Category: Digital Curation & Digital Preservation

JISC has released SHERPA DP2: Developing Services for Archiving and Preservation in a Distributed Environment—Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The SHERPA DP2 project (2007-2009) was a two year project funded by the JISC under the Digital Preservation and Records Management Programme. The project was led by the Centre for e- Research at King's College London (formerly the Executive of the Arts and Humanities Data Service), which is working with several institutions to develop a preservation service that will cater for the requirements of a diverse range of digital resources and web-based resources. In summary, the project has the following objectives:

1. Extend and refine the OAIS-based Shared Services model created for the initial SHERPA DP project to accommodate the requirements of different Content Providers and varied collaborative methods.
2. Produce a set of services that will assist with the capture and return of research data stored in distributed locations, building upon existing software tools.
3. Expand upon the work processes and software tools developed for SHERPA DP(1) and SOAPI to cater for the curation and preservation of increasingly diverse resource types.

The Harvard University Library has launched its Web Archive Collection Service (WAX).

Here's an excerpt from the press release (posted on DIGLIB@infoserv.nlc-bnc.ca):

WAX began as a pilot project in July 2006, funded by the University's Library Digital Initiative (LDI) to address the management of web sites by collection managers for long-term archiving. It was the first LDI project specifically oriented toward preserving "born-digital" material. . . .

During the pilot, we explored the legal terrain and implemented several methods of mitigating risks. We investigated various technologies and developed work flow efficiencies for the collection managers and the technologists. We analyzed and implemented the metadata and deposit requirements for long term preservation in our repository. We continue to look at ways to ease the labor intensive nature of the QA process, to improve display as the software matures and to assess additional requirements for long term preservation. . . .

WAX was built using several open source tools developed by the Internet Archive and other International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) members. These IIPC tools include the Heritrix web crawler; the Wayback index and rendering tool; and the NutchWAX index and search tool. WAX also uses Quartz open source job scheduling software from OpenSymphony.

In February 2009, the pilot public interface was launched and announced to the University community. WAX has now transitioned to a production system supported by the University Library's central infrastructure.

The Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation has released an English-language summary of A Future for Our Digital Memory: Permanent Access to Information in the Netherlands.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to underpin its strategy, the NCDD decided to first build a detailed picture of the current situation in the public sector in the Netherlands. Can institutions or domains be identified which have successfully risen to the challenge of digital preservation and permanent access? Which categories of data are in danger of being lost? How can the risks be managed? This so-called National Digital Preservation Survey was funded by the Ministry of Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

After some preliminary consultancy work it was decided that the survey would best be carried out by researchers with both knowledge of the issues involved in digital preservation and of the three sectors, which were identified as: scholarly communications, government & archives, and culture & heritage. A team of three researchers was recruited from among NCDD member staff, with the NCDD coordinator leading the project. The initial objective, to conduct a statistically relevant quantitative survey, had to be abandoned early in the project. The field to be surveyed was vast and varied, and some of the target groups were quite unfamiliar with the specifics of digital preservation, making online surveys unproductive. Therefore, the research team decided on a methodology of (some seventy) semi-structured interviews with knowledgeable stakeholders, adding relevant information from both Dutch and foreign published sources. Five interviews were held with major private sector parties to establish whether the private sector has best practices to offer for the public sector to emulate.

The California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service's first collections are available at Web Archives: Yesterday's Web; Today's Archives.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Researchers and scholars now will be able to delve into archived Web sites captured by the California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service (WAS). This new tool enables faculty, researchers and librarians to capture, curate and preserve Web sites, thus creating permanent archives available to researchers everywhere. The social history of our times is now being preserved in archives as rich and varied as the contentious 2003 California recall election, hundreds of California state Web archives, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp Web archive and the Middle East Political Sites archive. New archives continually are being built and published and will appear along with the current archives, available at webarchives.cdlib.org/.

The Web has revolutionized our access to information. Documents and publications that once were difficult to find now are readily available to anyone at any time. Popular reactions to historical events unfold via blogs and personal Web sites, and we have an unprecedented view into popular culture and the formation of public policy. "This is a tool that can track censorship in China, political regimes in Iran, and social commentary around the world," states Laine Farley, California Digital Library's executive director. "CDL and the UC libraries are leading the way in building collections for the 21st century." . . .

CDL's Web Archiving Service is the result of a 4.5-year grant awarded by the Library of Congress National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The program's mission is to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available digital content, especially materials that are created only in digital formats, for current and future generations. Working with partners at the University of North Texas, New York University, Stanford University and the campuses of the University of California, the California Digital Library has built a service that is easy to use and allows librarians to begin preserving information that was slipping away. Martha Anderson, director of program management for NDIIPP at the Library of Congress, says, "There is a growing public interest in the archiving of public Web sites for future reference. The technical challenges of constantly changing sites and technologies and the enormity of the universe of potential content require immediate and focused action."

Data has been successfully transferred from the Internet Archive's Archive-It service to LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe).

Helen R. Tibbo has published Proceedings of DigCCurr2009: Digital Curation: Practice, Promise, and Prospects on Lulu.

Here's the ad:

DigCCurr2009 was held on April 1-3, 2009 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as part of the Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr) project. DigCCurr is a three-year (2006-2009), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project to develop a graduate-level curricular framework, course modules, and experiential components to prepare students for digital curation in various environments. Contributions to DigCCurr2009 take the form of long and short papers, posters and panels. Potential contributions were submitted for peer review by a rich and diverse panel of international experts. Reviewers evaluated the submissions based on clarity and organization of presentation and writing; originality, creativity and potential for new contributions to the field; and engagement (topics addressed would be appropriate for and engaging to the diverse audience of DigCCurr2009 participants).

Presentations from the 2009 NDIIPP Partners Meeting are now available.

Here's a quick selection:

• DuraCloud: Managing Durable Data in the Cloud, a Pilot program of the DuraSpace Organization
• Synchronicity: Just-In-Time Discovery of Lost Web Pages
• Understanding and Implementing the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata

The Chesapeake Project has released its Two-Year Pilot Project Evaluation.

Here's an excerpt:

The Chesapeake Project began as a collaborative, two-year pilot program with the goal of preserving born-digital legal information published directly to the Web. It was implemented in early 2007 by the Georgetown Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia. Having successfully completed its pilot phase, The Chesapeake Project' legal information archive is now expanding.

The following document comprises the final evaluation and account of The Chesapeake Project's accomplishments during its two-year pilot phase, spanning from February 27, 2007, to February 28, 2009.

During this time, the project's digital archive was populated with more than 4,300 digital items representing nearly 1,900 Web-published titles, the vast majority of which have no print counterpart. Each of these titles were harvested from the Web, stored within a secure digital archive and assigned permanent archive URLs. Today, each archived digital title remains accessible to users, despite whether or not the original digital files have been altered or removed from their original locations on the Web.

A 2008 analysis of the digital archive's content showed that more than eight percent of the titles archived by The Chesapeake Project had disappeared from their original URLs within the project's first year, but remained accessible thanks to the project's efforts. The current evaluation demonstrates that this figure has increased significantly over the past year. In fact, as of March 2009, nearly 14 percent of the project's archived titles—approximately one in seven—have disappeared from their original locations on the Web.

Several blog reports are available about the recent National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program partners meeting.

• 2009-06-29: NDIIPP Partners Meeting
• NDIIPP Project Partners Meeting, Day One
• NDIIPP Project Partners Meeting, Day Two
• NDIIPP Project Partners Meeting, Day Three

The Library of Congress has released a digital video, Bagit: Transferring Content for Digital Preservation.

Here's the description:

The Library of Congress's steadily growing digital collections arrive primarily over the network rather than on hardware media. But that data transfer can be difficult because different organizations have different policies and technologies.

The Library—with the California Digital Library and Stanford University – has developed guidelines for creating and moving standardized digital containers, called "bags." A bag functions like a physical envelope that is used to send content through the mail but with bags, a user sends content from one computer to another.

Bags have a sparse, uncomplicated structure that transcends differences in institutional data, data architecture, formats and practices. A bag's minimal but essential metadata is machine readable, which makes it easy to automate ingest of the data. Bags can be sent over computer networks or physically moved using portable storage devices.

Bags have built-in inventory checking, to help ensure that content transferred intact. Bags are flexible and can work in many different settings, including situations where the content is located in more than one place. This video describes the preparation and transfer of data over the network in bags.

Conservation OnLine (CoOL) and the Conservation DistList are moving from the Stanford University Libraries to the American Institute for Conservation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) announced that they will now host Conservation OnLine (CoOL) after 22 years of its being hosted by Stanford University Libraries. CoOL is a web-based library of conservation information, covering a wide spectrum of topics of interest to those involved with the conservation of library, archives, and museum materials. It contains approximately 120,000 documents, including an online archive of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation. It also includes the Conservation DistList, with 9,969 subscribers from at least 91 countries. CoOL serves as both an important resource for information and as a forum for conservation professionals all over the world.

AIC’s first priority is to make the DistList operational as soon as possible. Further announcements will be made as to the resumption of activity on the DistList and where other CoOL resources will be located in the future. We are continuing discussions with allied and affiliate organizations in order to make CoOL’s transition as seamless as possible.

DPC What's New in Digital Preservation number 20 has been published.

Here’s a description of the publication:

This is a summary of selected recent activity in the field of digital preservation compiled from a number of resources including the digital-preservation and padiforum-l mailing lists. Additional or related items of interest may also be included.