Category: Digital Curation & Digital Preservation

4C has released Report on Risk, Benefit, Impact and Value.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This deliverable of the 4C project work package "WP4-Enhancement" proposes a pragmatic method for estimating costs of digital curation in two different scenarios:

• A "Current" scenario, where the costs of controls already exist in the repository as a means to reduce the impact of the consequence of a risk/threat, change the likelihood of an event, or reduce the exposure to a vulnerability;
• A "Future" scenario, where the costs of controls do not yet exist, but where repository managers are able to consider alternative scenarios of repository governance.

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

Sarah Middleton has published "Curation Costs Exchange: Supporting Smarter Investments in Digital Curation" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

A sizeable canon of research exists on cost modeling for digital curation. Although this research typically emphasizes the cost and complexity of digital curation and preservation, it is in many ways preliminary; the tools and methods developed have seen little uptake. Tools to manage and estimate costs, for example, have not been integrated into other digital curation processes or tools. The question is why? To answer it, a consortium of 13 European partners and cost modeling specialists launched the Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation (4C) project.

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

Alasdair Bachell and Matthew Barr have published "Video Game Preservation in the UK: A Survey of Records Management Practices" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

This study looked at the current attitudes towards preservation in the UK's independent ('indie') video games industry by examining current record-keeping practices and analysing the views of games developers. The results show that there is an interest in preserving games, and possibly a desire to do so, but issues of piracy and cost prevent the industry from undertaking preservation work internally, and from allowing others to assume such responsibility. The recommendation made by this paper is not simply for preservation professionals and enthusiasts to collaborate with the industry, but to do so by advocating the commercial benefits that preservation may offer to the industry.

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

Herbert Van de Sompel and Andrew Treloar have self-archived "A Perspective on Archiving the Scholarly Web."

Here's an excerpt:

As the scholarly communication system evolves to become natively web-based and starts supporting the communication of a wide variety of objects, the manner in which its essential functions —registration, certification, awareness, archiving—are fulfilled co-evolves. This paper focuses on the nature of the archival function based on a perspective of the developing future scholarly communication infrastructure.

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

Corey Davis has published "Archiving the Web: A Case Study from the University of Victoria" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

The University of Victoria Libraries started archiving websites in 2013, and it quickly became apparent that many scholarly websites being produced by faculty, especially in the digital humanities, were going to prove very challenging to effectively capture and play back. This article will provide an overview of web archiving and explore the considerable legal and technical challenges of implementing a web archiving initiative at a research library, using the University of Victoria's implementation of Archive-it, a web archiving service from the Internet Archive, as a case study, with a special focus on capturing complex, interactive websites that scholars are creating to disseminate their research in new ways.

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

Atos has released Digital Preservation in the Age of Cloud and Big Data .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

After introducing the basic concepts of Long-Term Digital Preservation, we show several examples of its importance in different sectors. Then, we explore the challenges that make this technical field a complex one, and in each case, we study the emerging state of the art that will define its evolution in the near future.

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

ALA has released Preservation Statistics: A Survey for US Libraries, FY 2013 Report.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Results from the 2013 Preservation Statistics Survey are now available. The annual survey gathers data about preventive preservation activities, conservation activities, reformatting and digitization activities and digital preservation responsibilities, as well as how preservation programs are administered.

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

Portico has released "Scaling Up and Scaling Out: Leveraging Preservation Infrastructure and Experience to Benefit the Community."

Here's an excerpt:

Now well into its eleventh year as a preservation archive and service, Portico's preservation infrastructure—hardware, software, and key data and metadata models and definitions—has been subject to a continual process of re-view and revision that makes it possible for us to leverage our work to benefit the broader community. Since 2012, Portico has been delivering e-journal con-tent to the British Library as part of their legally mandated deposit program, en-abling the British Library to benefit from existing preservation expertise to manage the normalization of e-journal content. In this paper we will discuss Portico's development, the scaling up of our preservation capacity, the chal-lenges and opportunities in our partnership with the British Library, and the value of leveraging and sharing existing preservation infrastructure, skills, and experience for the good of the broader community.

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

POWRR has released From Theory to Action: Good Enough Digital Preservation for Under-Resourced Cultural Heritage Institutions.

Here's an excerpt:

Libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations collect, create, and steward a rapidly increasing volume of digital content. Both research conclusions and professionals' real-life experiences expose the inherent fragility of this content. The cultural heritage and information science communities have developed guidelines, best practices, policies, procedures, and processes that can enable an organization to achieve high levels of digital preservation. However, these protocols are often complex, leaving many practitioners attempting to address the challenge of preserving digital materials feeling overwhelmed. This is particularly true for professionals serving smaller institutions that are often operating with restricted resources like small staff sizes, a lack of specialized expertise, dated technical infrastructures, and/or limited budgets. This white paper is the result of a three year investigation, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, of affordable, scalable digital preservation solutions that can be successfully implemented at under-resourced organizations. It reports the results of large-scale testing of several digital preservation tools and services, suggests pragmatic digital preservation options, including an incremental approach to digital preservation practices, and asserts that communities of practice are key to success.

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

James G. Neal has published "The Integrity of Research Is at Risk: Capturing and Preserving Web Sites and Web Documents and the Implications for Resource Sharing" in IFLA WLIC 2014—Lyon.

Here's an excerpt:

Born digital materials, for example websites and web documents, present particular challenges to academic and community libraries and their collection development, discovery and access, preservation, and resource sharing programs. This paper will explore the policy, workflow, legal, governance, financial, and service framework for capturing and preserving web content in the context of expanding collaborative collection development agreements among libraries. The paper will describe the program at the Columbia University Libraries in the area of Web Resources Archiving Collaboration. Columbia has sought to situate its program within the broader mission of its Libraries, collecting content deemed important for current and future research, preserving the content for future scholars, but also providing access in novel ways to foster current use in teaching and research.

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

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group has announced the 2014 NDSA Innovation Award winners.

Here's an excerpt:

Institution: National Software Reference Library, National Institute for Standards and Technology: Recognized for their substantial leadership in building a national collection of software, developing and sharing workflows and approaches for software preservation, and for modeling approaches to corpus analysis of born digital collections. You can learn more about the NSRL in this interview.

Project: XFR STN, The New Museum. "XFR STN" (Transfer Station) acts as "an open-door artist-centered media archiving project." The project is recognized in particular for how it stands as a model for community-driven digital preservation activity, utilized existing platforms like the Internet Archive for long term preservation, and worked directly with artist and media creators to preserve their work.

Individual: Trevor Muñoz, Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research at the University of Maryland Libraries and an Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Recognized for his work developing and teaching best practices in data curation in the digital humanities and for his work advocating for digital preservation as a core function of librarianship, archival work, and scholarship.

Future Steward: Emily Reynolds, National Digital Stewardship Resident, The World Bank. Recognized for the quality of her work in a range of internships and student positions with ICPSR, University of Michigan Libraries, the Library of Congress, Brooklyn Historical Society, Storycorps, and, in particular, her recent work on the World Bank"™s eArchives project.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap