Digital Curation & Digital Preservation – Page 54

Open Data: UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Adopts EPSRC Policy Framework on Research Data

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which is "the main UK government agency for funding research and training in engineering and the physical sciences," has adopted the EPSRC Policy Framework on Research Data.

Here's an excerpt from the document:

This policy framework sets out EPSRC's expectations concerning the management and provision of access to EPSRC-funded research data. EPSRC recognises that a range of institutional policies and practices can satisfy these expectations, and encourages research organisations to develop specific approaches which, while aligned with EPSRC's expectations, are appropriate to their own structures and cultures.

The expectations arise from seven core principles which align with the core RCUK principles on data sharing. Two of the principles are of particular importance: firstly, that publicly funded research data should generally be made as widely and freely available as possible in a timely and responsible manner; and, secondly, that the research process should not be damaged by the inappropriate release of such data.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Preserving News in the Digital Environment: Mapping the Newspaper Industry in Transition

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program has released Preserving News in the Digital Environment: Mapping the Newspaper Industry in Transition, which was written by a team from the Center for Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This report provides a vivid glimpse inside the workplaces that produce what – not long ago – we would have called newspapers. As digital news-gathering and production methods proliferate, and as digital avenues for distribution emerge, these workplaces are being transformed in profound ways, with electronic facsimiles and websites (and probably more) overtaking the paper format.

The report is an outgrowth of the Preserving Digital News meeting held at the Library in September 2009, and it features illustrative examples from four American newspapers: The Arizona Republic, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (since 2008, seattlepi.com), Wisconsin State Journal, and The Chicago Tribune. There is additional information pertaining to the work of The New York Times, Investor’s Business Daily, and the Associated Press. Altogether, the report makes it clear that the transition to the digital environment is not a neat, throw-the-switch change.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

"Preserving Repository Content: Practical Tools for Repository Managers"

Miggie Pickton, Debra Morris, Stephanie Meece, Simon Coles, and Steve Hitchcock have published "Preserving Repository Content: Practical Tools for Repository Managers" in the latest issue of the Journal of Digital Information.

Here's an excerpt:

The stated aim of many repositories is to provide permanent open access to their content. However, relatively few repositories have implemented practical action plans towards permanence. Repository managers often lack time and confidence to tackle the important but scary problem of preservation.

Written by, and aimed at, repository managers, this paper describes how the JISC-funded KeepIt project has been bringing together existing preservation tools and services with appropriate training and advice to enable repository managers to formulate practical and achievable preservation plans.

Three elements of the KeepIt project are described:

The initial, exploratory phase in which repository managers and a preservation specialist established the current status of each repository and its preservation objectives;

The repository-specific KeepIt preservation training course which covered the organisational and financial framework of repository preservation; metadata; the new preservation tools; and issues of trust between repository, users and services;

The application of tools and lessons learned from the training course to four exemplar repositories and the impact that this has made.

The paper concludes by recommending practical steps that all repository managers may take to ensure their repositories are preservation-ready.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Institutional Repository Bibliography |

"’Link Rot’ and Legal Resources on the Web: A 2011 Analysis by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group"

The Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group has released "'Link Rot' and Legal Resources on the Web: A 2011 Analysis by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group."

Here's an excerpt:

The Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group has completed its fourth annual investigation of link rot among the original URLs for online law- and policy-related materials archived though the group's efforts.

The Chesapeake Group focuses primarily on the preservation of Web-published legal materials, which often disappear as Web site content is rearranged or deleted over time. In the four years since the program began, the Chesapeake Group has built a digital archive collection comprising more than 7,400 digital items and 3,200 titles, all of which were originally posted to the Web.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Digital Preservation: JHOVE2 2.0.0 Released

The JHOVE2 project team has released version 2.0.0 of JHOVE2. JHOVE2 is "open source software for format-aware characterization of digital objects."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This release supports all the major technical objectives of the project, including a more sophisticated, modular architecture; signature-based file identification; policy-based assessment of objects; recursive characterization of objects comprising aggregate files and files arbitrarily nested in containers; and extensive configuration and reporting options. It provides a stabile interface against which developers can code new format modules.

Format modules included in this release are:

ICC color profiles

SGML

Shapefile

TIFF

UTF-8

WAVE

XML

Zip

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Preservation of Digitized Books and Other Digital Content Held by Cultural Heritage Organizations

Portico has released the Preservation of Digitized Books and Other Digital Content Held by Cultural Heritage Organizations.

