Digital Archives and Special Collections – Page 5

About 30 Million Pages of Unclassified Records Will Be Digitized and Put Online: "The Obama Presidential Library That Isn’t"

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/arts/obama-presidential-center-library-national-archives-and-records-administration.html

"Never Best Practices: Born-Digital Audiovisual Preservation"

Julia Kim, Rebecca Fraimow and Erica Titkemeyer have published "Never Best Practices: Born-Digital Audiovisual Preservation" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

The sheer conditionality of [born-digital audiovisual file preservation] recommendations leaves practitioners mired in a sea of questions as they struggle to set realistically adhered to policies for their institutions. Should files be accepted as-is, or transcoded to an open and standardized format? When is transcoding to a preservation file specification worth the extra storage space and staff time? If transcoding, what are the ideal target specifications? When developing policies and workflows for batch transcoding a variety of different formats, each with different technical specifications, how do you make sure that preservation files maintain all the perceptible, let alone "significant" characteristics of the original files?

This paper presents case studies from three institutions—a university special collections library, a federal government department, and a public broadcasting station—demonstrating how the factors listed above might lead to 'tiered' processing and decision-making around 'good enough' practices for the preservation of born-digital a/v files.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Informing the Digital Archive with Altmetrics"

http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/35931/

"The Reconfiguration of the Archive as Data to Be Mined"

Michael Moss et al. have published "The Reconfiguration of the Archive as Data to Be Mined" in Archivaria.

Here's an excerpt:

This article discusses changing practices brought about by the move to online digital records, the impact these are having on the way history is written, and the way in which archivists are responding (and will need to respond in the future). We argue that digital administrative records are surrounded by other sources—online newspapers and social media—and that the huge volume of digital records alters the way historians read material. This will require a shift in approach from archivists, who will need to view archives as collections of data to be mined and not as texts to be read. . . . While grappling with these issues, archivists will also need to recognize that the future record will be as much about sound and vision as about text.

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Digital Data Archives as Knowledge Infrastructures: Mediating Data Sharing and Reuse"

Christine L. Borgman et al. have self-archived "Digital Data Archives as Knowledge Infrastructures: Mediating Data Sharing and Reuse."

Here's an excerpt:

Digital archives are the preferred means for open access to research data. They play essential roles in knowledge infrastructures—robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions—but little is known about how they mediate information exchange between stakeholders. We open the "black box" of data archives by studying DANS, the Data Archiving and Networked Services institute of The Netherlands, which manages 50+ years of data from the social sciences, humanities, and other domains. Our interviews, weblogs, ethnography, and document analyses reveal that a few large contributors provide a steady flow of content, but most are academic researchers who submit datasets infrequently and often restrict access to their files. Consumers are a diverse group that overlaps minimally with contributors. Archivists devote about half their time to aiding contributors with curation processes and half to assisting consumers. Given the diversity and infrequency of usage, human assistance in curation and search remains essential. DANS' knowledge infrastructure encompasses public and private stakeholders who contribute, consume, harvest, and serve their data—many of whom did not exist at the time the DANS collections originated—reinforcing the need for continuous investment in digital data archives as their communities, technologies, and services evolve.

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"ARCHANGEL: Trusted Archives of Digital Public Documents"

John Collomosse, have self-archived "ARCHANGEL: Trusted Archives of Digital Public Documents."

Here's an excerpt:

We present ARCHANGEL; a de-centralised platform for ensuring the long-term integrity of digital documents stored within public archives. Document integrity is fundamental to public trust in archives. Yet currently that trust is built upon institutional reputation—trust at face value in a centralised authority, like a national government archive or University. ARCHANGEL proposes a shift to a technological underscoring of that trust, using distributed ledger technology (DLT) to cryptographically guarantee the provenance, immutability and so the integrity of archived documents. We describe the ARCHANGEL architecture, and report on a prototype of that architecture build over the Ethereum infrastructure. We report early evaluation and feedback of ARCHANGEL from stakeholders in the research data archives space.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

“Over One Million Digital Items from California Cultural Heritage Institutions Now Available through Calisphere!”

https://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2018/04/16/over-one-million-digital-items-from-california-cultural-heritage-institutions-now-available-through-calisphere/

"Digital Archives as Big Data"

Luis Martinez-Uribe has self-archived "Digital Archives as Big Data."

Here's an excerpt:

Digital archives contribute to Big data. Combining social network analysis, coincidence analysis, data reduction, and visual analytics leads to better characterize topics over time, publishers' main themes and best authors of all times, according to the British newspaper The Guardian and from the 3 million records of the British National Bibliography.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 8 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Massive Newspaper Migration—Moving 22 Million Records from CONTENTdm to Solphal"

Alan Witkowski et al. have published "Massive Newspaper Migration—Moving 22 Million Records from CONTENTdm to Solphal" in D-Lib Magazine.

