BitCurator Consortium launches website

The BitCurator Consortium (BCC) has launched its website at http://bitcuratorconsortium.org/. The website contains numerous information resources about the BitCurator Consortium, digital forensics, and more.

The BCC is an independent, community-led membership association that supports the curation of born-digital materials by libraries, archives, and museums. Members of the BitCurator user community founded BCC in 2014 to enhance, promote, and explore this growing area of professional activity.

The BitCurator environment is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that includes open source and public domain digital forensics tools, as well as unique reporting mechanisms and user interfaces, designed to assist libraries, archives, and museums with the curation of born-digital materials. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the BitCurator project has developed, packaged, and documented open-source forensics and data analysis tools to create forensic disk images, analyze files and file systems, extract file system metadata, identify and redact sensitive information, and identify and remove duplicate files.

The BCC operates as an affiliated community of the Educopia Institute, a nonprofit organization that advances cultural, scientific, and scholarly institutions by catalyzing networks and collaborative communities to facilitate collective impact.

Source: edited from ARCAN-L, "Announcement: New BitCurator Consortium Website!", 020150903

"Tackling the wicked problem of managing records in the digital environment" lecture, Victoria, BC, April 21, 02015

As part of the Archives Association of British Columbia's pre-conference, Dr. Julie McLeod,  Professor in Records Management, iSchool, Northumbria University, United Kingdom, will present a lecture titled "Tackling the wicked problem of managing records in the digital environment".

The lecture will be held on April 21, 02015 at St. Ann's Academy Auditorium, 835 Humboldt St., Victoria, BC, from 10 am to 11 am. Pre-registration at a cost of $10 is required by April 20. You can pre-register at http://www.gifttool.com/registrar/ShowEventDetails?ID=1831&EID=19998

Further details and updates are at http://aabc.ca/resources/news/2015/4/7/new-aabc-pre-conference-lecture-in-victoria-announced/

British Columbia Government Information Act begins second reading in Legislative Assembly

Update for March 3, 02015: The second reading of Bill, the Government Information Act, began on March 2, 02015 in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly. The Hansard transcript is here: http://www.leg.bc.ca/hansard/40th4th/20150302pm-House-Blues.htm

In speaking about the bill, opposition member Doug Routley gave a lengthy critique and highlighted the 33,000 boxes of records in government warehouses awaiting transfer to the BC Archives, part of the Royal BC Museum.

 Original post: British Columbia government introduces legislation to create government digital archives

The British Columbia government introduced Bill 5, the Government Information Act, on February 12, 02015. The main purpose of the act is to repeal the 1936 Document Disposal Act. The new act will also establish a "digital archives for government information" and mandate a new position, the chief records officer, who will be "responsible for managing, securing and preserving the digital archives." The digitization of government information will become mandatory under this legislation unless the information is exempt from being digitized. Information in a non-digital form "must be digitized before it is archived."

Although it is open for interpretation and clarification, section 20(2)(e) appears to lay the groundwork for the government to begin paying fees to the Royal BC Museum for archival services. Except in a few very special circumstances, the Royal BC Museum has not taken in government records for over a decade. The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner highlighted this situation in its July 02014 special report A Failure to Archive: Recommendations to Modernize Government Information Management. Could this bill be a response to the OIPCBC's report?

I wonder too whether with this new legislation the door may be opening for the payment of a one-time fee and transfer of thousands of boxes to the "museum archives of government" as the bill styles the Royal BC Museum.

The first reading version of the bill is at
http://www.leg.bc.ca/40th4th/1st_read/gov05-1.htm

A news release offers some additional information: the "digital archives will be open to the public and searchable online" and "The transition to digital information management will begin in the spring of 2015 and is expected to take three years."

The Victoria newspaper Times-Colonist's article about Bill 5 is here.

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.

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

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.

