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Finally ISO 16919 is published, ISO auditing can start

November 3, 2014 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/finally-iso-16919-is-published-iso-auditing-can-start/

Rijksmuseum-man-voor-commissie

I blogged before about the enormous amount of time it takes before a draft standard becomes an approved ISO standard and finally this week happened what we were waiting for: ISO officially published the ISO 16919 standard. Fully named: Requirements for bodies providing audit and certification of candidate trustworthy digital repositories. This mouthful of words all comes down to one element: consistency. An audit done with auditors from one part of the world should be comparable with an audit done by auditors in another part of the world. This is a problem that ISO has tackled by having a standard that regulates the accreditation of auditors : ISO 17021 Standard requirements for A&C general management systems. The PTAB group adapted this standard in order to make it complementary to the ISO 16363 -2012 standard Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories. What additions were needed? In short: specific digital preservation knowledge is introduced as a requirement in this standard. This is done by an explicit reference to the OAIS standard ISO 14721-2012, and the ISO 16363-2012. A list of competencies is added, describing the qualifications an auditor should possess to participate in the audit process. This also is focused on digital preservation aspects, adding to general auditors requirements like confidentiality, impartiality, responsibility etc. Experience in digital preservation is expected and where the knowledge is lacking, training might fill the gaps. The next step will be that qualified auditors will be appointed. Here the national standard bodies play an important role, as they monitor this process. So we are not there yet, but an important milestone is reached. The European framework of audit and certification sees an external audit according to ISO 16363 as the highest level of certification. An organisation can start with certification according to the Data Seal of Approval, followed by the Nestor/DIN 31644 standard. This will leave some time to train qualified auditors and get experience with the concept of certification in the evolving world of digital preservation.

Reflections on iPRES 2014

October 20, 2014 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/reflections-on-ipres-2014/

Perseverance Hotel, Brunswick Street, Melbourne

Recently after 22 hours of flying I attended the iPRES 2014 conference in Melbourne, which was an awesome experience. How often does one have a chance to discuss aspects of the profession of digital preservation with no need of explaining the obvious? Meeting 200 colleagues, gathered in the beautiful State Library of Victoria, was an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas. And because there is no top ten of the buzzwords and no evidence of what was discussed during the breaks, the lunches and the dinners, I will summarize some highlights that inspired me.

First of all: everyone is worried about the fact that we constantly need to defend ourselves. Even in large organisations with mandates to preserve digital material, repeatedly higher management needs to be persuaded to think about the consequences of this mandate. What is wrong? I personally wonder whether we use the right language, or as I said in the panel on Friday, maybe we lack the skills of framing digital preservation properly. How to describe an abstract concept of long term preservation to the non-initiated? Our message is often too complicated, speaks of problems and high costs without sketching the clear benefits and does not appeal to the imagination. This is a threat for our profession, as many colleagues agreed.

The second topic was about involving other disciplines in digital preservation, like the industry and science. Mixing ideas from different disciplines might lead to new ideas and innovations. It is important to convince these disciplines of the importance of digital preservation for their business, research or simply their sustainability and our knowledge can help them to get up to speed, while they can help us to make the next step forward. For this we need to develop a language understood by all parties. ( I’ll ignore the fact that the week started with a discussion about whether it is digital preservation, digital curation, data science or whatever term you could use – in my view this discussion distracts us from the main problem.)

But we all expected great benefits of more collaboration amongst the current preservationists, although there are some aspects that need to be taken into consideration. Collaboration without a clear benefit for the participants is doomed to fail. Sometimes projects might lead to good results, but these projects require an organisation and funding. Chances for these kinds of projects are little in the current economical climate. But on a smaller scale the magic of the conference atmosphere led to new initiatives between a few individuals to exchange information, do something together or to really start working on an old idea.

The final buzzword on the conference was the DPTR: the Digital Preservation Technical Registry. An initiative to develop a file format registry, with a new data model and filled with information from existing registries. Currently it is a proposal under Horizon 2020, based on work done by the National Library and Archive New Zealand and National Library of Australia. There were mixed feelings about this initiative. On the one hand all agreed that the current registries fail for various reasons and that a good format registry is an absolute must. But what are the “lessons learned” about the previous – not so successful registries? Were these lessons incorporated in this new proposal? And was this new proposal not another example of technique first and then use cases?

It were the presentations – which will be published soon – that gave us new food for thought but I’m convinced that the discussions during the breaks really gave us renewed energy to proceed with the challenge of digital preservation, although it took another 20 hours flying before I was back home!

The Research Data Alliance in Amsterdam and the KB

Prof. C. Borgman Image: Inge Angevaare KB-NL

Our colleagues from DANS organized the 4^th Plenary Meeting of the Research Data Alliance ( RDA: research data sharing without barriers) in Amsterdam, held this past three days. I was there, representing the KB, one of the few national libraries present. The concept that national libraries have “research data” is a concept that needs some explanation. There are repositories that collect data sets that are a result of research, often underpinning an article. DANS and 3TU are good examples of this. But there are also repositories that have “collections” to facilitate research, like sensor data, astronomical data, climate data. This is similar to what the KB offers the researchers: a vast amount of digitized historical texts and a (restricted accessible) web archive. Researchers use these sets, see for example the Webart project. With the growing attention for digital scholarship or e-Humanities, we can expect more use. And to make the process complete, the results of research done on KB collections might end up as a publication in the KB and a data set at DANS. An NCDD working group on Enhanced Publications is looking into ways to present both outputs smoothly as an integral entity to the user. In short, there are good reasons for libraries to be at RDA! The opening of the conference had several speakers from the European Commission. Both Robert Jan Smits (Director General DG Research) and Neelie Kroes, Vice president of the European Commision via video, stressed that the European Commission expects RDA to contribute to the growing importance of sharing and preserving research data, as open access to research data is a key message in the Horizon 2020 Programme. With a new cohort of EU politicians, some canvassing work to convince them of the ins and outs of this and the role of RDA will be necessary. Prof. dr. Barend Mons from Leiden University and founder of the “fair data” initiative was asked to give his views on the matter. FAIR data being: Findable, Accessible Interoperable and Re-usable, for both humans and computers. With the motto “Bringing data to Broadway” he pleaded for professionalism in data publishing by a good infrastructure for data and a rewarding system for researchers (data should have the same “status” as a publication) and for real data stewardship. Difficulties in hiring and keeping competent data scientists, for example are a barrier. Are publishers ready for data publishing or will the data end up in a black hole? Despite the trend of putting data central, he believes that there will always be “a narrative” explaining the findings (read: articles, books). To improve professional data stewardship, he pleaded to reserve 5% of research budgets to achieve the goals of FAIR data. Prof. Christine Borgman of UCLA gave an interesting talk in which she criticized some assumptions related to research data. For example data sharing: this is not common practice in every discipline and (again) as long as researchers are not rewarded for it, it will not happen. The emphasis on data might not be fair, publications are not simply “containers for data” but are arguments, supported by the data. The carefully designed process in publications (for example the order of appearance of the authors) is not even designed yet for data sets. More of this will be described in her new book, to be published by the end of the year. The rest of the work these days was done in a variety of Interest Groups (IGs) and Working Groups (WGs). The KB participates in the activities on Certification of Digital Repositories and Data Publishing (about workflows in data publishing, of interest for our (inter-) national e-Depot, about costs for data centers). All information is available from the RDA website. At the final meeting an interesting announcement was made: in December a follow up of the Riding the Wave report will be published, with the working title Harvesting the Data. Knowing the immense impact the Riding the Wave report had, this is something to look forward to. The Research Data Alliance started as a small group and has now over 2500 members, with a large range of Interest Groups and Working Groups. Time has come to streamline the activities more in order to integrate the results and to think about the sustainability of the RDA itself. The results of this process will be discussed in the next Plenary Meeting in San Diego 9-11 March 2015.

“Materials contain the seeds of their own destruction”. A preservation handbook.

September 22, 2014 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/materials-contain-the-seeds-of-their-own-destruction-a-preservation-handbook/

Regularly I have discussions whether digital material and analogue material can be treated the same way or whether the digital aspect requires special treatments, sometimes even resulting in different working processes, staffing and policies. Quite too often this discussion takes place with participants that are either representatives of the digital or of the analogue view. The polite way of trying to understand each other by finding analogies often lead to simplified views and unsatisfying outcomes and nobody gets the wiser. Therefore I was triggered when a new digital preservation handbook exactly raised this issue by stating “This book is based on the philosophy that there are preservation principles that apply to all kinds of materials, whether digital or not.” For a preservation handbook this is a realistic perspective, as organisations have both kinds of materials. The authors present this book as the first example of ” the essential tools and principles of a preservation management programme in the 21st century – one that addresses the realities of diverse collections and materials and embraces the challenges of working with both analogue and digital collections.”

This being stated, the authors start addressing the different issues related to digital versus analogue and refer to the fact that digitization in the past led to destruction of the related physical objects by assuming that “the information” was saved in the new digital object, a debatable point of view nowadays (see Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold. Libraries and the assault on paper. 2001) . They come with a set of shared preservation principles, for both analogue and digital material.

Four principles describe the context and aims of preservation, amongst which the needs of the user is mentioned (a point of view we also see in the OAIS model) as well as “Preservation is the responsibility of all, from the creators of objects to the users of objects“. A set of 8 general principles focus on “collaboration”, “advocacy, “active, managed care” and the preference for actions “that address large quantities of material over actions that focus on individual objects” [ although this is highly dependent on the value of these objects I would say] . The following principle describes the key of preservation: “Understanding the structure of material is the key to understanding what preservation actions to take, as materials contain the seeds of their own destruction (inherent vice)”.

This set of Preservation principles and practices is the red line for the rest of the book, which contains a wealth of information. I can recommend this book to both the digital and the analogue preservationists, as it will contribute to mutual understanding so desperately needed! And don’t complain about the price (90 dollars) : this book might be expensive, but a one day course is more expensive and almost all the rest you want to know about digital preservation is freely available on the internet!

The preservation management handbook: a 21st-century guide for libraries, archives and museums. [Edited by] Ross Harvey and Martha R. Mahard. Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. ISBN 978-0-7591-2315-1 (also available as e-book)

Meetup “Digitaal Geheugenverlies” van de VPRO

September 15, 2014 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Als vervolg op de Tegenlicht uitzending van de VPRO over “Digitaal geheugenverlies” was er afgelopen dinsdag een “meetup” in Pakhuis De Zwijger in Amsterdam, waar ruim 100 mensen op afkwamen. De teloorgang van de bibliotheek van het KIT was voor regisseur Bregtje van der Haak aanleiding om deze documentaire te maken. Hans van Harteveld, voormalig directeur van deze bibliotheek, zei aanvankelijk verbijsterd te zijn geweest over de plannen met de bibliotheek. Zijn roman “De verkwanseling van een kroonjuweel” (Uitgeverij In de Knipscheer ISBN 978-90-6265-862-6) werd ter plekke gepresenteerd en beschrijft de hele gang van zaken.

Bart Krul (Instituut Maatschappelijke Innovatie) interviewde Bas Savenije (namens KB) en Marcel Ras (namens de NCDD). Leidraad van hun gezamenlijk betoog was dat niet alles bewaard kan worden, dat degene die het verzamelt niet noodzakelijkerwijze ook degene is die het moet bewaren, en dat de uiteindelijke gebruiker de reden is dat we het doen. Maar weten we wat die toekomstige gebruiker wil en maken de ontwikkelingen niet een herdefinitie van kernbegrippen noodzakelijk? Is de definitie van “publicatie” niet te strikt, als daardoor beleidsnotities van Jan Pronk buiten de boot zouden vallen? Door een intensieve nationale samenwerking, zoals nagestreefd door de NCDD (de Nationale Coalitie Digitale Duurzaamheid) kunnen we in Nederland tot een evenwichtig bewaarbeleid komen, om zo het gevreesde verlies te voorkomen.

Hoe helder en bekend dit ook in de oren klinkt van de mensen in de zaal die “in het vak zitten”, mij werd vooral duidelijk dat er een enorme kloof ligt tussen wat men denkt dat we doen als erfgoedsector en wat we feitelijk doen. Begripsverwarring over digitaal geheugenverlies bleek al in de uitzending, die voor een groot deel over de verdwijning van een papieren collectie ging. Onbekendheid bij de VPRO met erfgoedsector in Nederland zorgde er voor dat voornamelijk initiatieven uit de Verenigde Staten (Brewster Khale van Internet Archive, Jason Scott van The Archive Team en ingenieurs die NASA tapes redden) in de uitzending getoond werden. En steeds weer werd de vraag gesteld: waarom moeten we alles bewaren? Het is aan ons daar een antwoord op te hebben, net als Brewster Khale, Jason Scott en Ismail Serageldin, directeur van de bibliotheek van Alexandrië.

