Representation of Socio-historical Context to Support the Authoring and Presentation of Multimodal Narratives: The Mingei Online Platform

In this article, the Mingei Online Platform is presented as an authoring platform for the representation of social and historic context encompassing a focal topic of interest. The proposed representation is employed in the contextualised presentation of a given topic, through documented narratives that support its presentation to diverse audiences. Using the obtained representation, the documentation and digital preservation of social and historical dimensions of Cultural Heritage are demonstrated. The implementation follows the Human-Centred Design approach and has been conducted under an iterative design and evaluation approach involving both usability and domain experts.

Digital preservation of information sources at academic libraries in Jordan: an employee’s perspective

Purpose Digital preservation requires new skills and collaboration among library staff to maintain long-term access to information resources. Digital content and digital technologies pose a serious challenge to information institutions to continue to select, preserve and access information resources. However, there is an urgent need to increase awareness of the new trends in the partnership between research communities and academic libraries; there is also a need for new digital preservation-related skills among librarians. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the benefits, importance, requirements and challenges of digital preservation in academic libraries in Jordan.Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire was disseminated to 150 library staff working at the 10 public universities in Jordan, with 133 questionnaires suitable to analyze with a response rate of (88.6%).Findings The results indicate a moderate perception of the benefits and importance of digital preservation, as well as the requirements and challenges in academic libraries in Jordan to carry out the digital preservation process. This indicated the importance of increasing the academic libraries' – specifically academic libraries in Jordan – awareness of the vast and important benefits of digital preservation to maintain long-term access to information. It was noted that factors such as sex, experience, educational level and specialization did not affect the results.Practical implications The findings will provide insights for other academic libraries on how to plan and develop preservation policies to maintain access to information.Social implications Access to information is a human right that contributes to the advocacy of sustainable development, and hence, digital preservation can facilitate long-term availability and accessibility to information.Originality/value This paper provides insights and practical solutions for academic libraries in response to technological development and the change requirements. It will help academic libraries handle and cope with the challenges of providing distance library services over digital channels.

Digital Preservation

In recent decades, libraries, archives, and museums have created digital collections that comprise millions of objects to provide long-term access to them. One of the core preservation activities deals with the evaluation of appropriate formats used for encoding digital content. The development of science has entered the 4th paradigm, where data has become much more intensive than in the previous period. This situation raises new challenges in managing research data, especially related to data preservation in digital format, which allows research data to be utilized for the long term. The development of science in the 4th paradigm allows researchers to collaborate with and reuse research datasets produced by a research group. To take advantage of each other's data, there is a principle that must be understood together, namely the FAIR principle, an acronym for findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

Digital Preservation of Indigenous Knowledge in South African Rural Communities

Indigenous knowledge is mainly preserved in the memories of elders, and most of this knowledge is slowly disappearing in rural communities due to various factors such as death, sickness, and memory loss. Digital preservation is regarded as one of the modern methods to preserve indigenous knowledge as it can be shared with others and be passed on to future generations. But how can indigenous knowledge be documented and preserved to benefit indigenous knowledge owners and accessible for future generations? The chapter thus looked into the policy, techniques, and technologies being employed to document and preserve indigenous knowledge in rural communities. Knowledge management frameworks were also used as underpinning theories to guide the study. The findings revealed that rural communities are still relying mostly on traditional methods such as oral tradition, storytelling, and community of practice in sharing their indigenous knowledge in this digital era.

Conservation Challenges and Emerging Trends of Digital Preservation for UNESCO Architectural Heritage, Pakistan

Recent worldwide initiatives at world heritage forums, especially UNESCO, have increased the importance of architectural heritage. Architectural heritage includes built structures that are of outstanding value of natural and cultural identity and require conservation, preservation, presentation and transmission to the future generations. In this regard, UNESCO has enlisted six World Heritage Sites in Pakistan that need to be preserved. Moreover, the heritage sites are undergoing theft, vandalism, natural decay and other socio-cultural harms. One of the state-of-the-art methodologies is the digital preservation of the historic sites. Amongst the various available computer technologies, photogrammetry is the quickest and most cost-effective method that can be used for digital preservation. The research will focus on the digital preservation of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, which is an emerging trend in an architectural context. Developing countries have limited funds and resources and most historic sites are being neglected by the lack of financial resources. The paper suggests digital preservation as an emerging solution, identifies its challenges and suggests photogrammetry as a cost-effective solution to six UNESCO enlisted historic sites of Pakistan. It also suggests that once digitally recorded, information of historic sites can also be used in diverse applications to generate further finances.

Evaluating Auction Mechanisms for the Preservation of Cost-Aware Digital Objects under Constrained Digital Preservation Budgets

Digital preservation is a field of research focused on designing strategies for maintaining digital objects accessible for general use in the coming years. Out of the many approaches to digital preservation, the present research article is a continuation work of a previously published article containing a proposal for a novel object-centered paradigm to address the digital preservation problem where digital objects share part of the responsibility for self-preservation. In the new framework, the behavior of digital objects is modeled to find the best preservation strategy. The results presented in the current article add a new economic constraint to the object behavior. Now, differently from the previous paper, migrations, copies and updates are not free to use, but subject to budget limitations to ensure the economic sustainability of the whole preservation system, forcing the now-called cost-aware digital objects for efficient management of available budget. The presented approach compares two auction-based mechanisms, a multi-unit auction and a combinatorial auction, with a simple direct purchase strategy as possible efficient behaviors for budget management. TiM, a simulated environment for running distributed digital ecosystems, is used to perform the experiments. The simulated results map the relation between the studied purchase models with the sustained quality level of digital objects, as a measure of its accessibility, together with its budget management capabilities. About the results, the best performance corresponds to the combinatorial auction model. The results are a good approach to deal with the digital preservation problem from a sustainable point of view and open the door to future implementations with other purchase strategies.

A 21st Century Technical Infrastructure for Digital Preservation

Digital preservation systems and practices are rooted in research and development efforts from the late 1990s and early 2000s when the cultural heritage sector started to tackle these challenges in isolation. Since then, the commercial sector has sought to solve similar challenges, using different technical strategies such as software defined storage and function-as-a-service. While commercial sector solutions are not necessarily created with long-term preservation in mind, they are well aligned with the digital preservation use case. The cultural heritage sector can benefit from adapting these modern approaches to increase sustainability and leverage technological advancements widely in use across Fortune 500 companies.

Survey of Preservation and Conservation of Information Resources in Private University Libraries, South-west, Nigeria

Background of study: Preservation and conservation of the cultural, social and technical context of our heritage are germane. Purpose: The study examined the preservation and conservation of information resources in selected private university libraries in South-west Nigeria. Eight (8) selected private universities in South-west, Nigeria with the population consisted of one hundred thirty-seven respondents which comprised of library professionals and para-professionals. Method: The study employed a survey research design and random sampling technique. Data collected with aids of semi- structured questionnaire and was analysed using frequency, mean and standard deviation with the aid of a Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM-SPSS) version 20.0 Results: The findings revealed that book becoming torn is the highest nature of deterioration followed by vandalisation, mutilation and brittle of print library materials. Moreover, the study revealed that digital preservation level of utilisation is low and is not extensively used in selected private university libraries. Conclusion: The study concluded that preservation and conservation techniques are recognized in the selected university libraries, but the digital preservation techniques are not adequately used due to various constraints. One of the recommendations made was the provision of formal training for library staff on preservation and conservation of information resources.