Here's an excerpt:

In one response to this need to develop models of digital preservation, the NEH and IMLS awarded a grant to Portico, in partnership with Cornell University Library, through the "Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership grant program" to develop a practical model for how preservation can be accomplished for digitized books. Through this initiative and other efforts, Portico had the opportunity to discuss digital collections and their long-term preservation with 27 cultural heritage organizations. In addition, Cornell University Library provided significant samples of content to analyze. Out of this research and the extensive experience in preservation at both Portico and Cornell University Library, we developed a model for the preservation of digitized books and other "document like" digital content at cultural heritage organizations.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

CLIR Gets Grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to Study Data Curation Issues

The Council on Library and Information Resources has received a $117,567 grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study data curation issues. CLIR's Digital Library Federation will administer the grant. Chuck Henry (CLIR), Rachel Frick (DLF), and Elliott Shore (Bryn Mawr College) will be the principal investigators.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Most graduate programs in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are not well prepared to cultivate the data management skills of their students, or sometimes even to teach them why such skills are important to the survival of their fields of study. In every discipline, at least some professionals must come to grasp the complex demands related to the creation, access, reuse, and preservation of digital research data, which have been the purview of the library and information technology professions, and of schools of library, information, and computer science.

"Developing and maintaining skills in data curation must become central to the professional identities of specialists in each discipline if our educational institutions are to build robust, efficient, and appropriately integrated online environments for future research, teaching, and learning," said CLIR President Chuck Henry. "We are grateful to the Sloan Foundation for the opportunity to deepen our understanding of the landscape that is developing around digital curation practice and education."

The project will consist of three interrelated activities. The first will be an environmental scan of professional development needs, and of education and training opportunities for digital curation in the academy. The second will be an anthropological study of five sites where digital curation activities are under way. The third will be a report that analyzes the results of the two research efforts and includes a proposal, informed by the findings, for amending the curriculum for CLIR's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Academic Libraries program.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grants Available

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced the availability of Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grants. The maximum award is $350,000 (up to three years). The deadline is July 20, 2011.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supports projects that provide an essential foundation for scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities. Thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country maintain important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects. Funding from this program strengthens efforts to extend the life of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible, often through the use of digital technology. Awards are also made to create various reference resources that facilitate use of cultural materials, from works that provide basic information quickly to tools that synthesize and codify knowledge of a subject for in-depth investigation.

Applications may be submitted for projects that address one or more of the following activities:

arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;

cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture;

providing conservation treatment (including deacidification) for collections, leading to enhanced access;

digitizing collections;

preserving and improving access to born-digital sources;

developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject or to provide integrated access to selected humanities materials;

creating encyclopedias;

preparing linguistic tools, such as historical and etymological dictionaries, corpora, and reference grammars (separate funding is available for endangered language projects in partnership with the National Science Foundation);

developing tools for spatial analysis and representation of humanities data, such as atlases and geographic information systems (GIS); and

designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

"DataStaR: A Data Sharing and Publication Infrastructure to Support Research"

Gail Steinhart has published "DataStaR: A Data Sharing and Publication Infrastructure to Support Research" in AgInfo Worldwide.

Here's an excerpt:

DataStaR, a Data Staging Repository (http://datastar.mannlib.cornell.edu/) in development at Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library (Ithaca, New York USA), is intended to support collaboration and data sharing among researchers during the research process, and to promote publishing or archiving data and high-quality metadata to discipline-specific data centers and/or institutional repositories. Researchers may store and share data with selected colleagues, select a repository for data publication, create high quality metadata in the formats required by external repositories and Cornell's institutional repository, and obtain help from data librarians with any of these tasks. To facilitate cross-domain interoperability and flexibility in metadata management, we employ semantic web technologies as part of DataStaR's metadata infrastructure. This paper describes the overall design of the system, the work to date with Cornell researchers and their data sets, and possibilities for extending DataStaR for use in international agriculture research.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

"Joining in the Enterprise of Response in the Wake of the NSF Data Management Planning Requirement"

Patricia Hswe and Ann Holt have published "Joining in the Enterprise of Response in the Wake of the NSF Data Management Planning Requirement" in the latest issue of Research Library Issues.

