preserving born-digital...
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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
Creating: leave it open
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
Creating: leave it open
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’
Image c/o archive.org, 2011
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
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
Image c/o archive.org, 2011
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.
Help>
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
HLF digital requirements
web sites: at least W3C Single A accessibility standard
open source technology when possible
contribute to heritage digital collections when possible
acknowledge HLF support
HLF digital requirements
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)
?
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