Utah Digital Newspapers is a pioneering digital newspapers program at the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library. Recently, a small project team completed a successful migration away from CONTENTdm onto a home-grown system called Solphal, built using open-source applications. The migration process is detailed along with examples of scripts used to prepare and enhance metadata. Transitioning away from a limiting vendor-based solution to a home-grown system has enabled the Utah Digital Newspapers program to be more responsive to user requests as well as realizing greater efficiencies in hardware and software. The platform has opened up new possibilities for the future as the collection continues to grow.

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Europeana Photography Launched

Europeana has launched Europeana Photography.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, we're proud to launch Europeana Photography, our latest thematic collection. Photography lovers and researchers can explore more than 2 million historical photographs, contributed by over 50 European institutions in 34 countries.

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The ABC Method: A Risk Management Approach to the Preservation of Cultural Heritage

The Canadian Conservation Institute has released The ABC Method: A Risk Management Approach to the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

Here's an excerpt:

This manual offers a comprehensive understanding of risk management applied to the preservation of heritage assets, whether collections, buildings or sites. It provides a step-by-step procedure and a variety of tools to guide the heritage professional in applying the ABC method to their own context. The method can be applied to a range of situations, from analysis of a single risk to a comprehensive risk assessment of the entire heritage asset.

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"Leveraging Exceptions and Limitations for Digital Curation and Online Collections: The U.S. Case"

Patricia Aufderheide has published "Leveraging Exceptions and Limitations for Digital Curation and Online Collections: The U.S. Case" in Libellarium: Journal for the Research of Writing, Books, and Cultural Heritage Institutions.

Here's an excerpt:

Librarians wanting to use digital affordances for their patron’s and public benefit have increasingly found themselves frustrated by copyright law designed for a pre-digital era. In the U.S., this frustration has driven the nation’s most prestigious library group, the Association of Research Libraries, to explore the utility of the major exception to copyright monopoly rights, fair use, in order to accomplish basic curation and collection goals in a digital era. The ARL's efforts to clarify how libraries can employ fair use has resulted in sometimes-dramatic changes in how work is done, and has permitted innovation at some universities. Its approach demonstrates the power of consensus in a professional field to permit innovation within the law.

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Web Archiving in the United States: A 2016 Survey

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance has released Web Archiving in the United States: A 2016 Survey .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

From January 20 to February 16, 2016, a team representing multiple NDSA member institutions and interest groups conducted a survey of organizations in the United States actively involved in, or planning to start, programs to archive content from the Web. This effort built upon a similar survey undertaken by NDSA in late 2011 and published online in June 2012 and a second survey in late 2013 published online in September 2014.

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"Content-Based Video Retrieval in Historical Collections of the German Broadcasting Archive"

Markus Mühling et al. have self-archived "Content-Based Video Retrieval in Historical Collections of the German Broadcasting Archive."

Here's an excerpt:

The German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) maintains the cultural heritage of radio and television broadcasts of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The uniqueness and importance of the video material stimulates a large scientific interest in the video content. In this paper, we present an automatic video analysis and retrieval system for searching in historical collections of GDR television recordings. It consists of video analysis algorithms for shot boundary detection, concept classification, person recognition, text recognition and similarity search. The performance of the system is evaluated from a technical and an archival perspective on 2,500 hours of GDR television recordings

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"ArchiveSpark: Efficient Web Archive Access, Extraction and Derivation"

Helge Holzmann, Vinay Goel, and Avishek Anand have self-archived "ArchiveSpark: Efficient Web Archive Access, Extraction and Derivation."

Here's an excerpt:

Web archives are a valuable resource for researchers of various disciplines. However, to use them as a scholarly source, researchers require a tool that provides efficient access to Web archive data for extraction and derivation of smaller datasets. Besides efficient access we identify five other objectives based on practical researcher needs such as ease of use, extensibility and reusability.

Towards these objectives we propose ArchiveSpark, a framework for efficient, distributed Web archive processing that builds a research corpus by working on existing and standardized data formats commonly held by Web archiving institutions. Performance optimizations in ArchiveSpark, facilitated by the use of a widely available metadata index, result in significant speed-ups of data processing. Our benchmarks show that ArchiveSpark is faster than alternative approaches without depending on any additional data stores while improving usability by seamlessly integrating queries and derivations with external tools.

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Omeka Classic 2.5 Released

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka Classic 2.5.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The final day of January 2017 brings with it the release of the long awaited version 2.5 of Omeka Classic. While the release includes a long list of minor changes and bug fixes (see the release notes), there are a number of key improvements that were requested by the user community:

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"The Devil’s Shoehorn: A Case Study of EAD to ArchivesSpace Migration at a Large University"

Dave Mayo and Kate Bowers have published "The Devil's Shoehorn: A Case Study of EAD to ArchivesSpace Migration at a Large University" in the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

A band of archivists and IT professionals at Harvard took on a project to convert nearly two million descriptions of archival collection components from marked-up text into the ArchivesSpace archival metadata management system. Starting in the mid-1990s, Harvard was an alpha implementer of EAD, an SGML (later XML) text markup language for electronic inventories, indexes, and finding aids that archivists use to wend their way through the sometimes quirky filing systems that bureaucracies establish for their records or the utter chaos in which some individuals keep their personal archives. These pathfinder documents, designed to cope with messy reality, can themselves be difficult to classify. Portions of them are rigorously structured, while other parts are narrative. Early documents predate the establishment of the standard; many feature idiosyncratic encoding that had been through several machine conversions, while others were freshly encoded and fairly consistent. In this paper, we will cover the practical and technical challenges involved in preparing a large (900MiB) corpus of XML for ingest into an open-source archival information system (ArchivesSpace). This case study will give an overview of the project, discuss problem discovery and problem solving, and address the technical challenges, analysis, solutions, and decisions and provide information on the tools produced and lessons learned.