Here's an excerpt:

This article affords an overview of the new, leading roles libraries can adopt in the provision of data services, thus blending appraisal with advocacy. How are libraries currently giving assistance in data management planning? What recommendations can libraries make that draw from, and build on, these efforts? The article also reports on new communities of practice forming around the challenges of digital data issues, bringing together much needed knowledge and expertise not only from libraries but also from various other sectors of a university, including IT divisions, grant administration offices, and research institutes.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation

Association of Research Libraries has released New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Authored by Tyler Walters and Katherine Skinner, the report looks at how libraries are developing new roles and services in the arena of digital curation for preservation. The authors consider a "promising set of new roles that libraries are currently carving out in the digital arena," describing emerging strategies for libraries and librarians and highlighting collaborative approaches through a series of case studies of key programs and projects. They also provide helpful definitions and offer recommendations for libraries considering how best to make or expand their investments in digital curation. Issues and developments within and across the sciences and humanities are considered.

Preserving Our Digital Heritage: The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program 2010 Report

The Library of Congress has released Preserving Our Digital Heritage: The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program 2010 Report.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

It documents the achievements of the Library of Congress and its NDIIPP partners working together to create sustainable long-term access to digital materials.

Since NDIIPP was founded in 2000 by an act of Congress, a network of over 185 partners in 44 states and 25 countries have developed a distributed technical infrastructure, preserved over 1400 at-risk collections, and have made strides to support a legal environment conducive to digital preservation.

The report describes a decade of action in digital preservation and outlays the short- and long-term plans to ensure libraries, archives and other heritage institutions in the United States can collect and provide long-term access to the resources of the 21st Century, and beyond.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Publishing Support for Small Print-Based Publishers: Options for ARL Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries has released Publishing Support for Small Print-Based Publishers: Options for ARL Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This report is the summary of a project funded by ARL to investigate how research libraries might provide support to print-only publishers in order to ensure long-term digital access to their content. The final report was prepared for ARL by project consultants, October Ivins and Judy Luther.

The project was conducted from 2009 to 2010, and the report to ARL includes identification of the extent and character of journal titles for which support would be necessary, reviews of the capabilities and interest of research library publishing services to support the publishers, and recommendations for actions ARL and member libraries might undertake to address the needs of the editors and publishers of these small print-only titles. Appendices provide talking points for campus outreach, an annotated bibliography, and an overview of the landscape for publishing options.

For more information on the project, please visit http://www.arl.org/sc/models/lib-publishing/pub-support/index.shtml.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010

Digital Scolarship has released the Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010. This 80-page book presents over 500 English-language articles, books, and technical reports that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. This selective bibliography covers digital curation and preservation copyright issues, digital formats (e.g., data, media, and e-journals), metadata, models and policies, national and international efforts, projects and institutional implementations, research studies, services, strategies, and digital repository concerns. Most sources have been published from 2000 through 2010; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included. Many references have links to freely available copies of included works.

The Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 is available as an open access PDF file and as a $9.95 paperback. All versions of the bibliography are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

For further information about Digital Scholarship publications, see the "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview" and "Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications."

"Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability"

Sarah Rhodes has published "Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive's Examination of URL Stability" in LLRX.com.

Here's an excerpt:

In analyzing a single sample of these original URLs at annual intervals, the prevalence of link rot was 8.3% in 2008, within zero to twelve months of the content being harvested. One year later, twelve to twenty-four months after the content was harvested, link rot in the same sample was found to have jumped to 14.3%. In the most recent analysis, in 2010, link rot was found to be 27.9%. In other words, link rot increased from about one in every twelve archived titles in 2008, to one in every seven titles in 2009, and finally to about one in every 3.5 titles in 2010.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

NEH Issues Call for Proposals for Preservation and Access Research and Development Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities's Division of Preservation and Access has issued a call for proposals for Preservation and Access Research and Development grants. Application deadline: May 19, 2011.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Eligible projects include:

the development of technical standards, best practices, and tools for preserving and creating access to humanities collections;

the exploration of more effective scientific and technical methods of preserving humanities collections;

the development of automated procedures and computational tools to integrate, analyze, and repurpose humanities data in disparate online resources; and

the investigation and testing of new ways of providing digital access to humanities materials that are not easily digitized using current methods.

NEH especially encourages applications that address the following topics:

Digital Preservation: how to preserve digital humanities materials, including born-digital materials, for which there is no analog counterpart;

Recorded Sound and Moving Image Collections: how to preserve and increase access to the record of the twentieth century contained in these formats; and

Preventive Conservation: how to protect humanities collections and slow their deterioration through the use of sustainable preservation strategies.. . .

The maximum award is $350,000 for up to three years. Applicants whose projects focus on any of the three areas of special interest noted above may request up to $400,000.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Lasting Change: Sustaining Digital Scholarship and Culture in Canada

The Sustaining Digital Scholarship for Sustainable Culture Group has released Lasting Change: Sustaining Digital Scholarship and Culture in Canada.

