Modular Curation for ETD Repositories

This paper discusses the Lifecycle Management of ETDs project led by the University of North Texas (UNT) and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). This paper explains the research methodology the project took to evaluate these various tools, IRs and related submission systems; share findings; and discuss how these findings have solidified implementation improvements for the above mentioned curation technologies (Clam, AV, JHOVE/JHOVE2, DROID & FITS)

Chronicles in Preservation: Building Institutional Capacity in Digital Preservation

Poster presented at the 2013 iPres Conference. The poster discusses the Chronicles in Preservation project, which evaluates how to improve the preservation readiness of digitized and born-digital newspapers on a spectrum of essential to optimal levels of conformance to digital preservation standards

Building Institutional Capacity in Digital Preservation

Paper for the IPRES Annual Conference on building institutional capacity in digital preservation

BagIt Fixer-Upper: Scaling BagIt Tools to Manage the Ingest of Petabytes of Digitization Work

The New York Public Library has created over 1.5 PB of files from digitizing over 50,000 audio and video items for the long-term preservation of their content. This paper details the Library’s usage of the BagIt File Packaging Format during Quality Assurance and Audit Submissions functions as defined by OAIS. It also discusses extensions of the bagit-python library in order repair bags that do not pass those functions. Working with thousands of terabytes stored in hundreds of thou- sands of bags requires that our approaches to ingest scale appro- priately. Common changes to bags such as the accidental creation of system files in bags or purposeful edits of metadata files will invalidate the entire bag. Noting and responding to these errors is critical for improving workflows, but manual response is impos- sible. Using the bagit-python library, NYPL has created tools to selectively clean system files from bag directories and manifests, update or add checksums, and create event logs of repairs

What is the Standard Format for Digitized Audio? - iPRES 2019 Amsterdam

The best practices for representing analog audio with digital bitstreams are relatively clear. Sample the signal with 24 bits of resolution at 96KHz. The standards for storing the data are less clear, especially for media with complex configurations of faces, regions, and streams. Whether accomplished through metadata and/or file format, the strategy chosen to represent the complexity of the original media has long-term preservation implications. Best practice guides rarely document these edge cases and informal discussions with practitioners have revealed a wide range of practices. This paper aims to outline the specific challenges of representing complex audio objects after digitization and approaches that have been implemented but not widely adopted

Assessing High-volume Transfers from Optical Media at NYPL

NYPL’s workflow for transferring optical media to long-term storage was met with a challenge: an acquisition of a collection containing thousands of recordable CDs and DVDs. Many programs take a disk-by-disk approach to imaging or transferring optical media, but to deal with a collection of this size, NYPL developed a workflow using a Nimbie AutoLoader and a customized version of KBNL’s open-source IROMLAB software to batch disks for transfer. This workflow prioritized quantity, but, at the outset, it was difficult to tell if every transfer was as accurate as it could be. We discuss the process of evaluating the success of the mass transfer workflow, and the improvements we made to identify and troubleshoot errors that could occur during the transfer. A background of the institution and other institutions’ approaches to similar projects is given, then an in-depth discussion of the process of gathering and analyzing data. We finish with a discussion of our takeaways from the project

ETD Lifecycle Management Tools Manual: Version 1.0

The IMLS-funded Lifecycle Management of ETDs project has researched, developed, and/or documented a suite of modular Lifecycle Management Tools for curating electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The project targeted the following curation activities: Virus Checking, Format Recognition, Preservation Event Record-Keeping, and Simple ETD & Metadata Submission. This manual describes how to implement Lifecycle Management Tools for those activities. The manual is written for ETD Program Managers. It describes a general rationale and use case for each curation activity mentioned above in the context of an ETD program. While the technical and administrative implementations of ETD programs are diverse, this manual includes generalized recommendations for where and when to deploy the tools in an ETD submission workflow. ETD Program Managers are encouraged to coordinate with the full range of stakeholders (including the graduate schools, libraries, campus IT, and vendors) to adapt tools to their implementation

Open Preservation Foundation Community Survey 2015

This poster will present the headline results from the Open Preservation Community Survey 2015, which surveyed over 130 institutions around the world to establish the current state of the art in digital preservation practice. The survey focused on technology adoption and real-world infrastructure and architectures, including demographics about the type and size of the responding institution. The responses include: staff roles and allocations; core digital preservation activities; content types accepted for long-term management; storage capacity and models; use of the cloud and consortial solutions; use of open source; repository and workflow systems; and tool adoption. The survey did not ask about policies or costs. In addition, comparisons are drawn with the PLANETS survey from 2009 to show changes in requirements and practice over time. The published analysis and raw data will be forthcoming by the end of 2015