preserving born-digital...

Preserving born-digital material

Stephen Gray (University of Bristol)

“Digital objects break. They are bound to the specifc application packages (or hardware) that were used to create or manage them.They are prone to corruption. They are easily misidentifed. They are generally poorly described.”

Seamus Ross, Digital Preservation, Archival Science

and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries ECDL2007

Managing after a project

Digital preservation

Digital preservation is an active process not a magical fle format or an indestructible disk

Impossible to ‘lock away’ digital material to safeguard it Prone to rapid technological obsolescence Build it to last Pre-empt inevitable problems & plan for them If it’s used it will survive: share it to preserve it

Over to you: What digital materials do archives have?

The Digital Lifecycle. Good practice in:

Creating digital material Sharing & using digital material Long-term preservation

Creatingdigital materials

Rapid Prototyped Auricular Mold c/o yuhuihuang.wordpress.com

£ Laser scanning in 3D= £450/day

Dodgy photos?

Q. Can we defne a single measure of ‘good quality’?

A.No. Digital materials should meet the identifed needs of a community of users to be of quality.

e.g. This image is easily mistaken for a poor quality image*.Yet it allowed one volunteer to identify a new type of galaxy.

Image c/o Galaxy Zoo2, 2012

*out of focus, low resolution, low contrast & poor colours

Key question: Who is the audience and what will they do with our ‘digital stuff’?

Creating: leave it open

Open solutions Not owned by a commercial company Supported by an enthusiastic user community instead Can be setup, confgured or fxed by anyone Less risk of obsolescence as no commercial interests Free

Proprietary solutions Owned by a commercial company Often only vendor can support, fx problems or update Potential to get ‘trapped’ in an aging technology Often expensive


Open is a philosophy. Some examples of opentechnologies: VLC player (open source media player software) Open Offce Writer (open equivalent of Microsoft Word) Big Buck Bunny (an open movie) OScar (an open source car) Android (a smart phone operating system)

Fit-for-purpose?

Major botanical illustration collection digitised and then managed using commercial image management software

Commercial company then went bust, leaving archive with no support and a large ‘migration’ job to do

Image c/o archive.org, 2011


File formats are a particularproblem: remember theBBC Domesday project?

Technology needed to accessthe content (LaserVision ROM) became obsolete very quickly

Major (expensive) challenge to save content. Now succeeded: as Domesday Reloaded

Image c/o http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday

A mini-DV tape needs a mini-DV player or camera* An MPEG-2 video fle needs the MPEG-2 codec A .docx fle needs MS Offce (or very similar) An i-Phone app from 2009 (probably) needs an i-Phone from

2009

These are technological dependencies If possible, avoid ‘dependencies’ Where unavoidable...

*and the mini-DV codec if video later played on a computer

Creating: Dependencies

... Minimise their number Go for technology made by lots of different

vendors Use multiple formats Make at least one of them an open format Make at least one of them a popular format

Creating: Dependencies

Creating: seeking permissions

Rights & permissions need to be in place asap:

Copyright permissions for anything to be copied (even for preservation)

Moral rights need to be addressed for anything which can be ‘attributed to a named person or people’ (including user-generated content, work done by volunteers or even paid freelancers)

Web2Rights.org.uk has template forms

Section round-up

Use open source technologies if you can, in order to: Help avoid obsolescence Avoid excluding people without specifc

technology

Make sure all required permissions are in place, especially if user generated content is involved

Sharing digital material

Believe the hype?

“Accessibility is design, not a feature...we should be designing our contentso it is globally accessible and meetsthe needs of as many people aspossible and practical given ourspecifc circumstances, regardless oftheir abilities or the type of devicethey choose to access the web.”

Andy Clarke, Transcending CSS

Sharing: Accessibility

In the UK, public web sites must have a at least

‘W3C Single A’ accessibility standard.

Sharing: Accessibility

Copyright = “All rights reserved”

Attribution

Noncommercial

No DerivativeWorks

Share Alike

Public Domain = “No rights reserved”

“Some Rights reserved”

The four main Creative Commons categories –often used in combination

Sharing: Granting permissions

Manage & preserve things(e.g. ‘FILE FORMAT’ helps us spot an out-dated format)

Use things(e.g. ‘CC LICENCE’ tells us what we’re allowed to do with an item)

Find things (e.g. ‘NAME OF CREATOR’ lets us group everything by the artist Banksy,

potentially even across collections)

Sharing: Metadata

Metadata allows us to:

When metadata goes bad.