Here's an excerpt:

This report reflects the growing concern in the scholarly and cultural communities, and beyond, regarding the sustainability of Canada's digital knowledge and heritage. Canada's digital advantage is only of value if it can be carried into the future. Canadians must meet the challenge of preserving and enhancing scholarly and artistic knowledge production and our culture in a digital environment. This report reviews the current state of knowledge about the sustainability of digital scholarship and related cultural activity in Canada and identifies research opportunities that emerge from consideration of the literature.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Managing Digital Collections: A Collaborative Initiative on the South African Framework

The National Research Foundation has released Managing Digital Collections: A Collaborative Initiative on the South African Framework.

Here's an excerpt:

The objective of this Framework is to provide high-level principles for planning and managing the full digital collection life cycle. It aims to

provide an overview of some of the major components and activities involved in creating good digital collections

provide a sense of the landscape of digital collections management

identify existing resources that support the development of sound local practices

encourage community participation in the ongoing development of best practices for digital collection building

contribute to the benefits of sound data management practices, as well as the goals of data sharing and long term access

introduce data management and curation issues

assist cultural heritage organisations to create and manage complex digital collections

assist funding organisations who wish to encourage and support the development of good digital collections

advocate the use of internationally-created appropriate open community standards to ensure quality and to increase global interoperability for better exchange and re-use of data and digital content.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Randy S. Kiefer Named as Executive Director of CLOCKSS

Randy S. Kiefer has been named as the Executive Director of the CLOCKSS Archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The CLOCKSS Archive (http://www.clockss.org) is pleased to announce the appointment of Randy S. Kiefer as their new Executive Director. Randy is the Principal Consultant in the Kiefer Strategy Group, LLC, which handles business development efforts for publishers like INFORMS, the American Accounting Association, the Military Operations Research Society, and others. From 1999 to May of 2010, Randy served in various roles at INFORMS. For his last three years, he was the Director of Subscription, Membership, and Technical Services at INFORMS, and his primary activity was developing the global library market for INFORMS' twelve journals.

Randy is a board member of COIN-OR (http://www.coin-or.org) , an organization dedicated to open-source software for the operations research community. and is on the board of two charitable organizations in the Baltimore area. Randy has been active in software development since 1985. . . .

Gordon Tibbitts, outgoing CLOCKSS executive director and President Atypon Systems declares, "The CLOCKSS Archive, now one year old is well placed for its next phase of growth. The Board of Directors is very pleased to have Randy on board as the Archive's first full time Executive Director."

CLOCKSS is a global nonprofit, community-governed archive that preserves digital scholarly materials for the very long term through a geo-physical and geo-political distributed network of archive nodes.

| Digital Scholarship |

"Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) Training Needs Assessment Survey: Executive Summary"

The Library of Congress Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) initiative has released the "Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) Training Needs Assessment Survey: Executive Summary."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement :

The survey was conducted in summer and fall 2010 by the Library’s Digital Preservation Outreach and Education initiative which seeks to foster outreach, education and collaboration nationwide to encourage organizations to preserve their digital content, regardless of staff or budget size or location.

The survey received 868 responses. Of the respondents, 40% were libraries, 34% were archives and 16% were museums. The rest consisted of state and local governments, corporations, nonprofit organizations, parks, and churches.

Among the survey’s major findings:

Just over half of the organizations who responded to the survey have less than 25 employees.

Only about one-third of respondents had full-time or part-time paid staff dedicated to digital preservation duties. One-half of respondents assigned digital preservation to various staff on an as-needed basis, one-fifth had no staff for this function, and one-tenth used volunteers (figures have been rounded off).

Among potential subject areas for digital preservation training, the most important area to respondents was technical training. Management planning, project management and strategic training all tied for second place.

The most preferred format for receiving training was small, in-person workshops. Proximity was significant—onsite training was the first choice, with training within a 100-mile radius the second choice.

A half-day to a full day was the most preferred length for training.

Digital content holdings for almost 95 percent of respondents consisted entirely of digitized versions of already-held collections (typically, paper-based materials), and about 5 percent of holdings were "born digital" content.

