Thursday, October 30, 2014

2014 DPOE Training Needs Assessment Survey

2014 DPOE Training Needs Assessment Survey. Barrie Howard, Susan Manus. The Signal. Library of Congress. October 29, 2014.
The survey was an effort to get a sense of the state of digital preservation practice and understand more about what capacity exists for organizations and professionals to effectively preserve digital content.
The most significant takeaways are:
  1. an overwhelming expression of concern that respondents ensure their digital content is accessible for 10 or more years (84%), 
  2. evidence of a strong commitment to support employee training opportunities (83%). 
  3. a substantial increase across all organizations in paid full-time or part-time professional staff with practitioner experience (13%)
The type of digital content held by each institution:
  1. reformatted material digitized from collections already held (83%), 
  2. born-digital content created by and for your organization trails close behind (76.4%). 
  3. deposited digital materials managed for other individuals or institutions (45%). 

Investing in Curation: A shared path to sustainability.

Investing in Curation: A shared path to sustainability. 4C Project. October 20, 2014.

Digital curation involves managing, preserving and adding value to digital assets over their entire lifecycle. The active management of digital assets maximises their reuse potential, mitigates the risk of obsolescence and reduces the likelihood that their long-term value will diminish. However, this requires effort so there are costs associated with this activity. As the range of organisations responsible for managing and providing access to digital assets over time continues to increase, the cost of digital curation has become a significant concern for a wider range of stakeholders.

Establishing how much investment an organisation should make in its curation activities is a difficult question. If a shared path can be agreed that allows the costs and benefits of digital curation to be collectively assessed, shared and understood, a wider range of stakeholders will be able to make more efficient investments throughout the lifecycle of the digital assets in their care. With a shared vision, it will be easier to assign roles and responsibilities to maximise the return on the investment of digital curation and to clarify questions about the supply and demand of curation services. This will foster a healthier and more effective marketplace for services and solutions and will provide a more robust foundation for tackling future grand challenges.

Situating the Roadmap:  The six messages in the roadmap have been carefully considered to effect a step change in attitudes over the next five years. It starts with a focus on the costs of digital curation—but the end point and the goal is to bring about a change in the way that all organisations think about and sustainably manage their digital assets.

D5.1 - Draft Roadmap ( PDF - 2.5 MB)


Digital Preservation Network (DPN) Launches Member Content Pilot

Digital Preservation Network (DPN) Launches Member Content Pilot. Carol Minton Morris. Duraspace.org. 2014-10-29. 
DPN has launched a Member Content Pilot program as a step toward establishing an operational, long-term preservation system. The pilot is testing real-world interactions between DPN members through DPN “nodes” that ingest data from DPN members and package it for preservation storage. Chronopolis/Duracloud, The Texas Preservation Node, and the Stanford Digital Repository will be functioning as First Nodes. APTrust and HathiTrust, in addition to the above three, will be providing replication services for the pilot data.

NTT Data Digitizes Vatican Library Manuscripts for Online

NTT Data Digitizes Vatican Library Manuscripts for Online. Jun Hongo. Blog: Wall Street Journal, Japan Realtime. Oct 28, 2014.
NTT Data signed an initial agreement with the Vatican to work on about 3,000 of the approximately 80,000 manuscripts owned by the library, which was established in 1475. Some of the items it holds date back to the 2nd century. There are about 50 staff members working on the project, at a cost of about $21.3 million. The finished manuscripts are available online.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

4 Ways Academic Libraries Are Adapting For The Future

4 Ways Academic Libraries Are Adapting For The Future. Brad Lukanic. Fast Company. October 24, 2014.
Instead of becoming obsolete, academic libraries are changing and becoming more relevant.
  • Libraries have become the heart of the spirit of collaboration and innovation--going beyond being places to merely access knowledge to become hubs to truly explore and create.
  • Universities around the country are evolving their libraries into catalysts for discovery, learning, collaboration, and scholarly breakthroughs.
  • Each institution requires a unique vision for creating an intellectual center for 21st-century teaching, learning and collaboration. That vision must reflect the institution’s own voice and decide what it means to support the creation of academic scholarship. 
  • Libraries must offer learning opportunities and access to local and global networks of information, with the ability to easily create and share knowledge. 
  • Libraries must offer the settings and tools to foster discovery and learning in a dynamic academic framework.
Four key areas critical to the changing landscape for academic libraries:

