scholarly journals Relay-supporting Archives: Requirements and Progress

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Janée ◽  
James Frew ◽  
Terry Moore

We characterize long-term preservation of digital content as an extended relay in time, in which repeated handoffs of information occur independently at every architectural layer: at the physical layer, where bits are handed off between storage systems; at the logical layer, where digital objects are handed off between repository systems; and at the administrative layer, where collections of objects and relationships are handed off between archives, curators, and institutions.  We examine the support of current preservation technologies for these handoffs, note shortcomings, and argue that some modest improvements would result in a "relay-supporting" preservation infrastructure, one that provides a baseline level of preservation by mitigating the risk of fundamental information loss.  Finally, we propose a series of tests to validate a relay-supporting infrastructure, including a second Archive Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT).

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Andrew Wilson

Long-term preservation of digital objects requires curators to be able to guarantee the archival authenticity of the objects in a digital repository. In IJDC 4(1), Ronald Jantz suggested that a digital certificate is sufficient to ensure authenticity. The letter writer takes issue with this view and points out some of the archival misinterpretations in the Jantz article. He maintains that the archival literature is a rich source for discussions of authenticity that has been ignored to the detriment of Jantz’s arguments.


2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Von Suchodoletz ◽  
Jeffrey Van der Hoeven

Emulation used as a long-term preservation strategy offers the potential to keep digital objects in their original condition and experience them within their original computer environment. However, having just an emulator in place is not enough. To apply emulation as a fully fledged strategy, an automated and user-friendly approach is required. This cannot be done without knowledge and contextual information of the original software. This paper combines the existing concept of a view path, which captures the contextual information of software, together with new insights into improving the concept with extra metadata. It provides regularly updated instructions for archival management to preserve and access its artefacts. The view-path model requires extensions to the metadata set of the primary object of interest and depends on additionally stored secondary objects for environment recreation like applications or operating systems. This article also addresses a strategy of rendering digital objects by running emulation processes remotely. The advantage of this strategy is that it improves user convenience while maximizing emulation capability.


2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
June M. Besek

The collection and long-term preservation of digital content pose challenges to the intellectual property regime within which libraries and archives are accustomed to working. How to achieve an appropriate balance between copyright owners and users is a topic of ongoing debate in legal and policy circles. This paper describes copyright rights and exceptions and highlights issues potentially involved in the creation of a nonprofit digital archive. The paper is necessarily very general, since many decisions concerning the proposed archive's scope and operation have not yet been made. The purpose of an archive (e.g., to ensure preservation or to provide an easy and convenient means of access), its subject matter, and the manner in which it will acquire copies, as well as who will have access to the archive, from where, and under what conditions, are all factors critical to determining the copyright implications for works to be included in it. The goal of this paper is to provide basic information about the copyright law for those developing such an archive and thereby enable them to recognize areas in which it could impinge on copyright rights and to plan accordingly. After initial decisions have been made, a more detailed analysis will be possible. As the paper indicates, there are a number of areas that would benefit from further research. Such research may not yield definitive legal answers, but could narrow the issues and suggest strategies for proceeding.


2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miquel Termens ◽  
Mireia Ribera ◽  
Anita Locher

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the file formats of the digital objects stored in two of the largest open-access repositories in Spain, DDUB and TDX, and determines the implications of these formats for long-term preservation, focussing in particular on the different versions of PDF. Design/methodology/approach – To be able to study the two repositories, the authors harvested all the files corresponding to every digital object and some of their associated metadata using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) protocols. The file formats were analyzed with DROID software and some additional tools. Findings – The results show that there is no alignment between the preservation policies declared by institutions, the technical tools available, and the actual stored files. Originality/value – The results show that file controls currently applied to institutional repositories do not suffice to grant their stated mission of long-term preservation of scientific literature.


2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chirag Shah

Emerging information media present new challenges to the curators. While archiving objects, and building meaningful collection for long-term preservation and access, have been well-understood practice for centuaries, digital objects present new issues. In the previous article (Shah, 2009) I identified a number of these issues related to digital objects, specifically digital videos of an ephemeral nature. I argued that while preserving such objects, adding contextual information is essential. One of the interesting challenges is to identify what to collect and preserve as contextual information. For ephemeral digital videos, I proposed to harvest four kinds of relevances and five kinds of contexts. In order to implement this proposal, I presented ContextMiner, a framework and a system to support digital video curation. In this article, I will take a closer look at ContextMiner, analyzing it for its functionalities and usability. This is done by usability inspection and content analysis. For the former, we simulated two curatorial tasks, asked our users (curators) to use ContextMiner, and provide us feedback on its usability and functionalities. For the latter, we mined a collection prepared by ContextMiner for its potential usage in preservation. Finally, I have summarized the lessons learned from developing and using our system, providing implications for digital library curators interested in collecting and preserving digital objects of an ephemeral nature.   


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter X. Zhou

AbstractThe digital lifecycle encompasses definitive processes for data curation and management, long-term preservation, and dissemination, all of which are key building blocks in the development of a digital library. Maintaining a complete digital lifecycle workflow is vital to the preservation of digital cultural heritage and digital scholarship. This paper considers digital lifecycle programs for digital libraries, noting similarities between the digital and print lifecycles and referring to the example of the Digital Dunhuang project. Only through a systematic and sustainable digital lifecycle program can platforms for cross-disciplinary research and repositories for large aggregations of digital content be built. Moreover, advancing digital lifecycle development will ensure that knowledge and scholarship created in the digital age will have the same chances for survival that print-and-paper scholarship has had for centuries. It will also ensure that digital library users will have effective access to aggregated content across different domains and platforms.


Author(s):  
Sheila Morrissey ◽  
John Meyer ◽  
Sushil Bhattarai ◽  
Sachin Kurdikar ◽  
Jie Ling ◽  
...  

In the problem space of long-term preservation of digital objects, the disciplined use of XML affords a reasonable solution to many of the issues associated with ensuring the interpretability and renderability of at least some digital artifacts. This paper describes the experience of Portico, a digital preservation service that preserves scholarly literature in electronic form. It describes some of the challenges and practices entailed in processing and producing XML for the archive, including issues of syntax, semantics, linking, versioning, and prospective issues of scale, variety of formats, and the larger infrastructure of tools and practices required for the use of XML for the long haul.


Author(s):  
Sándor Kopácsi† ◽  
Rastislav Hudak ◽  
Raman Ganguly

In this paper we describe the implementation of a classification server that helps in metadata organization for a long term reservation system of digital objects. After a short introduction to classifications and knowledge organization, the requirements of the system to be implemented are summarized. Some Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) management tools we have evaluated are briefly presented. These include Skosmos, the solution we have selected for implementation. Skosmos is an open source, web-based SKOS browser based on the Jena Fuseki SPARQL server. We present the main steps of the installation of the applied tools and some potential problems with the classifications used, as well as possible solutions.


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