scholarly journals Digital Preservation Theory and Application: Transcontinental Persistent Archives Testbed Activity

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Watry

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and EU SHAMAN projects are working with multiple research institutions on tools and technologies that will supply a comprehensive, systematic, and dynamic means for preserving virtually any type of electronic record, free from dependence on any specific hardware or software. This paper describes the joint development work between the University of Liverpool and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego on the NARA and SHAMAN prototypes. The aim is to provide technologies in support of the required generic data management infrastructure. We describe a Theory of Preservation that quantifies how communication can be accomplished when future technologies are different from those available at present. This includes not only different hardware and software, but also different standards for encoding information. We describe the concept of a “digital ontology” to characterize preservation processes; this is an advance on the current OAIS Reference Model of providing representation information about records. To realize a comprehensive Theory of Preservation, we describe the ongoing integration of distributed shared collection management technologies, digital library browsing, and presentation technologies for the NARA and SHAMAN Persistent Archive Testbeds.

Author(s):  
Eunsong Kim

The Archive for New Poetry (ANP) at the University of California San Diego was founded with the specific intention of collecting alternative, small press publications and acquiring the manuscripts of contemporary new poets. The ANP’s stated collection development priority was to acquire alternative, non-mainstream, emerging, “experimental” poets as they were writing and alive, and to provide a space in which their papers could live, along with recordings of their poetry readings. In this article, I argue that through racialized understandings of innovation and new, whiteness positions the ANP’s collection development priority. I interrogate two main points in this article: 1) How does whiteness—though visible and open—remain unquestioned as an archival practice? and 2) How are white archives financed and managed? Utilizing the ANP’s financial proposals, internal administrative correspondences, and its manuscript appraisals and collections, I argue that the ANP’s collection development priority is racialized, and this prioritization is institutionally processed by literary scholarship that linked innovation to whiteness. Until very recently, US Experimental and “avant-garde” poetry has been indexed to whiteness. The indexing of whiteness to experimentation, or the “new” can be witnessed in the ANP’s collection development priorities, appraisals, and acquisitions. I argue that the structure of the manuscripts acquired by the ANP reflect literary scholarship that theorized new poetry as being written solely by white poets and conclude by examining the absences in the Archive for New Poetry.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristela Garcia-Spitz ◽  
Kathryn Creely

How are ethnographic photographs from the twentieth century accessed and represented in the twenty-first century? This report from the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology at the University of California San Diego Library provides an overview of the photographic materials, arrangements and types of documentation in the archive, followed by summaries of specific digitization projects of the photographs from physician Sylvester Lambert and anthropologists Roger Keesing and Harold Scheffler, among others. Through the process of digitization and online access, ethnographic photographs are transformed and may be discovered and contextualized in new ways. Utilizing new technologies and forming broad collaborations, these digitization projects incorporate both anthropological and archival practices and also raise ethical questions. This is an in-depth look at what is digitized and how it is described to re/create meaning and context and to bring new life to these images.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824402110566
Author(s):  
Sophia Alim

Although the web accessibility of universities around the world is well documented, much remains unknown about this aspect of higher education institutions in the UK. Using three automated web accessibility tools (TAW, WAVE and EIII Page Checker), this study explores the accessibility of the homepages of 66 research-intensive universities with respect to the WCAG 2.0 checkpoints. The results show that the most common checkpoint violations involve the provision of text alternatives for non-text content, contrast errors and the need to increase the computability of webpages with future technologies and tools. The results show that there are variations between UK universities, and there is some evidence of consistent compliance amongst the university homepages. However, when evaluated against results from similar studies of web accessibility in other countries, these web pages perform well. Overall, this study adds to the body of knowledge on web accessibility in higher education in the UK.


1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Riedlmayer

Three years have passed since the beginning of the war in Bosnia. Amidst the reports of human suffering and atrocities, another tragic loss has gone largely unnoted—the destruction of the written record of Bosnia’s past.On 25 August 1992, Bosnia’s National and University Library, a handsome Moorish-revival building built in the 1890s on the Sarajevo riverfront, was shelled and burned. Before the fire, the library held 1.5 million volumes, including over 155,000 rare books and manuscripts; the country’s national archives; deposit copies of newspapers, periodicals and books published in Bosnia; and the collections of the University of Sarajevo. Bombarded with incendiary grenades from Serbian nationalist positions across the river, the library burned for three days; it was reduced to ashes with most of its contents. Braving a hail of sniper fire, librarians and citizen volunteers formed a human chain to pass books out of the burning building. Interviewed by ABC News, one of them said: “We managed to save just a few very precious books. Everything else burned down. And a lot of our heritage, national heritage, lay down there in ashes.” Aida Buturovic, a librarian in the National Library’s exchanges section, was shot to death by a sniper while attempting to rescue books from the flames.


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