Als erfgoedsector doen we veel, maar het is goed te weten van particuliere initiatieven om digitaal erfgoed te behouden en te gebruiken. In de zaal zaten mensen die meededen met The Archive Team, wakker geschud toen Hyves werd opgeheven. Richard Vijgen vertelde hoe hij als grafisch ontwerper gebruik maakt van de geredde website Geocities en een nieuwe “installatie” maakte van dit materiaal door het opnieuw tot leven te brengen.

De VPRO heeft ons een goede dienst bewezen met deze documentaire en “meetup” (het is vast geen toeval dat de NRC onlangs ook over Internet Archive schreef), hoog tijd om ons eigen verhaal eraan toe te voegen!

Too early for audits?

May 4, 2014 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/too-early-for-audits/

I never realized that the procedure of getting to an ISO standard could take several years, but this is true for two standards related to audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories. Although we have the ISO 16363 standard on Audit and Certification since 2012, official audits cannot take place against this standard until the related standard Requirements for bodies providing Audit and Certification (ISO 16919) is approved, regulating the appointment of auditors. This standard, similar to the ISO 16363 compiled by the PTAB group in which I participate, was already finished a few years ago, but the ISO review procedure, especially when revisions need to be made, takes long. The latest prediction is that this summer (2014) the ISO 16919 will be approved, after which national standardization bodies can train the future (official) auditors. How many organizations will then apply for an official certification against the ISO standard is not yet clear, but if you’re planning to do so, it might be worthwhile to have a look at the recent report of the European 4C project Quality and trustworthiness as economic determinants in digital curation.

The 4C project (Collaboration to Clarify the Cost of Curation) is looking at the costs and benefits of digital curation. Trustworthiness is one of the “economic determinants” of the 15 they distinguish. As quality is seen as a precondition for trustworthiness, the 4C project focusses in this report on the costs and benefits of “standards based quality assurance” and looks at the 5 current standards related to audit and certification: DSA, Drambora, DIN 31644 of the German nestor group, TRAC and TDR. The first part of the report gives an overview of the current status of these standards. Woven in this overview are some interesting thoughts about audit and certification. It all starts with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. The report suggests that the OAIS model is there to help organisations to create processes and workflows (page 18), but I think this does not right to the OAIS model. If one really reads the OAIS standard from cover to cover (and should not we all do that regularly?) one will recognize that the OAIS model expects a repository to do more than designing workflows and processes. Instead, a repository needs to develop a vision on how to do digital preservation and the OAIS model gives directions. But the OAIS model is not a book of recipes and we all are trying to find the best way to translate OAIS into practice. It is this lack of evidence which approach will offer the best preserved digital objects, that made the authors in the report wonder whether an audit that will take place now might lead to a risky outcome (either too much confidence in the repository or too little). They use the phrase “dispositional trust” . “It is the trustor’s belief that it will have a certain goal B in the future and, whenever it will have such a goal and certain conditions obtain, the trustee will perform A and thereby will ensure B.”(p. 22). We expect that our actions will lead to a good result in the future, but this is uncertain as we don’t have an agreed common approach with evidence that this approach will be successful. This is a good point to keep in mind I think as well as the fact that there are many more standards applicable for digital preservation then only the above mentioned. Security standards, record management standards and standards related to the creation of the digital object, to name just a few.

Based on publicly available audit reports (mainly TRAC and DSA, and test audits on TDR) the report describes the main benefits of audits for organisations as

to improve the work processes,
to meet a contractual obligation and
to provide a publicly understandable statement of quality and reliability (p. 29).

These benefits are rather vague but one could argue that these vague notions might lead to more tangible benefits in the future like more (paying) depositors, more funding, etc. By the way, one of the benefits recognized in the test audits was the process of peer review in itself and the ability for the repository management to discuss the daily practices with knowledgeable people.

The authors also tried to get more information about costs related to audit and certification, but had to admit in the end that currently there is hardly any information about the actual costs of an audit and/or get certified (why they mention on page 23 financial figures of 2 specific audits without any context is unclear to me) and base themselves mainly on information that was collected during the test audits that the APARSEN project performed and the taxonomy of costs that was created. For costs we need to wait for more audits and for repositories that are willing to publish all their costs in relation to this exercise.

