Digitization and Digital Preservation Resources

From PASCAL Wiki

Rick Moul

Overview

This page outlines resources on digitization and digital preservation. The point of departure is notes and links from the NISO Digital Preservation Forum I attended March 14, 2008.

The forum provided a pretty good overview of digital preservation issues, the role of standards, and highlighted several approaches that seem relevant to South Carolina, PASCAL and SCDC.

Here's a link to the forum presentations:

http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/digpres08/agenda/

Some highlights -

The NISO Director, Todd Carpenter, introduced the concept of "the long now" (10,000 years) vs. nowadays (30 years) vs. "now" (3 days). This from a Wired article by a Danny Hill (interestingly much of the original graphics are lost on the web.)

Evan Wilson, Chief Technical Officer of PORTICO did a thorough presentation outlining the stakes and stakeholders in long term digitization (Slides #7-8) with useful terms for initial discusions in SC because it shows how the various stakeholders (e.g. publishers, cultural instituions, libraries, universities, and government) have interrelated concerns. He reviews the OAIS model and related technical standards, including key papers in their development (Slides 11 - 22), and tells some compelling preservation/standards based war-stories.

Perhaps the best part was a pretty detailed overview of the PORTICO business technical models (Slides 31 - 37). Basically PORTICO is "A permanent archive of scholarly literature in electronic form – All preservation and access rights secured by irrevocable contractual agreements."

He then talked about work-flow, processing and philosphical issues involved in re-presentation of data - summarized with this thought - "One Work: Multiple Renditions" (Slides 39 - 47). Some of the big lessons learned are discussed in his concluding slides - "Digital preservation is very new. We need standards and best practices. We also need to hedge our bets through diversity."

For PASCAL/SC two thoughts struck me in this presentation:

First, much in this presentation needs to be taken up in discussion by stakeholders here, certainly not limited to SCDC group. Second, we need to research how other large scale academic consortia interact with Portico.

Lucille T. Nowell, Program Director - Data, Data Analysis & Visualization, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation Gave an interesting presentation on big time NSF level interests in preservation of scientific data sets. Evocative for our larger institutions...

Tom Clareson, Program Director for New Initiatives, PALINET did an excellent presentation on NEDCC's 2005 survey of digital preservation at institutions and on major projects. The bottom line is that folks are not really systematically stepping up to the plate yet. His presentation has a lot of practical information. One critical observation (slide 18)was that DAM, or Digital Object Management systems, which are seen by some institutions as the solution to preservation are not sufficient. I think this is of particular importance in the SCDC discussions at this point.

Katherine Skinner, Executive Director, Educopia Institute & Digital Projects Librarian, Emory University Presented the MetaArchive Cooperative operated out of Emory. This is a LOCKSS-based storage cooperative. In a lot of ways, it seemed the most relevant example of an architecture that might make sense in South Carolina, and it might also be that SC institutions could/should participate in it directly.

After providing some good definitions and reviewing the relatively slim field of cooperative programs, she outlined the technology and organizational structure involved in the Metaarchive (slides 7-9)The levels for participation are outlined in slide 13. It strikes me that a good role for PASCAL/SCDC is to explore basing a node at the highest level at DCIO, which would serve as a preservation node for all of the smaller institutions. Would be concurrent with the ContentDM site. If USC and Clemson did a similar plan, we might have a pretty solid schema for preservation.

The other afternoon presenters were interesting, especially Robert MacDonald (USCSD) who talked about the Chronopolis data grid and cloud computing.

Adam Chesler (ACS) Finished with a good overview presentation of CLOCKSS dark archive for electronic journal content. He did a good job distinguishing it from the basic LOCKSS concept. LOCKSS "light" and driven by library specific cancellations. CLOCCKS a dtrusted vendor archive, driven by mass cancellation (eg. cessation of publiciation).