barbarasierman2013 – Page 4

Author: barbarasierman2013 (page 4 of 4)

iPRES 2013

September 23, 2013 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman

The iPRES2013 conference took place in beautiful Lisbon, together with the Dublin Core 2013 conference. In total there were around 400 people, from 38 countries. Each conference had its own program. But the three (shared) key note speakers draw the attention from both the bibliographic people and the digital preservation in the room and sketched their views on important challenges we need to work on collaboratively. Gildas Illien (BnF) strongly advocated that bibliographic people and digital preservation people would be more cooperative, as they both are trying to make the collections accessible but from a different angle. The user expectations should be leading in both fields and, if so, will require more collaboration in the organizations. Management need to be convinced of this. Paul Bertone from the European Bioinformatics Institute explained the recent breakthrough in storage: storage in DNA, which might be a solution for massive storage of data. And finally Carlos Morais Pires, from the European Commission, talked about Horizon 2020 and data infrastructures (and here – as libraries we need to point this out again and again: data is not only restricted to scientific data generated by instruments, but also the big data collections in libraries and data centres for social sciences ! Carlos Morais Pires immediately agreed on this and changed his slide.)

Barbara Sierman speaking at iPRES

All presentations can be found on http://purl.pt/24107 , covering a wide range of aspects. There are simply so many aspects related to digital preservation ( webarchiving, preservation policies, open source preservation systems, trust, storage, and so on…). I can only advise you to have a look at the above mentioned URL.

Is there a trend to be discovered in all these presentations? To me, they demonstrate there is a lot of national and international collaboration nowadays. The European projects like Blog4Ever, SCAPE, APARSEN, ENSURE and Timbus, national initiatives like Goportis and international collaboration in the 4C project, they all bring together people from various disciplines . No longer is it only about libraries, archives and data centers, but institutional repositories, health care and business are now also tackling the problem and are presenting their views. The presentations reflect a greater self-confidence of the digital preservation community; we don’t have the answers to all challenges but we are developing a methodological way to deal with them: the development of standards, life cycle models, cost models, monitoring of the environment, lending from other communities to create tools etc. And most important of all, we know how to find each other.

Organiser José Borbinha with all varietes of the conference badge on his shirt

But there was also another topic, mainly raised in discussions and during breaks. Our own organisations. The elephant in the room is the fact that our own organisations will need to deal with both analogue and digital material, while the expertise in dealing with analogue material is far more developed in the organisation then the competence of dealing with digital material. Someone said to me “these are different people”. May be that is the case. Look at the sometimes heated debates around reading e-books or preferring the paper ones. I like both and don’t think the paper book will disappear. So as a reader I will integrate both worlds and sometimes prefer a paper book above an e-book. This is the world we need to deal with, and organizations need to integrate both worlds. It will require training to have employees that are both familiar with digital as well as print collections. This is a management challenge, but as digital preservation people we cannot close our eyes for it. We need to convince our management and as the keynote speaker Gildas Illien said (paraphrased by me): “ We need to show our added value. Use the rest of the world to convince your management.” This is how we as digital preservation people can exploit our existing collaboration structures!

A deadly sin

September 11, 2013 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/a-deadly-sin/

At last week’s iPRES2013 conference in Lisbon, a talk was given about an experiment on the migration of WARC files, done by Tessella, called Studies on the scalability of web preservation. One remark in the talk caused some rumour, namely the fact that the presenter suggested to adapt the WARC file and deviate from the standard. Why did they? Because – as we were told – the current version of the Wayback Machine software, that enables you to render the WARC file format, is not optimal for rendering WARC files with conversion records. But tweaking the format of the Archival Information Package and store this for the long term is not the way we should go. We preserve information for long term. Our future custodians will not understand this (unless they are told so via metadata and even then) and will assume if they see a WARC format, all the rules in the standard are taken into account. Deviating from this is wrong, in fact it is almost a deadly sin.

After reading the corresponding publication (the conference papers are published by the Portugese National Library as a free e-book), I saw that things were less straight forward. The approach Tessella chose was to create two WARC files: a correct WARC according to the standards and an adapted WARC for access. From the article:

This required the development of two different workflows for creating migrated WARC files: one, which is formally correct according to the WARC standard, and maintains the integrity of the WARC schema, and a second which is more pragmatic, and produces a file that can be displayed correctly by current WARC viewers. This pragmatic workflow can also be used for the migration of container formats which do not support conversion records, such as ARC files.