Reading between the lines, one could easily conclude that it is not recommended to perform audits yet. But especially now the DP community is working hard to discover the best way to protect digital material, it is important for any repository to protect their investments and to avoid that current funding organizations (often tax payers) will back off because of costly mistakes. The APARSEN trial audits were performed by experts in the field and the audited organizations (and these experts) found the discussions and recommendations valuable. As standards are evolving and best practices and tools are developed, a regular audit by experts in the field can certainly safeguard organizations to minimize the risk for the material. These expert auditors need to be aware of the current state of digital preservation, the uncertainties, the risks, the lack of tools and the best practices that are there. The audit results will help the community to understand the issues encountered by the audited organizations, as audit results will be published.

As I noticed while reading a lot of preservation policies for SCAPE, many organisations want to get certified and put this aim in their policies. Publishers want to have their data and publications in trustworthy, certified repositories. But all stakeholders (funders, auditors, repository management) should realise that the outcomes of an audit should be seen in the light of the current state of digital preservation: that of pioneering.

Research Data Alliance in Dublin

March 31, 2014 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Research Data Alliance (RDA); Dublin 26-28 maart 2014 door Barbara Sierman

Afgelopen week werd in Dublin de 3de plenaire bijeenkomst gehouden van de Research Data Alliance (RDA). Deze internationale organisatie, gebaseerd op vrijwillige deelname, is opgericht in 2013. Onderzoek verandert nu op grote schaal “big data” in de verschillende disciplines wordt ingezet, maar dit biedt ook uitdagingen: het delen van data, het bewaren van de bronnen, hoe te citeren, wie krijgt de “credits” voor dataverzamelingen, hoe linken we data aan publicaties etc. RDA is met name erop gericht om het delen van data, ondanks technische en sociale hindernissen, toch mogelijk maken ten behoeve van wetenschappelijk onderzoek – ook op langere termijn. “The RDA vision is researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society” .

De RDA kent verschillende werkgroepen (met taken die binnen 18 maanden uitgevoerd moeten zijn en die concrete bijdragen leveren aan de implementatie van deze visie) en zogenaamde “interest groups” (IG), waarin bepaalde onderwerpen worden uitgediept. Een ‘interest group” kan uiteindelijk tot een werkgroep leiden.

Waarom neemt de KB deel aan de Research Data Alliance? Ten eerste hebben wij als nationale bibliotheek de onderzoekers ook “big data” te bieden, met onze gedigitaliseerde collecties en ons web archief. Het is belangrijk dat de geesteswetenschappen /humaniora ook meedoen in de discussies vanwege haar rol in de “scholarly communication”. Nu worden de discussies veelal gevoerd door disciplines als aardwetenschappen, “life sciences”, “health”, “ agriculture, space and climate”, die al een veel langere traditie hebben in de omgang met “big data”.

Daarnaast krijgen wij in onze collecties ook te maken met publicaties, die verwijzen naar datasets als bron voor het gedane onderzoek. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan het Internationaal e-Depot, maar ook de publicaties van de Nederlandse universiteiten (DARE) en Nederlandse wetenschappelijke uitgeverijen. Deze datasets zitten soms bij de publicaties (ook wel “verrijkte publicaties” genoemd). Wetenschappelijke uitgevers zoeken oplossingen om ofwel zelf deze data sets te bewaren of bijvoorbeeld te verwijzen naar centrale “data repositories” . Het is belangrijk deze ontwikkelingen te volgen, om een goede (toekomstige) dienstverlening te ontwikkelen voor onze duurzame collecties.

Vanuit de afdeling Onderzoek zit ik in twee groepen: Publishing Data (IG) en Certification of Digital Repositories (IG).

De Publishing Data Interest Group (weliswaar een IG maar met een 18 maanden plan) bestaat uit vier onderdelen:

Costs : de kosten van een data repository en hoe de financiering hiervan voor lange termijn te regelen (hier neemt de KB actief aan deel)
Bibliometrics: hoe wordt de dataset binnen de wetenschappelijke gemeenschap gewaardeerd (citatie indexen etc.)
Services: hoe te linken van publicaties naar data sets, tussen data sets onderling etc. Hier zit de KB niet in, maar de ontwikkelingen zijn belangrijk voor het concept van “verrijkte publicaties” waar ook vanuit de NCDD aan gewerkt wordt (meer daarover in mei)
Workflows: wat zijn de huidige manieren waarop data gepubliceerd worden en hoe kan dit verbeterd worden, rekening houdend met alle belanghebbenden.