  1. Respond to strategic campus and business needs
  2. Infuse technology infused in every aspect of service 
  3. Embrace flexibility
  4. Create places to engage
Academic libraries are changing from a repository of collections to a catalyst for discovery and creation, where people, knowledge, and research intersect to resolve our world’s greatest challenges.

Friday, October 24, 2014

The Many Uses of Rhizome’s New Social Media Preservation Tool.



The Many Uses of Rhizome’s New Social Media Preservation Tool.  Benjamin Sutton. Hyperallergic Media. October 21, 2014.
New York’s digital art nonprofit Rhizome is developing Colloq, a conservation tool to help artists preserve social media projects not only by archiving them, but by replicating the exact look and layout of the sites used, and the interactions with other users. The idea for Colloq came from the realization that Rhizome will be unable to accession new, contemporary Internet art if we don’t rethink archival practices. Colloq is still in its early stages of development.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Safeguard the Future of Your Data: Digital Preservation Technology for the U.S. Federal Market.

Safeguard the Future of Your Data: Digital Preservation Technology for the U.S. Federal Market. Hitachi brochure. 2014.
Hitachi’s Digital Preservation Platform (HDPP) is a non-magnetic storage solution that has the ability to preserve unlimited amounts of data for decades on end with minimal migration. The projected capacity of the storage solution is 1 PB per rack by the end of 2014. Offline media is also supported.

Cost-efficiency is another factor when considering long-term preservation. Traditional archives use a migration strategy that requires regular media refreshing which has proven to be costly over time. Migration is an ongoing process that takes a significant amount of resources.

Blu-ray optical media and M-DISC media ensure longevity and compatibility across generations of technology so the data can still be accessible as formats continue to evolve. Blu-ray discs are projected to 1 TB per disc. Mdisc capability is currently at 25 GB per disc, with plans for 300 GB per disc. Brochure also includes quick specs and diagrams.
 

Millenniata Announces Results of ISO/IEC 10995 Standard Tests – Storage Newsletter

Millenniata Announces Results of ISO/IEC 10995 Standard Tests – Storage Newsletter. Press Release. StorageNewsletter.com. 2013.06.10.
Millenniata, Inc. announced the results of its longevity test program based on the ISO/IEC 10995 standard. The results showed the median expected life of the M-DISC DVD was 1,332 years.  The same tests showed that other archival DVDs have an expected life of only 2.7 to 3.0 years.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Web archiving in the United States: a 2013 survey and NDSA Report.


Web archiving in the United States: a 2013 survey and NDSA Report. Jefferson Bailey, et al. National Digital Stewardship Alliance. September 2014. [PDF]

Report on a survey of organizations in the United States that are actively involved in, or planning to start, programs to archive content from the Web. Over half of the respondents were from colleges of universities. Respondents consider technical skills to be the most necessary to the development and success of their programs. Respondents are most interested in metrics relating to volume and usage. Most do not participate in collaborative archiving.  Overall the results suggest that web archiving programs are maturing and are moving towards standard practices.
  • 81% devote half or less of an FTE time to archiving the web
  •  40% indicated that knowledge of web technologies or archiving tools is essential
  • 58% capture web content without either notifying or seeking permission from content owners
  •  55% of respondents conditionally respect robots.txt
  •  63% use external web archiving services exclusively, a 3% increase over last survey
Concern about ability to archive types of content (multiple selections):
  • social media - 79%  
  • databases - 74%  
  • video 73% (63
  • interactive media 56%
  •  audio – 45%
  • blogs – 36%
  •  art – 17%