scholarly journals Letter to the Editor: Authentic Digital Objects

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Andrew Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Rich Source ◽  
Digital Certificate ◽  
Digital Repository ◽  
Letter To The Editor ◽  
Digital Objects ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
Long Term Preservation

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.

scholarly journals The woes of Swedish private archival institutions

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Proscovia Svärd
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Digital Repository ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Organization And Management ◽  
Long Term Preservation

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the long-term preservation challenges that the Swedish private archives are faced with. In as much as they offer a complement to the public archives and hence offer a nuanced national narrative, they lack both financial and human resources to effectively deal with the digital information management environment. Design/methodology/approach Participatory Action Research (PAR) was used to identify the challenges of long-term preservation together with the six private archives institutions that were involved in the collaboration. The collaboration was financially facilitated by the Södertörn University. PAR is defined as a systematic investigation, with the collaboration of those affected by the issue being studied, for the purposes of education and taking action or effecting social change. What is distinctive of PAR is the active involvement of people whose lives are affected by the phenomenon under study. Findings The private archival institutions face long-term preservation challenges such as lack of a digital repository that would facilitate the capture, organization and management of digital records that are of different formats and in a dispersed environment. There are no stringent legal requirements to facilitate the creation and management of the records in a standardized way and the institutions fear that imposing such requirements might deter their clients from depositing archival materials with them. The institutions will also need to espouse the business-oriented archival descriptions where private organizations are concerned to identify relevant archival materials and to promote participatory archival descriptions that would allow the creators to tag their records with metadata. Digital information requires a proactive approach, that is, planning for the long-term preservation of the information before it is created. Private archives need to invest in education packages that will facilitate their clientele’s understanding of the challenges of digital long-term preservation. Research limitations/implications The findings cannot be generalized to all private archival institutions, as it was only six institutions that participated, but the issues discussed are relevant to most archival institutions. Practical implications A lot of research has been carried out in the area of long-term preservation, but researchers have not paid enough attention to the woes of the private archives. To sustain a nuanced national narrative, the private archives need all the support to be able to live up to their mission of preserving archives of the private sector that are not captured by the public archival institutions. This is important in a pluralistic society such as Sweden. Highlighting the challenges might enable the institutions to work towards finding common challenges. Social implications The private archives are part of Sweden’s national heritage. Their preservation matters to the society as a whole and to enhancing the voices of the underrepresented. Originality/value The literature review revealed that not much research has paid attention to the challenges being faced by the private archives. This paper, therefore, contributes to this knowledge gap.

scholarly journals Emulation: From Digital Artefact to Remotely Rendered Environments

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Von Suchodoletz ◽  
Jeffrey Van der Hoeven
Keyword(s):  
Operating Systems ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Path Model ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
Computer Environment ◽  
Digital Artefact ◽  
Digital Objects ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Long Term Preservation

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.

An analysis of file format control in institutional repositories

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miquel Termens ◽  
Mireia Ribera ◽  
Anita Locher
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Institutional Repositories ◽  
File Formats ◽  
Digital Objects ◽  
Metadata Harvesting ◽  
Open Archives ◽  
Long Term Preservation ◽  
Open Archives Initiative

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.

scholarly journals ContextMiner: Supporting the Mining of Contextual Information for Ephemeral Digital Video Preservation

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chirag Shah
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Digital Video ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Digital Videos ◽  
Digital Objects ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Information Media ◽  
Long Term Preservation

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.   

scholarly journals Relay-supporting Archives: Requirements and Progress

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Janée ◽  
James Frew ◽  
Terry Moore
Keyword(s):  
Baseline Level ◽  
Storage Systems ◽  
Physical Layer ◽  
Information Loss ◽  
Digital Content ◽  
Fundamental Information ◽  
Digital Objects ◽  
Long Term Preservation

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).

scholarly journals Portico: A Case Study in the Use of XML for the Long-Term Preservation of Digital Artifacts

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Morrissey ◽  
John Meyer ◽  
Sushil Bhattarai ◽  
Sachin Kurdikar ◽  
Jie Ling ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Digital Preservation ◽  
Problem Space ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Electronic Form ◽  
Reasonable Solution ◽  
Digital Objects ◽  
Long Term Preservation ◽  
Semantics Linking

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.

scholarly journals Implementation of a Classification Server to Support Metadata Organization for Long Term Preservation Systems

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-243
Author(s):  
Sándor Kopácsi† ◽  
Rastislav Hudak ◽  
Raman Ganguly
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Organization ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Management Tools ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Simple Knowledge Organization System ◽  
Knowledge Organization System ◽  
Digital Objects ◽  
Reservation System ◽  
Long Term Preservation

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.

Development of a Universal Virtual Computer (UVC) for long-term preservation of digital objects

2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. van der Hoeven ◽  
R. J. van Diessen ◽  
K. van der Meer
Keyword(s):  
Digital Objects ◽  
Virtual Computer ◽  
Long Term Preservation
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