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"Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe Digital Archives: The Bentley Historical Library’s ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project"

Max Eckard, Dallas Pillen and Mike Shallcross have published "Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe Digital Archives: The Bentley Historical Library's ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project" in the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In recent years, ArchivesSpace and Archivematica have emerged as two of the most exciting open source platforms for working with digital archives. The former manages accessions and collections and provides a framework for entering descriptive, administrative, rights, and other metadata. The latter ingests digital content and prepares information packages for long-term preservation and access. In October 2016, the Bentley Historical Library wrapped up a two-year, $355,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to partner with the University of Michigan Library on the integration of these two systems in an end-to-end workflow that will include the automated deposit of content into a DSpace repository. This article provides context of the project and offers an in-depth exploration of the project’s key development tasks, all of which were provided by Artefactual Systems, the developers of Archivematica (code available at https://github.com/artefactual-labs/appraisal-tab).

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A Cookbook of Methods for Using CONTENTdm APIs

Andrew Bullen has released A Cookbook of Methods for Using CONTENTdm APIs.

Here's an excerpt:

CONTENTdm has a number of useful APIs for directly accessing information contained in its indexes and files. This site is intended as a practical reference guide to using many—though not all—of these APIs.

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"Happy Beta Release Day, Omeka S!!"

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University has released "Happy Beta Release Day, Omeka S!!."

Here's an excerpt:

Omeka S is the next-generation, open source web-publishing platform that is fully integrated into the scholarly communications ecosystem and designed to serve the needs of medium to large institutional users who wish to launch, monitor, and upgrade many sites from a single installation.

Though Omeka S is a completely new software package, it shares the same goals and principles of Omeka Classic that users have come to love: a commitment to cost-effective deployment and design, an intuitive user interface, open access to data and resources, and interoperability through standardized data.

Created with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Omeka S is engineered to ease the burdens of administrators who want to make it possible for their end-user communities to easily build their own sites that showcase digital cultural heritage materials.

"Omeka Curator Dashboard"

Jess Waggoner has published "Omeka Curator Dashboard" in the Omeka blog.

Here's an excerpt:

The Omeka Curator Dashboard (or "the OCD" as we endearingly refer to it) is a suite of fifteen plugins (though a bonus sixteenth will be coming soon!) designed to facilitate object import and export, manage metadata, and curate collections. Several of our plugins are already available on the official list of Omeka plugins. The others are still undergoing testing, but can be downloaded from the UCSC Library GitHub in the meanwhile. We are actively soliciting feedback on these plugins from the Omeka user community so we can continue to improve their features and interfaces.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Development of a Scale for Measuring Perceptions of Trustworthiness for Digitized Archival Documents"

Devan Rays Donaldson has self-archived "Development of a Scale for Measuring Perceptions of Trustworthiness for Digitized Archival Documents."

Here's an excerpt:

This dissertation advances scholarship on trustworthiness in three ways. First, it revises an existing conceptual model for trustworthiness perception. Second, it creates an original measurement model for digitized archival document trustworthiness perception-the Digitized Archival Document Trustworthiness Scale (DADTS). Third, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the concept of trustworthiness by providing measurement of the concept in a way that is sensitive to its nuances.

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Measuring Up: Assessing Use of Digital Repositories and the Resulting Impact Project Gets IMLS Grant

The Measuring Up: Assessing Use of Digital Repositories and the Resulting Impact Project has received an IMLS Grant.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a $500,000, three-year National Leadership Grant to four partner organizations-the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Montana State University, OCLC Research, and the University of New Mexico-to perform research and recommend best practices that will improve data collection and information sharing for institutional repositories and digitized collections.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Toolkit: Equipment for Image Digitisation Projects

JISC has released Toolkit: Equipment for Image Digitisation Projects.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This Jisc Digital Media toolkit sets out to look at each of these technologies in detail, outlining both the theory behind the technology, along with more practical insights. It looks at cameras and scanners in depth and provide the stakeholder with the knowledge required to make informed decisions when purchasing, what can be, very expensive items of equipment.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Guidelines for Planning the Digitization of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections

IFLA has released Guidelines for Planning the Digitization of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections.

Here's an excerpt:

These guidelines attempt to complement this body of knowledge by addressing the specific needs related to planning digitization projects for rare and special collections. They are written from the point-of-view of special collection managers, rare book librarians, curators, and researchers who study the physical object as an artefact bearing intrinsic historical evidence as much as for the intellectual content that it contains.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"