An Information Life-Cycle Approach: Best Practices for Digital Archiving This article appeared first in the January 2000 issue of D-Lib Magazine, Volume 6 Number 1. As we move into the electronic era of digital objects it is important to know that there are new barbarians at the gate and that we are moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever. We are, to my mind, living in the midst of digital Dark Ages; consequently, much as monks of times past, it falls to librarians and archivists to hold to the tradition which reveres history and the published heritage of our times. - Terry Kuny, XIST/Consultant, National Library of Canada [Kuny 1998] The rapid growth in the creation and dissemination of digital objects by authors, publishers, corporations, governments, and even librarians, archivists, and museum curators, has emphasized the speed and ease of short-term dissemination with little regard for the long-term preservation of digital information. The Background of the ICSTI Study
Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement In a rapidly changing technological environment, the difficult task of ensuring long-term access to digital information is increasingly important. The Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement presents over 130 English-language articles, books, and technical reports published in 2012 that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. This selective bibliography covers digital curation and preservation copyright issues, digital formats (e.g., media, e-journals, and research data), metadata, models and policies, national and international efforts, projects and institutional implementations, research studies, services, strategies, and digital repository concerns. It is a supplement to the Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, which covers over 650 works published from 2000 through 2011. The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. ———. ———.
Archiving the World Wide Web next section in this report >> | previous section >> | report contents >> Peter Lyman School of Information Management and Systems University of California, Berkeley Problem Statement: Why Archive the Web? The Web is the largest document ever written, with more than 4 billion public pages and an additional 550 billion connect-ed documents on call in the "deep" Web (Lyman and Varian 2000). The Web is written in 220 languages (although 78 percent of it is in English) by authors from every nation. The Web is growing quickly, adding more than 7 million pages daily. In the past, important parts of our cultural heritage have been lost because they were not archived—in part because past generations did not, or could not, recognize their historic value. The cultural problem. The technical problem. The economic problem. The legal problem. And yet it is not preservation that poses an economic threat, it is access to archives that might damage new markets. Technical Description of the Object
Acerca de la conservaci?n en el tiempo de los archivos digitales | MolinariPixel La conservación en el tiempo de los archivos digitales de fotografía es un tema central para quienes estamos involucrados en su producción y difusión. Las colecciones artísticas, los trabajos comerciales, los álbumes familiares, todo lo que pueda definirse como un patrimonio o un “activo” visual debe ser tratado con los cuidados que los expertos de nuestro país y de todo el mundo recomiendan. La elección del medio de trabajo y de los materiales y el modo de archivar las fotos condicionan la duración y la calidad de esta conservación. Pero hoy se plantea un serio interrogante cuando hablamos de la conservación de la fotografía digital. Copias digitales En primer término debemos establecer una diferencia entre la conservación de archivos digitales y la de impresiones digitales. La prevalencia de un sistema sobre otro estará determinada en el futuro por su calidad, su capacidad de permanencia en el tiempo y su facilidad y accesibilidad de uso, concepto que incluye al precio de la copia.
Digital Curation Blog Digital Preservation Service Provider Models for Institutional Repositories: Towards Distributed Services Abstract Digital preservation can encompass a range of activities, from simple replication and storage to more complex transformation, depending on the assessed value and risk to the target content. These activities require planning and, in most cases, begin with a need to know the technical format of the target content. In this case, the target is the content deposited in institutional repositories (IRs). The Preserv project [1] set out to investigate the use of The National Archives' (TNA) PRONOM-DROID service (PRONOM is the online registry of technical information; DROID is the downloadable file format identification tool) for file format identification on two pilot IRs using EPrints software, and instead produced format profiles (Preserv profiles) of over 200 repositories presented via the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). Introduction How are institutional repositories (IRs) to preserve the digital content for which they accept responsibility? What is 'preservation'?
Avoiding a Digital Dark Age Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information Kurt D. Bollacker When I was a boy, I discovered a magnetic reel-to-reel audio tape recorder that my father had used to create “audio letters” to my mother while he was serving in the Vietnam War. A decade later in the 1980s I was in high school making backups of the hard drive of my PC onto 5-¼-inch floppy disks. The Dead Sea scrolls, made out of still-readable parchment and papyrus, are believed to have been created more than 2,000 years ago. Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, an increasing proportion of the information we create and use has been in the form of digital data. Sending... Your email has been sent Enter the words above:Incorrect please try again
History in the Trash FT Magazine: March 17, 2007 Will history end up in the Trash? Deep beneath the British Library, Jeremy John, a dandyish forty- something with a floppy sweep of collar-length straw hair, is holding the keys to the digital scriptorium. Like Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, love-letters between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and John Lennon's scrawled first draft of "Ticket to Ride", these superannuated machines, and the equally venerable computer files boxed next to them, are now part of the world's greatest library collection. It's a sobering thought that the Domesday book, written in 1086 on pages of stretched sheepskin, has lasted more than 900 years. That latter-day Domesday project is a metaphor for the carelessness with which we're treating the digital information created during the past 20 years. Blinking under the fluorescent strip-lighting, John admits that "it takes a while to get priorities changed." There are about three million websites hosted in the UK.
