Google executive despairs of a digital dark age

People notice when a Google executive talks about a digital dark age. Vint Cerf, an Internet pioneer and Google executive, was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting and warning of "bit rot" and "digital vellum" to stem the tide of an "information black hole".

Ironically, as The Atlantic reported in its take on this story, there was a fire at a Brooklyn warehouse two weeks ago that

smogged up the Brooklyn ether (and confettied parts of the East River) with "decades’ worth of charred medical records, court transcripts, lawyers’ letters, sonograms, bank checks, and more." Huge swaths of Brooklyn's legal history literally fueled the fire, leaving one Clerk's Office representative to lament of the stacks of data lost: "They're priceless."

Of course archivists and technologists have been arguing for years over the most effective methods for digital preservation to prevent a digital dark age. No one set of methods appear to be accepted among the community. Cerf favors something called Olive (Open Library of Images for Virtualized Execution) under development by Carnegie Mellon University in association with IBM Research. They've had some success in virtualizing software such as Apple's last version of HyperCard and Microsoft Office 6.0.

Leading in the Digital World: Opportunities for Canada’s Memory Institutions report

The Council of Canadian Academics has released its report Leading in the Digital World: Opportunities for Canada's Memory Institutions. The report was assembled by an Expert Panel on Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution haired by Dr. Doug Owram.

Good morning IRENE, new hope for early audio formats

The new IRENE Audio Preservation service at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) is the culmination of a decade of research and development at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US Library of Congress.

The IRENE technology uses a non-contact approach, which eliminates the possibility of damage caused by mechanical contact of a stylus on fragile media.  The process creates ultra-high resolution images of the audio groove structures in either 2D or 3D, and the resulting image files are then processed through software that translates them into an audio file.

NEDCC CURRENTLY WORKS WITH THE FOLLOWING FORMATS:
Wax cylinders, lacquer discs ("acetate" discs), aluminum transcription discs, shellac discs, tin foils, and other rare formats (e.g., Dictabelt, Voice-O-Graph, etc.), and can handle rare, fragile, or damaged media.

LEARN MORE:
About the NEDCC IRENE Service:
https://www.nedcc.org/audio-preservation/about

About the History of the of the IRENE IMLS Grant Project at NEDCC:
https://www.nedcc.org/audio-preservation/history

QUESTIONS about NEDCC's IRENE Audio Preservation Service?
Contact:  Mason Vander Lugt, mlugt@nedcc.orgmlugt@nedcc.org
>
  NORTHEAST DOCUMENT CONSERVATION CENTER
Andover, MA  USA -  nedcc.org
JOIN THE NEDCC E-List for Updates on new IRENE projects and other preservation news you can use:
https://www.nedcc.org/contact/sign-up-for-news

 

Source: ARCAN-L mailing list, 020141120

Royal Society of Canada expert panel on future of archives and libraries releases its report

The Royal Society of Canada’s Expert Panel on The Future Now: Canada’s Libraries, Archives, and Public Memory is now available at: https://rsc-src.ca/en/expert-panels/rsc-reports/future-now-canadas-libraries-archives-and-public-memory

A free copy of the full report is downloadable at the  bottom of the page.

Source: ARCAN-L mailing list, 020141113

Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC releases special report, "A Failure to Archive"

Elizabeth Denham, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC, released a special report on July 22, 2014 titled "A Failure to Archive: Recommendations to Modernize Government Records Management". The report deals with three issues:

1. the decade-old backlog of 30,000+ boxes of records awaiting transfer from government to the BC Archives, which is part of the Royal BC Museum, a Crown corporation. The RBCM established a fee of $454 for the transfer of a box, so government offices decided to warehouse the records which was less expensive. 
2. "the lack of a practical method for archiving government’s electronic records", especially on the part of the BC Archives, which "does not have the capability to accept or archive those records. This challenge has been addressed in other jurisdictions, but B.C. [the province] has yet to make any significant progress in managing the archiving of electronic records."
3. modernization of the legislative framework for records management.

You can download the PDF report at https://www.oipc.bc.ca/special-reports/ and a press release is available for downloading at https://www.oipc.bc.ca/news-releases/

Born Digital report available for public comments

In 2011, an international group of ten archivists and special collections curators gathered for the first of a series of conversations about how born-digital materials are acquired and transferred to archival repositories. The resulting report, Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories, offers recommendations to help ensure the physical and intellectual well being of digital media and files during different stages of the acquisition process.

A draft of Born Digital has been published with MediaCommons Press, an innovative online publisher committed to open public review, and is currently open for your comments: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/borndigital/
We invite you to read the report, share your thoughts via the easy-to-use commenting interface, and take part in a discussion with the larger community of people concerned about the acquisition and preservation of born-digital materials. Your feedback will provide an important level of peer review as the report’s co-authors continue revising and preparing Born Digital for final publication.
If you have any questions about the report, please contact Gabby Redwine at gredwine@austin.utexas.edu

Source: DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, 02013 01 09

KEEP project releases new version of Emulation Framework (EF)

The European project KEEP released a new version of the Emulation Framework (version 1.1.0). The software is open source (Apache v2 license) and free to use for any organisation or individual. The software allows you to access old computer files and programs using emulation without the need to go through difficult installations and configurations.