So what should one do in the case an ISO standard does not meet ones requirements? In this case the WARC standard is maintained by the BnF , which can easily be seen if one looks for the standard itself. This is especially mentioned on the internet so that people can get in touch. Another approach is to look for interested parties in the Wayback Machine software, which every one who is involved in web archiving knows, is the Internet Archive. And there is the IIPC, the International Internet Preservation Coalition that is currently initiating a developers working group to improve the Wayback Machine software. So if you have some problems with the standards, think about the millions of precious digital objects that need to be preserved in that format and get in touch with the community. But don’t tweak the format itself!

“Retracted”, so: no longer accessible?

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/retracted-so-no-longer-accessible/

Some time ago I blogged about a fraud case in the Netherlands. The author was a well known expert in his field and published in various scientific journals. Many of his articles turned out to be based on fraudulent data and should not have been published. I briefly described the existing policies of publishers to retract information from their databases in these kind of cases.

Stapel in Science Direct

Well, this has now happened: the Science Direct database no longer shows a number of articles of Diederik Stapel. Instead you’re warned that the article is retracted and the reason why. If you request the article itself, you will only see part of the first page.

What Elsevier did is in line with their policy. But there is another side of the coin. Other scientists based publications on the insights that Stapel described in his articles, and cited from these articles. These citations can no longer be checked via Science Direct. If, say in 20 years time, someone wants to investigate what was all the fuss about in 2012 and to study the scientific publications of Stapel, he/she will not find the original articles in Science Direct, only perhaps the censored versions. It is not likely that his own university repository did preserve the original digital article, as they only have a subscription to the Science Direct e-journal, and do not own a digital copy.

This is exactly one of the reasons why some major players are collecting the “world” digital scientific output. Organizations like LOCKSS, CLOCKS, Portico and the International e-Depot of the National Library of the Netherlands all have the mission to preserve these e-journals and their articles. In these collections one should be able to find the original articles. They will have a policy of not to delete articles once they acquired them for long term preservation. The future researcher/detective should go to one of these repositories for his/her investigation.

Digital preservation – The cost of doing nothing

March 14, 2013 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/the-cost-of-doing-nothing

Lately there was much debate on the fact that over the years the digital preservation community mastered to create a collection of more than a dozen of cost models, making the confusion for every one starting in digital preservation even bigger. May be this is part of the way things are going: everyone sees his own situation as something special with special needs. The solution? Tayloring an existing model or developing a new one. We can expect help from the recently started European project 4C ,”The Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation”. In their introduction they state that “4C reminds us that the point of this investment [in digital preservation] is to realise a benefit”. Less emphasis on the complexity of digital preservation, and more on the benefits.

Some people think that talking about digital preservation in terms of complexity and costs sounds more negative than thinking in terms of opportunities (or challenges) and benefits. But in both cases, you will need the same hard-core figures about the costs you make as an organisation and the benefits that raise from it. The latter is not easy to do, but the work of Neil Beagrie and his team shows that it will be possible to measure the benefits.

If we would have better figures of the benefits of preserving digital material, we are in a better position to estimate what it will cost us if digital material is not preserved. Of letting digital objects die, be it intentionally or not. How much damage is done to society if crucial information is not preserved? Recently the question was raised that some interesting websites, containing the research results of a project that lasted for several years, might not be harvested and preserved in a digital archive. Consequence of this would be a tremendous loss for the community in the related research discipline. This is clearly an incentive for preservation!

I remember that when the Planets project was proposed, it was argued that the obsolescence of digital information in Europe, in case no action to preserve it would be taken, could cost the community an astonishing amount of 3 billion euro a year. I could not find a source for this assumption, only a reference to some articles. One of them described the amount of data that was created worldwide. The other article described the costs for an organization if lacking proper tools to manage data (getting access, searching, not finding etc). It could be that the Planets assumption derived from this information was used as an illustration to make the case for digital preservation (the amount of stories in the Atlas of Digital Damages does not prove this assumption).

But in essence, it are these kind of figures (and their related evidence) we also need to have at hand. Not only demonstrating the costs of digital preservation, but also demonstrating what it would cost society if we did not preserve things.