De dagen in Dublin waren vooral bedoeld om de collega’s binnen de RDA te informeren over de gedane activiteiten en plannen, te kijken waar overlap met andere werkgroepen en interest groepen is en om binnen de Publishing Data groep de komende activiteiten vast te stellen.

Dit gold ook voor de Certification of Digital Repositories IG. Wil men echt kunnen vertrouwen op de data repositories en de toegankelijk van de data op lange termijn, dan zal er toch een controle mechanisme moeten komen. Dat is de certificering van de repositories als een “trustworthy repository”. Onze collega’s bij DANS zijn hierbij de trekkers , zij hebben immers oorspronkelijk het Data Seal of Approval ontwikkeld. De KB is in deze werkgroep betrokken vanwege mijn activiteiten op het gebied van certificering en de tot stand koming van de standaard ISO 16363 Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories, en waarover ik presenteerde.

Meer informatie over de WG’s en IG’s in de RDA is te vinden op de Research Data Alliance website.

ANADP II in Barcelona

November 25, 2013 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

De tweede bijeenkomst van Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADP) vond afgelopen week in Barcelona plaats. De eerste bijeenkomt, in Tallinn in Estonia in 2011, resulteerde in een interessante publikatie http://www.educopia.org/publications met een overzicht van de laatste stand van zaken. En een reeks aanbevelingen voor verdere discussie (6 in de verkorte versie en 47 in de uitgebreide versie). Om een korte indruk te geven, noem ik enkele belangrijke topics die tijdens deze drie dagen steeds opnieuw onderwerp van discussie waren tijdens de panelsessies, de actieve werkgroepen en de lezingen van Clifford Lynch (Coalition of Networked Information) die de openingslezing hield en Adam Farquhar (British Library) , die de slotlezing verzorgde.

Clifford Lynch blikte terug wat er sinds 2011 bereikt was. Veel ‘collaboration” (“often just a lot of talking”) dat wel, maar hij waarschuwde dat deze samenwerking ook tot onderlinge afhankelijkheid kon leiden (“interdependency”) wat een risico kan vormen: gaat het bij een ander mis, dan heb jij daar ook last van. Denk dus van te voren goed na hoe ver de samenwerking moet gaan. Een ander punt betrof de grenzen van digitale duurzaamheid. Zijn die wellicht te nauw? Zouden we ons niet over meer druk moeten maken dan alleen de veilige opslag. Bijvoorbeeld over nieuwe toegangsmogelijkheden, zoals Europeana die biedt. Over informatie die verloren gaat als wij niets doen. Over gewijzigd gebruik en een ander verwachtingspatroon bij gebruikers. Adam Farquhar constateerde dat de meeste systemen die we nu voor digitale duurzaamheid gebruiken, zijn ingericht op opvraging van één object per keer, maar de nieuwe onderzoekers zien onze collecties als “big data” en willen onderzoek doen op grote aantallen objecten.

Niet alleen in de VS werd een “devaluation of public goods” gevoeld, nog versterkt door de krimpende budgetten. “Making the case for digital preservation “ zal steeds belangrijker worden. Dat kan op verschillende manieren, niet alleen door aan te tonen wat we allemaal bewaren, maar ook door aandacht te vragen voor wat er nu (ongemerkt) verloren gaat. Weten de beleidsmakers wel wat er op het spel staat? Wie maakt zich druk om kleine, lokale krantjes? Of om het bewaren van “public broadcasting”, dat in sommige landen nauwelijks gebeurt, terwijl dat een essentiële bron voor toekomstige onderzoekers is. Welke onderzoeken zijn in de toekomst niet meer mogelijk? Als voorbeeld werd genoemd: hoe komt iemand er over 10 jaar achter hoe lang het reizen van A naar B duurde? Er zijn geen papieren spoorboekjes meer, en niemand bewaart de databases van de spoorwegen. Het kan ons helpen dat het algemene publiek langzamerhand ook begint te beseffen dat de traditionele manier van overdracht van eigendom voor digitale objecten niet meer werkt. Je bent geen eigenaar meer van je favoriete muziek op Spotify of je favoriete boeken op je Kindle en je kunt ze niet aan je kinderen nalaten.