Source: DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, 02011 12 22

The Keepers Registry for e-journals in beta release

From the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02011 10 04):

EDINA and the ISSN International Centre are pleased to announce the Beta release of the Keepers Registry, the e-journals preservation registry service. The Keepers Registry is available online at http://thekeepers.org.
 The Keepers Registry renames and replaces the PEPRS Beta service which was launched in April 2011.  The Keepers Registry is the product of JISC-funded project activity and provides freely available means to discover which e-journals are being preserved by the leading archival organisations.  The metadata from an additional agency, HathiTrust, has been included in this release of the Keepers Registry, as well as new functionality to support browsing by journal title and publisher.
 The PEPRS project was initially funded as a two-year project to scope, design and build a prototype, during which user requirements were gathered from librarians and preservation agencies. The present funding, until July 2012, is geared towards implementation of a service-quality system. Suitable developments from the PEPRS project activity will be implemented into the Keepers Registry.
 The work of the PEPRS project and the launch of the Beta release of the Keepers Registry will be discussed at the annual meeting of the Directors of the ISSN National Centres to be held in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, from 5th - 7th October 2011.
 The idea for the registry was mooted in various reports since 2003 and the findings of a JISC-commissioned report carried out by the University of Loughborough and Rightscom and published in 2008. Further background information on the project and details of relevant reports are available on the PEPRS project website at http://edina.ac.uk/projects/peprs/index.html The six archiving agencies which have been participating in the project and have made metadata available to the PEPRS Beta service include:
 - British Library
- CLOCKSS Archive
- e-Depot at the Konjinklijke Bibliotheek
- Global LOCKSS Network
- HathiTrust
- Portico
 It is planned to extend the scope of the service by including metadata from other archiving agencies. Additional functionality will also be added to the service throughout 2011 and 2012 and details of this are set out in the FAQ section on the service.
 A programme to test new functionality is being developed and the project team would welcome offers from users to assist in the testing process.
 If you would like to get involved please contact us at edina@ed.ac.uk.

Day of Digital Archives, October 6, 02011

From the announcement on various mailing lists (2011 09 06) posted by Gretchen Gueguen, Digital Archivist, Digital Curation Services, University of Virginia Library:

The Day of Digital Archives is an initiative to raise awareness of digital archives among both users and managers. On this day, archivists, digital humanists, programmers, or anyone else creating, using, or managing digital archives are asked to devote some of their social media output (i.e. tweets, blog posts, youtube videos, etc.) to describing their work with digital archives. By collectively documenting what we do, we will be answering questions like: What are digital archives? Who uses them? How are they created and managed? Why are they important? This year’s Day of Digital Archives will be held on October 6 and entries will be gathered at the Day of Digital Archives blog.

What is meant by “digital archives” well, primarily archives, repositories, content management systems and other initiatives that collect or manage born-digital material. These initiatives don’t have to primarily collect born-digital materials…in fact they are more likely to only have some born-digital content as part of their mandate. Or, maybe they don’t really have a “mandate” at all…maybe someone will contribute their thoughts about managing their own personal digital content or social media presence. The thread ties the participants together is that they collect, manage, preserve, develop, use, think about or otherwise love born-digital content.

Do you create, manage, or use digital archives? Would you like to participate? Well then, drop me a line at gretchen[.]gueguen[@]gmail[.]com with your contact info and I’ll keep you up to date!

"Memory failure detected" article, Times Higher Education

The Times Higher Education (THE) published an article online on September 1, 02011 about archiving the Web it called "Memory failure detected". The article is by Zoë Corbyn. The article looks at the various Web archiving research projects and current Web archive systems and facilities.

The Signal: Digital Preservation Blog from Library of Congress

The United States Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) launched a blog dedicated to digital Preservation called The Signal: Digital Preservation on May 31, 02011.

The RSS feed URL for the blog is http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/feed/

European Union's SCAlable Preservation Environments, the SCAPE project

The European Union is funding a project known as SCAPE, for SCAlable Preservation Environments. Here's the blurb from the SCAPE site:

The SCAPE project will develop scalable services for planning and execution of institutional preservation strategies on an open source platform that orchestrates semi-automated workflows for large-scale, heterogeneous collections of complex digital objects. SCAPE will enhance the state of the art of digital preservation in three ways: by developing infrastructure and tools for scalable preservation actions; by providing a framework for automated, quality-assured preservation workflows and by integrating these components with a policy-based preservation planning and watch system. These concrete project results will be validated within three large-scale Testbeds from diverse application areas.

iPRES 2011, November 1-4, 02011, Singapore

iPRES 2011 - 8th International Conference on Digital Preservation of Digital Objects

November 1-4, 02011, Singapore

http://ipres2011.posterous.com

iPRES, the main international conference on digital preservation, is calling for proposals for original full and short papers, panels, workshops, posters and demonstrations.

See the Web site for relevant submission dates for your proposals.

