Like the United States, Canada also has a federal depository system. We at the Alaska State Library are fortunate to be a selective Canadian documents depository. As such, we are on the Infodep (sort of a cross between FDLP-L and govdoc-l) mailing list that has a public, but dated archive. Two recent announcements from Canadian Depository Services Staff show that our Northern (or Eastern if you're in AK) neighbors do things better and worse than us. On the one hand, I think they have a better understanding of the challenges involved with preserving digital documents as shown by this quote by Gay Lepkey, Head of Documentation of Publishing and Depository Services in an April 12th posting (full e-mail available on request to dnlcornwall@alaska.net) to the public infodep list (emphasis mine):

"As for the stability of electronic publications housed on DSP servers, we can say that the DSP electronic collection has been very stable since its Continue reading →

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Last month, there were stories in the press about a Canadian company, Remote Approach, that is developing tools to help "identify, manage and measure" the use of PDF documents "in real-time." Now Peter Suber writes about this and related technologies in the context of eprints of open access scholarly literature.

Trojan horse eprints, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #85, May 2, 2005.

Suber reports that "Remote Approach is working on executable scripts embedded in PDF files that will report back to their creators whenever the files are opened, even after they have been copied and redistributed." He notes that there is an obvious issue of reader privacy but there is also a deeper problem:

'The deeper problem is that once we allow scripts in text files for benign purposes, it will be very hard to block, let alone detect, scripts for malign purposes. Malign scripts could subvert fair-use rights and open access.'

He also notes press reports of "a feature that would let a company block a document from being read if there's no Internet connection." He sees dangers in such technolgies:

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Thanks to Herrick Heitman of the Washington State Library, we now have a summary of what sounds like an excellent session on Disaster Recovery for Depositories. With Herrick's contribution, there are only four sessions for which we have NO Summaries. Be the first attendee on your block to provide summaries for the following sessions: Sunday - Depository Library 101 Monday - Regionals Meeting Tuesday - FDLP Myths & Monsters Wednesday - New Depository Manual We actually only have three "contentless" session because we are pleased to offer access to Janet Scheitle's slides for Wednesday's New Depository Manual session. Finally, a hello to our new Bloglines subscribers, who now number twenty. Thanks for reading! Continue reading →

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To provide your own take on the Disaster Recovery for Depositories session, please either comment below, or send your notes and/or multimedia to dnlcornwall@alaska.net. Please let FGI know whether we can use your name and affiliation.

The following notes were contributed by Herrick Heitman of the Washington State Library.

All interpretations of documents and comments made are those of the notetaker and do not reflect on their home institution. All mistakes are those of the notetaker and/or FGI. Please feel free to post corrections. Moderator: Marianne Ryan—University of Maryland Presenters: Gwen Sinclair—University of Hawai’i, Manoa Dan Barkley—University of New Mexico Jan Swanbeck—for University of West Florida Janet Scheitle—Government Printing Office (These notes reflect the lessons I took from this session. They’re not in a linear “she said…and then she said…” style.) This was a good presentation that covered different scales of disaster: the burst pipes at the University of New Mexico damaged one building; the flash flood at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa caused damage throughout the campus and nearby neighborhood; and Hurricane Ivan struck the University of West Florida when that entire region that was dealing with the aftermath of previous hurricanes. Note also that some disasters are unexpected (burst pipes) and some are foreseeable (hurricanes). Prepare for the unexpected and take full advantage of any warning you may have. Continue reading →

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