"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

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

Fending off the digital dark ages: The archival storage issue

ComputerWorld published an article by Lamont Wood titled "Fending off the digital dark ages: The archival storage issue". Wood discussed the many complex issues involved with both vendor representatives and practitioners in the archives and library worlds. Overall, I got the impression that the situation is no better, at least in North America, than it was a decade or even two decades ago. In Europe, however, there seems to be a stronger desire and, more importantly, the will to get something done. Some national jurisdictions already have many of the necessary infrastructure and processes in place, and European digital preservation researchers work with national, pan-European and international partners. For example, while the digital preservation aspect is still a work in progress, the National Library of the Netherlands, according to an article on the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation site, has been receiving electronic publications under its legal deposit system since 2003. Are there any cultural institutions in North America that have as lengthy a track record?

DCC / DPC What's New, Issue 29, September 02010

As announced on the DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK mailing list (02010 09 03), the Digital Preservation Coalition and Digital Curation Centre have published Issue 29 of What's New for September 02010. This issue "includes an interview with Catharine Ward of Cambridge University Library and an overview of recent digital preservation activities in Canada from Pam Bjornson of the Canadian Institute for Science and Technical Information."

United States NARA tells agencies to delete Web 2.0 / social media content

According to this report from Federal Computer Week, "Dump That Data", the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is advising its clients that they need not necessarily preserve their own Web 2.0 / social media content. You can obtain the full NARA report (PDF file) through this link.

National Library of Australia closes the digital door on PADI

The National Library of Australia announced through various mailing lists on September 1, 02010 that it is closing the digital door on its PADI subject gateway and associated mailing list padiforum-l. The library inaugurated PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) in 1997. The reasons for the change appear to be budgetary and technological pressures, as well as loss of outside interest in the utility of PADI.

According to the announcement,

A copy of the website has been archived in PANDORA, Australia’s Web Archive. The existing live website will remain available until the end of 2010; however no new resources have been added since the start of July 2010 and the existing links will not be actively managed. The archives of the padiforum-l list will continue to be available , however no new postings will be accepted from 30 September 2010.

NetarchiveSuite Web harvesting software from Denmark

According to the Web site for the NetarchiveSuite software, it was "developed by the two national deposit libraries in Denmark, The Royal Library and The State and University Library, and has been running in production, harvesting the Danish world wide web for three years. The Danish netarchive currently contains over 120 TB of data that are mirrored on two different geographical locations." It's open source software based on the Heritrix web crawler from the Internet Archive. You can read more information about it on the netarchive.dk project site. I first took note of it on my Ten Thousand Year Blog on July 20, 02004.

DCC / DPC What's New: Issue 28

The Digital Curation Centre and the Digital Preservation Coalition released What's New, Issue 28 (August 02010), on August 3, 02010. According to the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, "As well as the regular round up of news and events this issue includes an interview with digital curator Sharon McMeekin of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and an overview of recent digital preservation activities in Ireland from Tim Keefe of Trinity College Library in Dublin. William Kilbride's editorial discusses the difficulty of knowing whether a preservation plan will work."

Google Apps for Government

According to this ITI Newslink item (July 29, 02010), Google has announced its Google Apps for Government, "the first suite of cloud computing messaging and collaboration applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation from the U.S. General Services Administration." I wonder if that includes digital archiving/preservation measures and how that functionality will be enabled through cloud computing? Digital archiving/preservation is not one of the features that Google is promoting for this service. At $50 per user per year, you get what you pay for.

New English language publication from the Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation

The Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation released an English language translation of A Future for Our Digital Memory (2): Strategic Agenda for Long-term Access to Digital Resources (2010-2013) (PDF) in June 02010.

iPRES2010 conference, September 02010, Vienna, Austria, Europe

From the call for participation announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02010 06 28) about the 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2010), September 19 to 24, 02010, Vienna, Austria, Europe:

The Austrian National Library, the Vienna University of Technology and Austrian Computer Society are pleased to invite you to the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES2010) in Vienna in September 2010. iPRES2010 will be the seventh in the series of annual international conferences that bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our digital heritage.

Digital Preservation and Curation is evolving from a niche activity to an established practice and research field that involves various disciplines and communities. iPRES2010 will re-emphasise that preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage requires integration of activities and research across institutional and disciplinary boundaries to adequately address the challenges in digital preservation. iPRES2010 will further strengthen the link between digital preservation research and practitioners in memory institutions and scientific data centres.

The early registration deadline is July 31 02010.