Piping the action in records and archives management journals

Pekka Henttonen, Assistant Professor (ERMS), Department of Information Studies, University of Tampere, Finland, has created a Yahoo Pipes that aggregates RSS feeds from records and archives management journals, including the Association of Canadian Archivists' flagship journal Archivaria.

Source: Archives & Archivists (A&A) List, 02008 11 06

The Best of Cybermuseology 02008 (FIAMP 02008)

Check out the winners of the Best of Cybermuseology 02008 from the ICOM/AVICOM conference in October in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada. The formal name of this event is FIAMP, the Festival International de l’Audiovisuel & du Multimédia sur le Patrimoine.

The Grand Prize was awarded to Simon Fraser University's Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for its A Journey into Time Immemorial, part of the Virtual Museum of Canada.

JHOVE2 project underway

Quoting from the announcement on DIGLIB (02008 11 06):

The open source JHOVE characterization tool has proven to be an important component of many digital repository and preservation workflows. However, its widespread use over the past four years has revealed a number of limitations imposed by idiosyncrasies of design and implementation. The California Digital Library (CDL), Portico, and Stanford University have received funding from the Library of Congress, under its National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) initiative, to collaborate on a two-year project to develop a next-generation JHOVE2 architecture for format-aware characterization.

Among the enhancements planned for JHOVE2 are:

* Support for four specific aspects of characterization: signature-based identification, feature extraction, validation, and rules-based assessment
* A more sophisticated data model supporting complex multi-file objects and arbitrarily-nested container objects
* Streamlined APIs to facilitate the integration of JHOVE2 technology in systems, services, and workflows
* Increased performance
* Standardized error handling
* A generic plug-in mechanism supporting stateful multi-module processing;
* Availability under the BSD open source license

To help focus project activities we have recruited a distinguished advisory board to represent the interests of the larger stakeholder community. The board includes participants from the following international memory institutions, projects, and vendors:

* Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB)
* Ex Libris
* Fedora Commons
* Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA)
* Harvard University / GDFR
* Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB)
* MIT / DSpace
* National Archives (TNA)
* National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
* National Library of Australia (NLA)
* National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ)
* Planets project

The project partners are currently engaged in a public needs assessment and requirements gathering phase. A provisional set of use cases and functional requirements has already been reviewed by the JHOVE2 advisory board.

The JHOVE2 team welcomes input from the preservation community, and would appreciate feedback on the functional requirements and any interesting test data that have emerged from experience with the current JHOVE tool.

The functional requirements, along with other project information, is available on the JHOVE2 project wiki http://confluence.ucop.edu/display/JHOVE2Info/Home. Feedback on project goals and deliverables can be submitted through the JHOVE2 public mailing lists.

To subscribe to the JHOVE2-TechTalk-L mailing list, intended for in-depth discussion of substantive issues, please send an email to (listserv at ucop dot edu) with an empty subject line and a message
stating:

SUB JHOVE2-TECHTALK-L Your Name

Likewise, to subscribe to the JHOVE2-Announce-L mailing list, intended for announcements of general interest to the JHOVE2 community, please send an email to with an empty subject line and a message stating:

SUB JHOVE2-ANNOUNCE-L Your Name

To begin our public outreach, team members recently presented a summary of project activities at the iPRES 2008 conference in London, entitled "What? So What? The Next-Generation JHOVE2 Architecture for Format-Aware Characterization," reflecting our view of characterization as encompassing both intrinsic properties and extrinsic assessments of digital objects.

Through the sponsorship of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and the British Library, we also held an invitational meeting on JHOVE2 following the iPRES conference as a opportunity for a substantive discussion of the project with European stakeholders.

A similar event, focused on a North American audience, will be held as a Birds-of-a-Feather session at the upcoming DLF Fall Forum in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 13. Participants at this event are asked to review closely the functional requirements and other relevant materials available on the project wiki at http://confluence.ucop.edu/display/JHOVE2Info/Home prior to the session.

Future project progress will be documented periodically on the wiki.

The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, 1846-1871

Reminiscent of the large-scale documentary editions of Presidential papers published in the United States, The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island British Columbia, 1846-1871 was formally launched on November 3, 02008 by the University of Victoria in a former Supreme Court of British Columbia courtroom in the Maritime Museum of British Columbia. I was privileged to have been invited. The Web site carries on and expands upon the work of University of Victoria emeritus professor James Hendrickson who began the monumental task of transcribing all the outgoing and incoming letters (despatches) between the British Colonial Office in London and the colonial governments of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. The initial set of XML-based transcriptions, migrated from an older machine-readable format called Waterloo Script, covers the seminal year of 1858 when the colony of British Columbia was established in response to the Fraser River Gold Rush. The site is still under construction and one important aspect of the despatches, the attachments (usually maps), have yet to be digitized and added. The Colonial Despatches site is a model project in many ways and my hope is that we will see many other examples of its kind in Canada.

New UK study on digital preservation policies in higher education

From the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02008 11 06):

The JISC are pleased to announce the publication of a study on Digital Preservation Policies which can be downloaded in PDF format from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/jiscpolicyfinalreport.aspx

A major business driver in all universities and colleges over the past decade has been harnessing digital content and electronic services and the undoubted benefits in terms of flexibility and increased productivity they can bring. The priority in recent years has been on developing e-strategies and infrastructure to underpin electronic access and services and to deliver those benefits. However any long-term access and future benefit may be heavily dependent on digital preservation strategies being in place and underpinned by relevant policy and procedures. This should now be an increasing area of focus in our institutions.

This JISC funded study completed by Charles Beagrie Ltd aims to provide an outline model for digital preservation policies and to analyse the role that digital preservation can play in supporting and delivering key strategies for Higher and Further Education Institutions. Although focussing on the UK Higher and Further Education sectors, the study draws widely on policy and implementations from other sectors and countries and will be of interest to those wishing to develop policy and justify investment in digital preservation within a wide range of institutions.

Two tools have been created in this study:

1) a model/framework for digital preservation policy and implementation clauses based on examination of existing digital preservation policies;

2) a series of mappings of digital preservation to other key institutional strategies in UK universities and colleges including Research, Teaching and Learning, Information, Libraries, and Records Management.

Our aim has been to help institutions and their staff develop appropriate digital preservation policies and clauses set in the context of broader institutional strategies.