Sustainability is more than saving the bits

February 20, 2013 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/uncategorized/sustainability-is-more-then-saving-the-bits/

The subject of the JISC/SCA report Sustaining our digital Future. Institutional strategies for digital content. By Nancy L. Maron, Jason Yun and Sarah Pickle (2013), is the sustainability of digitised collections in general, illustrated with experiences of three different organisations: University College London, The Imperial War Museum and the National Library of Wales. I was especially interested by the fact that the report mentions digital preservation, but not as a goal in itself (“saving the bits”). Instead, the authors broaden the scope of digital preservation with activities that are beyond bit preservation or even beyond “functional preservation”.

Nowadays a lot of digitisation projects are undertaken and interesting material comes to life for a large audience, often with a fancy website, a press release, a blog (and a big investment) and attracts immediately interested public. But the problematic phase starts when the project is finished. In organizations like universities, with a variety of digitisation projects, lack of central coordination of these projects could cause “disappearance” of project results, simple because hardly anyone knew about it. We all know these stories, and this report describes the ways these 3 organizations try to avoid that risk.

Internal coordination seems to be a key factor in this process. One organisation integrated more than a hundred databases in a central catalogue, another draw together several teaching collections. Both efforts resulted in visibility of the collections. But this is not enough to achieve permanent (long term) access. The data will be stored safely, but who is taking care of all the related products, that support the visibility of the data? In other (digital preservation jargon) words, who is monitoring the Designated Community and their changing environment?

The report describes interesting activities. Take for example this one: the intended public need to be reminded constantly of the existence of the digitized material by promotion actions, otherwise the collections will not be used at all. Who is planning this activity as part of digital preservation? That the changing environment needs to be updated sounds familiar. But there is more reason to do this apart from technical reasons. Websites need to be redesigned to be attractive, to adapt to changing user experiences. And who is monitoring whether there might be a new group of interested visitors?

Or, as Lyn Lewis Dafgis of the National Library of Wales said, there is an assumption that

once digitised, the content is sustainable just by virtue of living in the digital asset management system and by living in the central catalogue.

And this needs to change.

Not seldom digital preservation is seen as something that deals with access to the digital collections somewhere in the future. Permanent access, which is the goal of digital preservation, is often seen as solved by “bit preservation” and if you do a really good job “functional preservation”. This report illustrates with some good examples what more needs to be done and is coloring the not always well understood OAIS phrase “monitoring the Designated Community”.

Peeking over the wall

February 11, 2013 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/tag/digital-forensics/

Recently a very interesting report was published in the series of DPC Technology Watch Reports Digital Forensics and Preservation, by Jeremy Leighton John, from the British Library. I knew the phrase “digital forensics” and its potentials for digital preservation, especially in the archival community. This report shows clearly, with practical examples, what the digital preservationists can learn from the digital forensics. One could think that, as this is often related to personal archives, it might not be of interest for organizations that don’t have personal archives in their collections. But this reports shows that there is much ground in common to raise the interest.

The digital forensics process had some starting points that are very similar to what in the digital preservation community is referred to as “authenticity” and “the original”.

Acquire the evidence without altering or damaging the original,

Establish and demonstrate that the examined evidence is the same as that which was originally obtained and

Analyse the evidence in an accountable and repeatable fashion (p14).

The fact that the forensic practices has narrow links with legal authorities forces them to act towards criteria that are not always present in the environments of cultural heritage organisations. This might make the tools and approaches that are used in digital forensics more strict and reliable.

As noted in the report (p.17) a distinction between digital forensics and digital preservation is that the latter is aiming to have the material being accessible over time and by many different users, while digital forensics focus often on one specific goal: the court case. Of course this influences the methodology used in digital forensics, in this report referred to as the “lifecycle”, but the similarities in approaches between digital preservation and digital forensics are striking (p. 21). Especially related to steps that prepare the material before “archival storage”, so the ingest and pre-ingest steps. As digital forensics is often confronted with handhelds, smartphones and tablets etc. – a relatively new category for libraries – , the methods and insights they have developed could be of tremendous help for libraries, especially those with personal collections.

