Home » Posts tagged 'Digital deposit' (Page 9)
Tag Archives: Digital deposit
Early CLOCKSS Lessons
Reprinted with permission from the LOCKSS Alliance mailing list: ------------------- Dear Colleagues, The CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) Board would like to take this opportunity to apprise you of our progress, to share early lessons, and to encourage you to participate in the process of building this shared resource. The CLOCKSS participants (major academic publishers, research libraries, and the Stanford University team) are building a community-governed, stable, digital archive for published scholarly content. CLOCKSS access is unbundled from fees: after a “trigger†event (when a publisher is no longer able to provide electronic access to some or all of its archived material), content will be freely available to all. Many libraries have moved away from building and preserving collections, and there is increasing interest in community stewardship and preservation of, and guaranteed long-term access to, scholarly publications. Since its inception early in 2006, the CLOCKSS members made significant strides towards the effective management of archived materials, and learned some important lessons. We are also extremely proud to have been awarded the ALA ALCTS 2007 Outstanding Collaboration Citation, which will be formally presented at ALA’s annual meeting in Washington in June. To find out more about our early lessons and progress, go to www.clockss.org and click on the link “CLOCKSS Lessons.†As always, we welcome comments and suggestions. Please let us hear from you. Sincerely, Vicky Reich vreich@stanford.edu -------------------- I took Vicky's advice and checked out some of the CLOCKSS lessons. While I think you should read the entire five page documents, here are some good quotes that I think are worthwhile to documents librarians. Just think of "federal government" whenever you see the word "publisher":
The most important, and first, lesson learned by CLOCKSS participants was that commercial, university press, and society publishers; and librarians can collaborate effectively and thrive by working as equals to build a community-governed archive. The CLOCKSS Board meets formally twice each month by phone and twice a year in person. The Board establishes policies and implements procedures for wide range of social, business, content, and technical issues.---------
The archived content is a valuable asset, into which scholars, librarians, and publishers have made considerable long-term investments; it must be protected from a wide variety of possible disruptions whether deliberate or accidental. The CLOCKSS archive network is made up of widely distributed host libraries spanning geographic, political and legal boundaries, and this global network, under the stewardship of those who’ve invested so heavily in it, will protect these important assets for future generations of scholars.------------
In February 2007, the CLOCKSS team first successfully demonstrated the process that would follow a trigger event (retrieving preserved presentation content from the network of CLOCKSS boxes, transferring it to a publishing platform, and making it available to readers).-------------
Over the long term, the CLOCKSS Board intends to raise a capital fund to pay for most (if not all) of the archive’s ongoing expenses. Digital preservation requires continuous processes; when active preservation ceases, materials are lost. By building a capital fund and becoming selfsustaining, CLOCKSS will ensure that the preservation processes continue over time, regardless of the availability of outside sources of revenue (a circumstance with which libraries are wellfamiliar – witness the recent rescission of Library of Congress NDIIPP funding to help finance other American government priorities).---------------- No one agency can or should preserve government information all on it's own. There is another way. Continue reading
Librarian of Congress testifies on the 21st century library
James H. Billington, The Librarian of Congress, testified before the House Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch on March 20, 2007. read Billington's full testimony here. Billington pointed out that digital information is particularly fragile, but as the number of "digital transactions" that the LOC handles on a yearly basis, is extremely useful and of interest to students, historians, researchers and the general public. Billington said, "No single institution can collect, save and provide access to digital content in the future. Almost all of the Library's digital initiatives involve learning to work in new ways, in a networked environment, where we are working with others to amass critical content and deliver new and improved services." Check out "LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress" to see the LOC's analysis of the library's digital future. We're not saying that every library has to manage 295 terabytes of digital content, but ALL libraries should be thinking about, planning for and working toward being digital repositories for their communities. That includes digital deposit, harvesting and other avenues for building digital collections.
It took two centuries for the Library of Congress to acquire today's analog collection—32 million printed volumes, 12.5 million photographs, 59.5 million manuscripts and other materials – a total of more than 134 million physical items. By contrast, with the explosion of digital information, it now takes only about 15 minutes for the world to produce an equivalent amount of information. Researchers at Cal-Berkeley produced estimates of the amount of information produced and circulated on the Internet in 2003 – it was equivalent to 37,000 times the content of one Library of Congress. Most of this information exists only in digital form: so-called born-digital items, many of which are already irretrievably lost. There is a widely-held but false assumption that digital materials accessible today on one's PC or Blackberry will necessarily be available in the future. That is not the case. The average life of a Web site has been estimated to be 44 to 75 days (bold added), and information not actively preserved today could literally be gone tomorrow. Other essential digital information—most notably e-journals and data bases—are merely licensed for use in the short term– the information does not belong to the licensee. By contrast, traditional print books and journals collected by the Library for more than two centuries are, and will remain, in the possession of the Library and accessible to researchers. But it is current information that is often most needed by Congress, and current, up-to-date information is increasingly available only in digital form.Continue reading
Technical Requirement for Digital Deposit
A recent thread on the govdoc-l mailing list is about digital deposit. See Digital Deposit by Janet Fischer, 26 Apr 2007 and digital deposit by James [R.] Jacobs, 27 Apr 2007. Thanks to Janet for bringing this up and to James for the helpful links to technical information on digital deposit. I'd just like to add two thoughts: 1. I believe that it is best to think about digital deposit in much the same way we think about paper deposit: every library will be different. We shouldn't be looking for a one size fits all solution in the digital world anymore than we expect any two depositories to be identical. The technical requirements that any given library comes up with will depend on the level of service and collection profile that the library chooses. We should be thinking of services and collections first and technology second. We should not be trying to shoehorn our service and collection decisions into an abstract technological solution. Nor should we assume that every digital depository will have to meet the same requirements that an OCLC, CDL, NARA, or FDSys will meet. I can, for example, easily imagine a small depository with a slow or intermittent Internet connection and little or no online services selecting a few essential titles and putting them on a stand-alone public PC so that users can easily use those titles when in the library even if the network is down or slow or the originating site unreachable. And, at another extreme, I can see a large library, which already has some digital collections online and accessible over the web, adding government information to its collection and integrating government and non-government sources together so that its users do not have to go to two different interfaces or sites to find the information they need. You can probably easily expand these simple examples too your own situation and see where digital deposit will fit into your existing collections and services -- or collections and services you are planning. 2. I think it is equally important to emphasize to library management and to your technical support people that there are different technologies for implementing any given collection and service plan. Again, I believe that we should not be looking for a one-size-fits-all technological solution -- even for similar collection and service plans. For example, one library might choose to use LOCKSS to implement online collections, another might use its institutional repository software (e.g., DSpace, EPrints, Greenstone, etc.), another might use content management software, and another might integrated documents into its existing webspace by uploading them to the same server that hosts its existing html documents. The point is that there are different technical ways to implement the same collection and service plans. I hope this helps and others will contribute to this thread. If you have specific suggestion or solutions that you anticipate using, please share your stories! Continue reading
Comment Submission to GPO and Depository Library Council
On November 26, 2006, the volunteers at Free Government Information passed along all comments received on our DLC Digital Distribution page to the people named below. For a PDF copy of our responses and your comments, please see the file attached to this page.