Source: DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, 02011 05 10

"Archiving the Web for Scholars" article, Inside Higher Ed

"Archiving the Web for Scholars" by Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed (May 6, 02011) is a look mainly at Columbia University Library's efforts to help other organizations preserve their Web presence by utilizing the Internet Archives. The article concludes with a frank and "ironic" admission from Stephen Davis, director of the Libraries Digital Program at Columbia, "We’re trusting the Internet Archive to do this for us,” he says, “and that’s a big limb that we’re out on."

Launch of PEPRS e-journals preservation registry service

From the announcement to DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK on April 28, 02011:

EDINA and the ISSN International Centre are pleased to announce the Beta release of PEPRS, the e-journals preservation registry service. This is the product of JISC-funded project activity, and provides freely available means to discover which e-journals are being preserved by the leading archival organisations - highlighting those e-journals for which no arrangement is on record.

The PEPRS Beta service is available at http://www.peprs.org/

PEPRS is officially recognized by the ISSN Governing Board and officially launched it in Paris, France, on April 28, 02011.

The five archiving agencies that have been participating in the project and have made metadata available to the PEPRS Beta service include:

- British Library
- CLOCKSS Archive
- e-Depot at the Konjinklijke Bibliotheek
- Global LOCKSS Network
- Portico

Free poster to promote Preservation Week 02011 among libraries & archives

From the announcement on various mailing lists on April 25, 02011:

The National Archives and SAA’s Preservation Section and are pleased to present an e-poster in recognition of Preservation Week 2011. We encourage you to share this poster with staff and the general public. It is sized to 8 1/2" x 11" so that it can be printed on any color printer.

You can download the free poster on the SAA Preservation Section website: http://www2.archivists.org/groups/preservation-section and NARA’s Preservation and Archives Professionals page: http://www.archives.gov/preservation/.

SAA has partnered with ALA in Preservation Week 2011. It is an opportunity for libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions to connect to our communities through events, activities, and resources that highlight what we can do, individually and together, to preserve our personal and shared collections.

This is a great tool for outreach.

Archiving 02011 Conference

From the announcement for the Archiving 02011 Conference:

FamilySearch and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology invite you to Archiving 2011, the international digital archiving conference covering the most pressing issues in imaging technology, digital access and preservation.

Archiving 2011 offers a unique opportunity for imaging scientists and those working in the cultural heritage community (curators, archivists, librarians, etc.), as well as in government, industry, and academia, to learn from peers and experts about:

• Developing a digital archive with appropriate processes and flows
• Preserving and providing access to digital artifacts
• Latest trends in imaging science technology

The conference will be held May 16-19 in Salt Lake City, Utah at the Salt Lake City Marriott Downtown.

The Archiving 2011 Conference Committee has put together a technically rich meeting that balances an exciting papers program with fun and interesting networking events.

The stimulating program includes more than 30 oral presentations and a host of interactive papers. The program also contains behind-the-scenes tours of cultural institutions and the following industry-leading keynote speakers:

• David Ferriero, 10th Archivist of the US National Archives: Creating a Digital Future: The National Archives and Information Technology
• Jay Verkler, President and CEO, FamilySearch International: Preservation in a Digital Age
• Michael Wash, Deputy CIO, US Department of Transportation: Preservation Starts from the Beginning

The Archiving 2011 program and additional information are available at http://www.imaging.org/ist/conferences/archiving.

DigCCurr, developing an international digital curation/digital preservation curriculum

The DigCCurr site, based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is spearheading the development of an international digital curation/digital preservation curriculum. Papers from various conferences and symposia are online. Eligible doctoral (PhD) candidates are urged to apply for fellowship funding provided by the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Personal Digital Archiving 02011 Conference, San Francisco, CA, USA

The Personal Digital Archiving 02011 Conference, to be held February 24 and 25, 02011 at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, CA, USA, is looking for "proposals for session topics and speakers, as well as volunteers to help us organize and serve on site."

Source: DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, 02010 11 17

November/December 02010 issue of D-Lib Magazine is here

From the announcement on various mailing lists on 02010 11 16:

The November/December issue of D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) is now available.

This issue contains four articles, an opinion piece and a conference report. Also in this issue you can find the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from recent press releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items of interest in 'Clips and Pointers'. This month, D-Lib features WebExhibits courtesy of Michael Douma, WebExhibits Editor.

The articles include:

Taming the Metadata Beast: ILOX

Article by David Massart and Elena Shulman, European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium; Nick Nicholas, Australian National Data Service (ANDS), Australia; Nigel Ward, eResearch Lab, the University of Queensland, Australia; Frédéric Bergeron, TELUQ, Canada

PDF/A: A Viable Addition to the Preservation Toolkit

Article by Daniel W. Noonan, The Ohio State University Archives; Amy McCrory and Elizabeth L. Black, Ohio State University Libraries

Trends in Large-Scale Subject Repositories

Article by Jessica Adamick and Rebecca Reznik-Zellen, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Federated Content Rights Management for Research and Academic Publications Using the Handle System

Article by Guo Xiaofeng and Li Ying, Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, and Sam X. Sun, Corporation for National Research Initiatives