The benefit of this report is the practical line of approach, with references and descriptions to (open source) tools that are used in the digital forensics community. A wide range of examples that underpin the case for digital forensics are described, and I experienced a frequent occurrence of “aha Erlebnis”. Recognition of similar challenges and areas of interest: cloud computing, large scale, emulation, privacy, the need of test environments with reliable corpora (for libraries always difficult because of copyright) etc. The report summarizes a long list of conclusions (one of them the “inertia” of libraries and archives to preserve personal archives, but maybe we can extend that to the hesitation to preserve offline digital material in general) and finishes with a set of Recommended Actions, of which I conclude as the generic topic: collaboration.

Collaboration will be the most beneficial when parties involved are aware of their needs and what they want to achieve. I think that although we talked a lot of digital preservation, and much is yet not clear, we have a set of starting points that will support us in collaboration activities. The OAIS model still offers a very clear and understandable set of coherent concepts. For those that need a more practical explanation the series of audit materials like DSA , DIN, and RAC can support them. In a way digital preservation has grown up and is able to look around in other, less obviously adjacent disciplines. The people interested in emulation learned a lot of the open source community that rescued games (EU project KEEP – website no longer available) . Data visualisation, as was mentioned in a blog at The Signal , could help us identifying patterns in collections and perhaps identify risks, if applied in a clever way. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) science was mentioned by Luciana Duranti to be involved in her research into Records in the Cloud.

Sometimes people are wondering where all investments in digital preservation (research) have brought us so far. There seems to be no end to the challenges with the rapid technology changes. But I like the view that seems to emerge that there are rich opportunities to collaborate between (established) disciplines. Peeking over the wall around your own garden into the neighbours courtyard can offer some interesting views. Picking some of the seeds could make your border a stunning one!

BVIM and digital preservation policies

January 14, 2013 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/policies/bvim-and-digital-preservation-policies

Toy clock Digital 350 computer

Organizations must evaluate their activities and show the relevancy of them to their funders. It is no exception that organizations like libraries and archives are facing severe budget cuts, which will affect their current activities like their digitization projects. Simon Tanner of the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, wrote an interesting report, in which he explains the Balanced Value Impact Model. This model will support organizations (especially memory institutions) to do an Impact Analyses of their digital resources in order to show how the use of digital resources will benefit and change people. Not with vague notions, but in an evidence based approach. The results can be valuable input for further plans and can support decision makers at various levels. Decisons could be made not only on economical grounds, but also by taking the impact values into account.

Tanner distinguishes the following impact areas:

Social and Audience impacts : “the audience, the beneficial stakeholders and wider society has been affected and changes in a beneficial fashion”
Economic impacts “the activitiy is demonstrating economic benefits to the organisation or to society”
Innovation impacts: “that the digital resource is enabling innovation which is supporting the social and economic benefits accrued”
Internal process impacts: ”that the organisation creating/delivering the digital resources have been benefitted within its internal processes by the innovation demonstrated”. (p.45)

The model consists of 5 stages, of which the first two are “Context” and “Analysis and Design”. In these steps the digital environment in which the organization operates ( “the digital ecosystem”), are described, as well as the stakeholders who either benefit from or at least are affected by the digital resources.

It is not my intention to explain the model here and I would advise you to read the report. But it occurred to me that this exercise could benefit the case of digital preservation in an organisation as well. Part of the digital resources will be preserved for the long term after all.

As digital preservation is a costly activity, it is important to show the value of it. Why are we keeping all this digital material for an undefined amount of years? The Balanced Value Impact Model could be very helpful as this exercise will lead to an overview of the current ecosystem, and the current stakeholders for the digital resources. It will also show the value the stakeholders relate to the digital collections. Values for society and for individuals, economic values and values for the organization itself.

The information collected for the Balanced Value Impact Model can help the organization to identify the areas they need to monitor in their Preservation Watch to safeguard that this ecosystem and the identified stakeholders will be served over the years. The Designated community, – for many memory institutions quite a vague notion -, will be described better, as well as the value this Designated Community experiences with the digital resources. These values could be an ingredient for the organization in establishing their preservation policies, in which they will describe whether and how they will keep these values in the digital collection present.

Creating a Balanced Value Impact model will not be an easy task for an organization. But it could be a very useful exercise to support the preservation policies too.

KB Research

Research at the National Library of the Netherlands