Newsletter 12.3 Fall 1997 (Conservation at the Getty) The Getty Conservation Institute is part of the Getty Trust, a private operating foundation dedicated to the visual arts and the humanities. In the last decade and a half, the Getty has become a multifaceted international cultural institution with a range of programs designed to offer people opportunities to more fully understand, study, enjoy, value, and preserve the world's cultural heritage. This special issue of Conservation, The GCI Newsletter, marks the public opening of the new Getty Center in Los Angeles, home to the programs of the Getty Trust. In addition to the GCI, those programs are the J. Conservation invited the director of each Getty program to contribute to this issue in order to give our readership a broad picture of the diverse work of the Getty, the importance of conservation in each program's mission, and the collaborative nature of the Getty as a whole. The J. In 1953 J. Conservation is an essential element of the Museum's mission and a fundamental responsibility.
Svårt lagra digital information - DN.se Den digitala teknikens stora, okända svaghet är att det inte finns något säkert sätt att lagra digital information inför framtiden. En rad internationella projekt arbetar nu med att utveckla arkivbeständiga digitala lösningar. I Sverige leds arbetet från Boden. På Teknikvägen 3 i Boden hittar man Centrum för långsiktigt digitalt bevarande, LDB-centrum. Det finns nämligen inget säkert sätt att spara digitalt material för framtiden. Alla som talar om de spännande saker som kommer att hända med digital litteratur, film, musik och andra medier de närmaste åren borde börja svettas en aning. - Om du inte gör någonting på tjugo år med det du har lagt in på din senaste brända DVD, så garanterar jag att du inte kommer att kunna läsa den, säger Östen Jonsson, verksamhetsledare på LDB-centrum. Det tog två hundra år för Library of Congress att samla in sina 130 miljoner katalogposter - böcker, film, ljudinspelningar och annat. Ett par exempel visar vad vi kan vänta oss om vi inte gör något.
NDIIPP project partners meeting, day one I’m in Washington, DC for the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) grant partners meeting. NDIIPP is a program of the Library of Congress (LC), and we learned today that it has just been awarded permanent status in the federal budget. As a result, the program should receive an annual appropriation and become a permanent part of the digital preservation landscape. In response to this change, LC is thinking of creating a National Digital Stewardship Alliance (the name may change), which would allow current NDIIPP partners to continue working with LC and attract new partners. Organizations that are willing and able to direct resources to NDIIPP initiatives will have a voice in the operations of the alliance, and other interested institutions and individuals can become observers. I’ll be sure to post more information about this alliance as it becomes available. The Internet has enabled just about anyone who wishes to create media to do so.
'Digital dark age' could leave historians with no records of the 21st century - News - Gadgets and Tech Technology could mean that our lives are lost to history, according to experts. As the way that we store information about ourselves develops, memories stored in files that use older technology are becoming harder to access, Dr Vinton "Vint" Cerf, vice president of Google, has warned. That could mean that historians of the future are unable to learn about our lives, Cerf said. He compared the potential loss to the dark ages — the time after the Romans, about which little is known because there are few written records. Cerf recommended that users make physical copies of important documents, so that they will last into the future. "In our zeal to get excited about digitising we digitise photographs thinking it's going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong," he said. But even that might not work, since historians often don’t realise what the important documents of a time are until centuries after those that made them have died. Reuse content
RLG DigiNews: Volume 2, Number 6, December 15, 1998 Table of Contents Feature Article Digital Archiving: Approaches for Statistical Files, Moving Images, and Audio Recordings Introduction Oya Y. Rieger, Co-Editor, RLG DigiNews oyr1@cornell.edu One of the features that makes digital archiving an overwhelming effort is the richness of the digital terrain. The October 1998 issue of RLG DigiNews included an article by Margaret Hedstrom reviewing national initiatives in digital preservation. Numeric data archivists have helped pioneer solutions to long-term preservation challenges. Next, Thom Shepard describes the underlying philosophy of the Universal Preservation Format (UPF) initiative spearheaded by WGBH, the public broadcasting station of Boston, Massachusetts. Svein Arne Brygfjeld and Svein Arne Solbakk contribute the third segment on a collaborative digital audio archive initiative between the National Library of Norway and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. Notes (1) British Library Research and Innovation Centre. Shepard, Thom.
Research Information Should we be prepared to face a future without digital curation? A new digital curation centre in the UK will help research institutions to safeguard research data for years to come. Peter Burnhill, the centre's interim director, reports ...It's 2020. Searching the web for evidence to support her choice of topic, however, leads to a frustrating conclusion. The importance of data Scientists and researchers generate increasing amounts of digital data, and investment is being made into further digitisation and purchase of digital content and information. The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the academic community have taken note of this issue and invested in a number of scoping studies to find a solution. Now, building on that work and the expertise already existing in particular disciplines, a Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is being launched. Data forms the evidential base for scholarly conclusions, and for the validation of those conclusions.