Tegenwerping is vaak dat we gehinderd worden door de copyrightwetgeving. Dat gaf Lynch direct toe, maar als “digital preservation community” zouden we overeenstemming moeten zien te bereiken over “some sweeping statements” , waarmee we direct de noodzaak voor wijzigingen kunnen aantonen, in plaats van ons in details te verliezen.

En hoe tonen we aan dat we onze beloften waar maken? Kleine organisaties zeggen soms dat ze “sustainable” zijn voor een bepaalde periode, maar wie controleert dat? Lynch merkte op dat in alle branches sprake is van data verlies, maar dat dit in onze (library) wereld niet lijkt voor te komen. Meermalen is tijdens de conferentie gesproken over het opzetten van een “registry of failures”. Maar er is al een plaats waar de “horror stories” van verloren digitaal materiaal verteld kunnen worden: www.atlasofdigitaldamages.info

“Economics, the nightmare of sustainability”, (waarbij “sustainability” volgens Lynch maar al te vaak uitgelegd werd als “somebody else need to pay for his”) was een ander terugkerend onderwerp. Ons antwoord hierop kan gerelateerd zijn aan het feit dat we “public goods’ bewaren: het is met publieke middelen gemaakt, men heeft er recht op om er toegang tot te houden, en het is een enorme desinvestering als dit verloren zou gaan. Aan de andere kant is het de vraag of we erg veel energie moeten steken in gedetailleerde kostenmodellen.

Luciane Duranti (InterPARES/CICRA) wees er op dat het belangrijk is om de juiste bondgenoten te vinden (de cloud storage providers bijvoorbeeld zouden ook tot onze digital preservation community moeten horen, evenals leveranciers van systemen en services) en dat we op de juiste plekken moeten zijn, bij UNESCO en bij de conferenties van leveranciers om ons verhaal te vertellen en elkaar te versterken. Ook Chris Greer (Research Data Alliance) pleitte voor meer aansluiting bij andere disciplines en noemde als voorbeeld bio medici die nu beginnen hun collecties duurzaam op te slaan. Zij zouden kunnen profiteren van onze kennis.

Adam Farquhar vatte de trends samen in zijn slotlezing. We zullen overspoeld worden met data en toch moeten we er in slagen digitale duurzaamheid te integreren in onze dagelijkse activiteiten. Dat kunnen we niet meer alleen en zal leiden tot samenwerkingsverbanden en (gezonde) concurrentie met externe partijen die services verlenen. Onderzoekers zullen onze digitale collecties op een andere manier gebruiken, dat vergt aanpassingen in onze systemen (en m.i. mogelijk ook van het OAIS model). Maar bovenal zal de digitale duurzaamheid gemeenschap één consistente boodschap uitstralen; onze activiteiten zijn niet alleen gericht op het gebruik van het digitale materiaal in de toekomst maar ook in het heden.

Hoe nu verder? Men vond unaniem dat het niet nodig was weer een nieuwe organisatie op te richten om “alignment” te bevorderen, er zijn vele samenwerkingsverbanden die we kunnen gebruiken om bovengenoemde punten verder uit te werken. (Kijk maar eens op cdb.io/17laZbO voor samenwerkingen). Wel was er behoefte aan om over enkele jaren weer op deze strategische wijze over digital preservation te praten. Daar kijk ik naar uit!

Preserving e-journals

November 11, 2013 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Last Thursday a new DPC Technolgy Watch report was presented in London. Neil Beagrie wrote Preservation, Trust and Continuing Access for e-Journals . In a lively setting at RIBA almost all major players were present with representatives from Portico, CLOCKSS , the KB International e-Depot and the Keepers registry to celebrate the launch of this publication and to discuss a variety of challenges and complexities related to preserving this material.

The DPC report gives a good overview of the current state of affairs, the terminology used in this area, the way organizations acquire e-journals (either directly from the publishers or via web harvesting the publisher sites) and the reasons why organisations like the above mentioned are undertaking this task. E-journals are seen as the basic for scholarly communication. But the publishing model has changed the situation for libraries: instead of having the paper copies on the stacks, they need “preserving a connection” – this phrase is from Peter Burnhill- . This is what most subscribing organisations do: they don’t own the content, only the right to distribute the subscription to their members . To avoid loss of this material, one should start preserving the collection and negotiate with publishers the rights to preserve this. Six use cases illustrate the challenges in preserving this material and they are not so much technical challenges as well as “organisational challenges”, like publishers ceasing operation or transferring part of their collection to another publisher without notifying. One chapter is about Trust, and in this case it is not about the trust in the sense of one repository certified by the ISO 16363 standard for Trustworthy Repositories. But it is more about how to trust that these e-journals in general will be available in the future. The total sum of the participating and in future participating organisations that preserve e-journals should lead to trusting them to have a complete set that is accessible for the community.

