Environmental Data Centres1 Within the Earth Science sector the National Geoscience Data Centre covering Atmosphere, Bioinformatics, Earth Sciences, Earth Observation, Hydrology, Marine Science and Polar Science. 2 - Risk Reduction; (NGDC), a component of the British Geological Survey (BGS), is responsible for managing the geosciences data resource. The purpose of the NGDC is to maintain the national geoscience database and to ensure efficient and effective delivery by providing geoscientists with ready to access data and information that is timely, fit for purpose, and in which the user has confidence. The key benefits that NERC derives from this approach are: - Increased Productivity; and - Higher Quality Science. The paper briefly describes the key benefits of managing geoscientific information effectively and describes how these benefits are realised within the NGDC and BGS