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Tag Archives: digital preservation
MetaArchive publishes guide to distributed digital preservation
Please check out the new book published by the MetaArchive Cooperative called A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation. It's both timely and handy. [Full disclosure: the book is primarily about LOCKSS and mentions specifically the project that I'm working on LOCKSS-USDOCS, FGI and I receive no compensation from the sales of the book.]
Announcement: publication of A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation Authored by members of the MetaArchive Cooperative, A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation is the first of a series of volumes from the Educopia Institute describing successful collaborative strategies and articulating specific new models that may help cultural memory organizations work together for their mutual benefit. This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways. This guide is written with a broad audience in mind that includes librarians, archivists, scholars, curators, technologists, lawyers, and administrators. Readers may use this guide to gain both a philosophical and practical understanding of the emerging field of distributed digital preservation, including how to establish or join a network. Readers may access A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation as a freely downloadable pdf and/or as a print publication for purchase. Please visit http://www.metaarchive.org/GDDP to download or order the book. ****** The MetaArchive Cooperative provides low-cost, high-impact preservation services to help ensure the long-term accessibility of the digital assets of universities, libraries, museums, and other cultural memory organizations. In addition to preserving members' digital content in a distributed digital preservation network, the Cooperative also offers consulting and education services to institutions that seek training in digital preservation planning, policy creation, and implementation, including setting up and running Private LOCKSS Networks (http://www.lockss.org). For more information, please contact Program Manager Katherine Skinner (katherine.skinner@metaarchive.org).Continue reading
Lunchtime Listen: How are we ensuring the longevity of digital documents?
Please check out the spring 2009 plenary at Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) by David Rosenthal, chief scientist of the LOCKSS program. He presents a "contrarian view" of digital preservation. The issues he raises are definitely important to think about for those of us working to preserve digital govt information/documents for the long term.
How Are We Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents? from CNI Video Editor on Vimeo.
Lost Conversations, Lost Decisions, Lost History
Oliver Bell summarizes the issue of new forms of government communication and the need for new ways of preserving them:
- Lost Conversations, Lost Decisions, Lost History..., by Oliver Bell, TalkStandards (November 13, 2009)
Work needs to begin on archiving standards that will retain the information that is driving decisions today and as technology plays an increasingly larger role in the business of government archiving standards needs to be a core part of systems design, not a problem that we try and solve after the fact.One important element of this issue is Title 44 of the US Code that defines what GPO and the FDLP can handle. Its definitions limit what we can archive within those boundaries of the FDLP. But... if we had digital deposit, GPO could deposit official Title-44-approved content in FDLP digital libraries and those libraries could combine that content with non-Title-44 (Gov-2.0) content. GPO can't do this because of the limits of Title 44, but individual FDLP libraries have the flexibility to build their own collections combining Title 44 content with other content. We can do this today without changing the law. But we need digital deposit to make those collections rich and useful. Continue reading
Do zombies care about digital preservation?
I guess this is the day of big thoughts :-) “How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge?” This is the question mulled over by Richard Heinberg in his essay Our Evanescent Culture and the Awesome Duty of Librarians. “Ultimately,” Heinberg writes,
the entire project of digitized cultural preservation depends on one thing: electricity. As soon as the power goes off, access to the Internet goes down. CDs and DVDs become meaningless plastic disks; e-books become inscrutable and useless; digital archives become as illegible as cuneiform tablets — or more so. Altogether, digitization represents a huge bet on society’s ability to keep the lights on forever . . . . It’s ironic to think that the cave paintings of Lascaux may be far more durable than the photos from the Hubble space telescope. Altogether, if the lights were to go out now, in just a century or two the vast majority of our recently recorded knowledge would be gone or inaccessible.This isn't just an idle thought experiment. With GPO, FDLP libraries, Google, Internet Archive etc actively engaged in and/or planning for massive digitization of the historic record of the US govt. Matt Cardin of The Teeming Brain expounds on Heinberg's essay and makes some good points in "Zombies, Digital Media, and Cultural Preservation in the New Dark Age". [Thanks for the tweet about this ArchivesNext!] Continue reading
What is wrong with this picture?
The Executive Office of the President is looking for a private company to archive some of its presidential records. The records in question are those published by EOP on publicly-accessible web sites including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Does this strike anyone else as indicative of a major problem with how the government is approaching records retention and preservation? Will they just call it "outsourcing" and hope that magic word makes all the questions go away? Wouldn't it be easier, more comprehensive, and more authoritative for the government to capture its own records on the way to social networking sites? Its workflow of a) posting to commercial services, b) paying contractors to extract content from those servers and c) reformat it for preservation sounds like very bad planning to me. Surely we need governments to start taking their own communications seriously and create preservable records rather than try to re-create records in order to preserve them. The idea of creating hard-to-preserve records using commercial services and having to go through extra steps to re-capture and re-format the information is doing two things wrong instead of one thing right.
- Web Archive, Solicitation Number: WHO-S-09-0003, Agency: Executive Office of the President, FedBizOps (Aug 21, 2009).
- Administration wants help archiving its Facebook, Twitter content, By Ben Bain, Federal Computer Week (Sep 02, 2009)
- Administration issues solicitation to archive social media content, By Gautham Nagesh, NextGov (09/03/2009).
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