Dear Mr. James, Ms. Russell, Mr. Davis, Mr. Wash and members of the Depository Library Council: As you are well aware, the Depository Library Council held a session on Digital Distribution in Washington DC on Wednesday, October 25, 2006 as part of the Fall 2006 Depository Library Council meeting. In hopes of broadening the discussion on digital distribution beyond the confines of in-person Council meetings, I and the other volunteers at Free Government Information posted responses to the Digital Distribution discussion questions presented at Council on the FGI website (http://freegovinfo.info) and invited others to add their own comments. We are attaching to this email a copy of our comments and the responses from other librarians. We do not pretend to represent the whole depository community, just a few voices from people unable to travel to Council. We appreciate the fact that you are addressing this issue and reaching out to the depository community for their comments and ideas. Because this issue is so important and because so many depository librarians cannot attend Council meetings, we suggest that you reach out to the community even more and take input from a broader section of the community before major decisions are made. Some of the actions you might take include:Continue readingThank you for taking time to receive more input on an issue that will shape citizen access to federal government information for years to come.
- Using your OPAL meeting room to hold a set of “virtual town meetings†on the topic of digital distribution.
- Survey either the entire FDLP or the subset of libraries indicating willingness to take digital items on issues related to digital distribution.
- Send GPO/DLC reps to State library association meetings to given presentations on FDSys and take suggestions on Digital Distribution.
Selective-deposit and the technical requirements of a digital-deposit FDLP
There was one issue that evidently came up in the discussions of digital deposit at the Fall 2006 Depository Library Council meeting that we at FGI think deserves highlighting and clarification from Council or GPO or both.
This issue relates to "general assumption 5"
Libraries receiving FDLP digital publications would be responsible for providing sufficient infrastructure, including bandwidth and storage, to provide timely and effective public access.
In the notes about the proceedings that we have read (here and here), there were questions about "streaming video" and other bandwidth-intensive infrastructure needs.
Our concern is that a library might assume from this discussion that if it wants digital deposit, it will be required to support things like streaming video.
We don't believe that is the intent of the GPO or Council even in these early discussions, but it would be useful to have GPO or Council or both clarify that selectivity in a digital-FDLP is still a valued concept and that there is no intention to develop a one-size-fits-all technical infrastructure requirement.
To elaborate on this just a bit and state what is probably obvious to most of us, what we are thinking about here is analogous to what FDLP has always had in the paper world. In the paper world, not everyone had the physical infrastructure or resources to deal with the serial set or Y4's from every little committee. We might think of those as the streaming media of the paper world. But the availability of those large sets in the depository program did not mean that every library had to select them; it did not mean that every depository library had to have the infrastructure to deal with them. But availability of those materials in a selective-depository program did mean that some libraries could select them.
And so it should be, we believe, in a digital-depository FDLP. Selective depositories would still be able to select what information content and types they would want. That would mean that a small library and a large library with vastly different technical infrastructures could both participate in a digital-deposit FDLP.
That still leaves the issue of regional depositories and how the community will define them in the digital age. But that is a different question that should be dealt with separately. We shouldn't confuse the issue of technical requirements for most FDLP libraries with the technical requirements for a future regional-depository model.
We can foresee, for example, one selective depository library hosting databases and multimedia files, another having a large collection of PDF and HTML files on a topic or subject area gathered together from several agencies along with commercial information into a digital subject collection, and another library having a few PDF files and CD-ROMs and DVDs available to users on a library workstation or library local area network. There should be room in a digital-deposit FDLP for all these scenarios and more.
One of the advantages we will gain in a digital FDLP is the ability for each library to select what it wants with great precision. Selection by media-type, subject, agency and pre-coordinated item-numbers will just be the beginning. Selecting based on content as determined by keywords or authors, on technical requirements for delivery, on popularity, on availability (or lack of availability) of the content in other formats, and more should all be possible.
A digital FDLP can have more flexibility than we ever had in the paper world and GPO and Council can and should make that point now by affirming that the technical infrastructure requirements will be flexible.
We encourage everyone to participate in this important discussion that will determine the future FDLP. We'd like to remind you to check out the notes and audio of Fall DLC and by all means please give us your thoughts on digital deposit.
Continue reading
Latest Comments