“rampant errors threaten the scholarly vast digital library” (ResearchBuzz 2010)

Google accused of wrong dates, misattribution of authors, wrong classifcation (e.g. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass indexed under botany)

Unlike like physical objects, without accurate metadata digital ones can ‘disappear’


Consistency is important. The same type of thing would ideally always be described in the same way

So ‘pick-lists’ are better than ‘free text boxes’

Sharing: Metadata

Formal metadata is created by an authority (i.e. the project team)

Informal metadata (‘paradata’!) is contributed by users (e.g. rankings, tags, recommendations)

Sharing: Metadata

Who make it?

Evaluation

Digital evaluation tools are ideal for digital materials These include:

Google analytics 3rd party tools (e.g. stats form flickr or YouTube) Visitor stats from a project’s own site

Sharing: Evaluation

Sharing: Evaluation

http://weareculture24.org.uk/projects/action-research/how-to-evaluate-success-online/

Sharing: Evaluation

Section round-up

Accessibility: meet the needs of as many people aspossible

Unclear or restrictive permissions prohibit use, this should be addressed as early as possible

Metadata facilitates using, managing and preserving digital material

Is the greatest danger to digital collections loss of funding? Digital tools help evaluate real world impact. Measure everything!

Long-term preservation


Long-term: Digital storage

“Paper can be expected to last 200 years in favourable conditions but a hard drive lasts only 5 years. A CD: 3-5 years.”

http://www.technologyreview.com

Storage horror.

When digital storage goes wrong!

Telemetry data and video pictures from the moon now lost

Data tapes accidentally reused by NASA in 1980s

OopsImage c/o archive.org, 2011

Long-term: Digital storage

Storage sits at the ‘bottom of the Jenga pile’! It underpins everything else: lose your storage, lose your data Every digital fle should exist in more than one place at any one time Now we have the choice: local or in the cloud (online, yet private

storage)

£ 1GB cloud storage = £25/month

Refreshment: same data format on new bit of media (copy your MPEG1 ‘VCDs’ for extra security!)

Migration: newer version (transfer your MPEG1 videos to DVD (MPEG2) format to

prolong the shelf-life)

Emulation: take control of your dependencies! (write and maintain a software programme* that will play your

MPEG1 videos indefnitely)

* and make sure it has no dependencies of its own..!

Long-term: Tactics

Preservation can be achieved by sharing (LOCKSS) All technologies become obsolete. So ‘keeping data safe’

isn’t enough Digital preservation is active and never ends so has an

ongoing cost... ...sustainability has been achieved by licensing some digital

material for commercial use* If it’s used it will survive: share it to preserve it

* This does not negate making material free for non-commercial use

Long-term: Tactics

Go team.

Creative Commons www.creativecommons.org

W3C/WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 -

offers advice on making web content accessible to all

Managing outputs: Accessibility

£ User interface design specialist = £400/day

Rights & permissions

HF will fund the creation of, and public engagement with, digital materials as the main focus of an HLF project

Provided the project:• meets our aims and criteria• adopts the principles of high quality learning in the digital

environment• observes good practice for digital technology• meets our specifc requirements for digital outputs

HLF Digital policy since June 2012

HLF digital requirements

Projects with £200,000 or more of digital capital work (e.g. archive digitisation or 3D scanning)

• must have a 10-year management and maintenance plan• may include the value of increased future costs of

management and maintenance for up to 5 years after project completion as partnership funding

Projects must • meet requirements for evaluation• use appropriate digital methods of evaluation

Digital materials must be ‘usable’ for 5 years from date of project completion ‘available’ for the contract life (10/25 years)

Creative Commons licence all work must be attributed free to use for non-commercial purposes


web sites: at least W3C Single A accessibility standard

open source technology when possible

contribute to heritage digital collections when possible

acknowledge HLF support


Digital activities can be used to meet

HLFs Conservation aim e.g.

digitising existing heritage assets (e.g. archives, records, flms, sound recordings, photographs, manuscripts, books)

creating a digital record of heritage (e.g. survey of species/habitats or recording traditional processes)

buying digital material of heritage merit (at least 10 years old)

preserving born-digital...

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