Some general observations can be gleaned from the survey. Most organizations only work on digital preservation when it is needed; few devote a full-time staff member to such duties. Most are digitizing paper collections rather than preserving "born digital" data. Short sessions of practical training are most needed; training should be provided on-site because most respondents are small organizations with limited training budgets.

| Digital Scholarship |

"Data Preservation in High Energy Physics"

David M. South has self-archived "Data Preservation in High Energy Physics" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

Data from high-energy physics (HEP) experiments are collected with significant financial and human effort and are in many cases unique. At the same time, HEP has no coherent strategy for data preservation and re-use, and many important and complex data sets are simply lost. In a period of a few years, several important and unique experimental programs will come to an end, including those at HERA, the b-factories and at the Tevatron. An inter-experimental study group on HEP data preservation and long-term analysis (DPHEP) was formed and a series of workshops were held to investigate this issue in a systematic way. The physics case for data preservation and the preservation models established by the group are presented, as well as a description of the transverse global projects and strategies already in place.

| Digital Scholarship |

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography, Version 2

Version 2 of the Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship as an XHTML website with live links to many included works. This selective bibliography includes over 500 articles, books, and technical reports that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. All included works are in English. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Table of Contents

1 General Works about Digital Curation and Preservation
2 Digital Preservation Copyright Issues
3 Digital Preservation of Formats and Materials: 3.1 General Works
3.2 Digital Data
3.3 Digital Media
3.4 E-journals
3.5 Other Digital Formats and Materials
3.6 World-Wide Web
4 Digital Preservation Metadata
5 Digital Preservation Models and Policies
6 Digital Preservation National and International Efforts
7 Digital Preservation Projects and Institutional Implementations
8 Digital Preservation Research
9 Digital Preservation Services: 9.1 JSTOR
9.2 LOCKSS
9.3 Portico
10 Digital Preservation Strategies
11 Digital Repository Digital Preservation Issues
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author

The following recent Digital Scholarship publications may also be of interest:

| Digital Scholarship |

Cloud-Sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-Digitized Library Environment

OCLC has released Cloud-Sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-Digitized Library Environment.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The objective of the project was to examine the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories. The study assessed the opportunity for library space saving and cost avoidance through the systematic and intentional outsourcing of local management operations for digitized books to shared service providers and progressive downsizing of local print collections in favor of negotiated access to the digitized corpus and regionally consolidated print inventory.

Some of the findings from the project that are detailed in the report include:

There is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations.

The combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the US Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers.

Substantial library space savings and cost avoidance could be achieved if academic institutions outsourced management of redundant low-use inventory to shared service providers.

Academic library directors can have a positive and profound impact on the future of academic print collections by adopting and implementing a deliberate strategy to build and sustain regional print service centers that can reduce the total cost of library preservation and access.

| Digital Scholarship |

Digital Preservation: Major PRONOM Update

The US National Archives has announced that PRONOM has been significantly updated.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The National Archives has contributed to the update of a groundbreaking system—made available online today—that supports long-term preservation of and access to electronic records. The "new and improved" version of this "PRONOM" system was developed in partnership with the National Archives of the United Kingdom and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

PRONOM is a web-based public technical registry of more than 750 different digital file formats that enables digital archivists, records managers and the public to precisely identify and confirm digital file formats. This identification is the first step to ensuring long-term electronic file preservation by enabling the identification of those file formats that are in danger of becoming obsolete. . . .

Technology from the National Archives contributed to a 25% increase in the number of entries in the PRONOM database, greatly enhancing PRONOM's range. "The National Archives is proud to share these technologies and contribute to PRONOM. Providing sustained access to valuable digital information is essential to preserving both our nation's records, and valuable digital assets worldwide" said NCAST Director, Kenneth Thibodeau. "The electronic records of the U.S. Government must be preserved for future generations, just as traditional paper and parchment records were preserved for us."

| Digital Scholarship |

Memento Project Wins Digital Preservation Award 2010

The Memento Project has won the Digital Preservation Award 2010.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Institute for Conservation and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are delighted to announce that the Memento Project led by Herbert Van De Sompel and colleagues of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Michael Nelson and colleagues of Old Dominion University, USA, has won the Digital Preservation Award 2010. . . .

"The ability to change and update pages is one of the web’s greatest advantages but it introduces a sort of structured instability which makes it hard to depend on web pages in the long term. For more than a decade services like the UK Web Archive and the Internet Archive have provided a stable but partial memory of a fragment of the web—but users had no way of linking between current content and earlier versions held by web archives."

"The Memento project resolves this by letting users set a time preference in their browser. The underlying technology then deploys basic, under-used features of the HTTP protocol to direct users to whichever archived copy of a website most closely matches their request." [Richard Ovenden, Chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition]

| Digital Scholarship |