In contrast to websites, where nobody expects to preserve the whole Word Wide Web, with e-journals we strive ‘ to have them all’, at least to preserve all e-journals that are relevant for the scholarly communication. To monitor this, the KEEPERS registry is there to show us who is preserving which e-journal. In his talk Peter Burnhill tried on the hand to be optimistic about the registry but showed on the other hand that we are not there. Although the e-journals of big publishers like Elsevier and Springer are preserved for example by Portico and the International e-Depot of the KB , they represent only a small part of the total. It is far more difficult to collect the rest of the e-journals, the “long tail”, as these are often called: small publishers with only a few e-journals . Collecting these is costly. One need to search for them, negotiate the terms with each publisher individually and design an ingest flow, which is as time consuming for one small publisher as it is for big publishers. Some statistics here, from the 100.000 serials with an e-ISSN, only 21.000 are mentioned in the Keepers registry. So 79.000 are in danger, not to mention the amount without a e-ISSN (more statistics in Burnhills blog).

For preservation the challenge lies also in the technical developments around e-journals, what is exactly the “digital object” ? This topic is less represented in the DPC Tech Watch Report, but a growing problem for collecting organisations. The time lies behind us that a publication was simply a pdf article. Nowadays it is often accompanied by supplemental material (this can still be seen as part of the article) and “context information”, like websites, altmetrics, data etc. Can this be seen as part of the object and should this also be preserved? The same discussion takes place related to “enhanced publications”. And this is different from the analogue world, where no one expected a library to preserve all the literature referred to in the footnotes of scientific publications! Preserving organisations will need to publish their policies in this respect, to manage the expectations of their user community.

Beagrie writes that “ This makes e-journals one of the most dynamic and challenging areas of digital preservation” . But how about e-books and websites, are they less challenging? Let’s not categorize the objects to preserve (“who is doing the toughest job”), time will show that all digital genres will offer us similar challenges!

Save our preservation tool kit!

October 8, 2013 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/save-our-preservation-tool-kit/

Jan Luyken Tea and coffy tool kit. Courtesey Rijksmuseum, Netherlands

The recent US Government shut down should make all people involved in digital preservation thinking, if not worrying. I gave some feedback in Simon Tanners blog post , but the weekend helped to ponder a bit more about this topic.

We have always said, digital preservation is an international activity and we act like that, by having international collaboration in various areas. Sometimes one organisation starts a very good initiative and we all like to make use of the results, like PRONOM (TNA), FITS (Harvard), JHOVE, OPF, NDSA, DCC, DPC, PREMIS at the Library of Congress. Oops… due to the US government shut down this one was no longer available via the well known URL. Although the LoC website has recently be restored (5-10-2013), many more sites are still not available, like for example data.gov . So we could say that the digital preservation community is affected by the US Government shut down, and not only because we can’t have our regular meetings with the preservation people of the Library of Congress.

Have we been naïve as digital preservationists? This is not the first time the US Government shuts down, it also happened in 1995 and 1996 and before. But at that time the web was less influential on our daily activities and we were less dependent of it. Things have changed and we work with the web all day. But we might have been a little bit naïve in expecting things to be there, while our daily job is based on the expectation that things will not always be there. We try to save things. But we don’t have a rescue plan for the information we are dependent on in our processing activities. We might need registries at ingest and transformations and reference works when doing risk assessment of file formats and new object types. But we don’t have an overview of these vital sources that together make our digital preservation tool kit: standards,registries, software, reference works etc. All things that are only accessible from one place are principally in danger – the same rule we’ll apply for our preserved digital collections. What happened in the US can also happen somewhere else.

I would suggest to create an overview of our digital preservation tool kit, the vital elements without which we cannot work, and be reassured that their availability will no longer be restricted to one place. They should be present on various mirror sites. This activity really requires collaboration, but we already have the infrastructure for that. It is now important to make use of it. We should see this US Government shut down as a wake up call, it is not too late yet.

KB Research

Research at the National Library of the Netherlands