Final Report of The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

Preservation Week
Pass It On: Saving Heritage and Memories

The American Library Association will launch its first Preservation Week May 9-15, 2010.

 

"Welcome to Lyrasis' disaster wiki home page. The purpose of this wiki is to provide a space where institutions affected by disasters can provide staff contact information and updates about the status of their buildings and collections. Information will be posted only as long as needed; once your institution has resumed normal activities, information will be removed from this site. "

"This online tutorial was developed for curators, librarians, archivists, collections managers and other staff who are involved in managing machine-based media collections in cultural institutions. Viewers will learn basic principles and concepts for managing audiovisual collections and will be provided with information and strategies for preservation, contracting for reformatting, and finding funding opportunities."

Washington, DC--The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Preservation Statistics 2006-2007, a compilation of data on the levels of preservation efforts in ARL libraries throughout North America.

Highlights from the report suggest that the patterns of preservation activities may be changing, with digitization increasing and microfilming declining. 112 ARL libraries reported expenditures of $108,278,519 in 2006-2007 with a total 1,149.13 library-wide preservation staff engaged in preservation duties.

 

The new home for CoOL  (Conservation Online)

The report by ARL Visiting Program Officer Lars Meyer, "Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Describing Roles & Measuring Contemporary Preservation Activities in ARL Libraries," responds to a recommendation of the 2006 ARL Task Force on the Future of Preservation in ARL Libraries. The task force encouraged ARL to conduct a high-level investigation of the range and balance of preservation activities represented among the ARL membership. Meyer's report is a thoughtful and thorough qualitative examination of how research libraries' preservation activities are evolving and expanding in the 21st century. He not only considered activities traditionally captured by ARL's Preservation Statistics, but also a host of emerging activities largely, but not exclusively, centered on developing digital collections and involving collaborative efforts.

National Archives project to shrinkwrap collections

Describes Rutgers project to shrinkwrap their Special Collections prior to a construction project

"CoOL" or Conservation OnLine gathers resources for preservation and conservation

"Every year, archives, libraries, museums, and historic preservation organizations set aside May 1 to participate in MayDay, an initiative to protect cultural heritage from disasters."

"Since we were "fortunate enough" to be in at the ground level of the flooding in Iowa in Cedar Rapids and at the University of Iowa, we are documenting as best we can our experiences from beginning to end at our blog, Preservation Beat. We're slowly converting our paper logs into this blog in the hopes of helping others."

"Understanding PREMIS" is now available from the PREMIS Maintenance Activity website. This document is a "gentle" introduction to the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, giving an overview of its scope and goals. It does not give enough information for implementation, but will make the larger document, i.e. the PREMIS Data Dictionary, more familiar.

 

"Understanding PREMIS" was written by Priscilla Caplan, Florida Center for Library Automation, for the Library of Congress. It is available at:   http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/understanding-premis.pdf

 

The full PREMIS Data Dictionary is available at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/v2/premis-2-0.pdf

 

 

Kevin F. Brady, Partner, Connolly Bove Paul W. Grimm, U.S. Magistrate Judge, (Maryland) Kevin Brady and Judge Paul Grimm provide a flowchart of the admissibility of electronic evidence. They explain when evidence is relevant, authentic, hearsay, and the exceptions that apply, as well as practice tips. Download the full article below.

ccHost is an open source (GPL licensed) project that provides web-based infrastructure to support collaboration, sharing, and storage of multi-media using the Creative Commons licenses and metadata. It is the codebase used by ccMixter and other sites.

Besides its focus on sharing content, ccHost differentiates itself from other multi-media hosting programs by emphasizing the reuse (a.k.a. remixing) of content between artists, not only between artists on any given installation of ccHost, but between all installations across the web and any web site that implements the Creative Commons Sample Pool API, including non-ccHost sites such as the freesound project.

"Electronic files of several out-of-print books, reports and symposium proceedings publishes by RLG, Inc. from 1988 to 2003 are now available in the OCLC Corporate Library Collection housed in the OCLC Digital Archive."

NHPRC Digitizing Historical Records

The Commission seeks proposals that use cost-effective methods to digitize nationally-significant historical record collections and make the digital versions freely available on the Internet. Project must make use of existing holdings of historical repositories and be made up of entire collections or series. The materials should already be available to the public at the archives and described so that projects can re-use existing information to create metadata for the digitized collection. Applicants must have the permission of all relevant copyright holders, where possible.

To make these projects as widely useful as possible for archives, historical repositories, and researchers, the applications will be evaluated on:

1. The national significance of the collections or records series to be digitized;
2. An effective work flow that repurposes existing descriptive material, rather than create new metadata about the records;
3. Reasonable costs and standards for the project as well as sustainable preservation plans for the resulting digital records;
4. Well-designed plans that evaluate the use of the digitized materials and the effectiveness of the methods employed in digitizing and displaying the materials.

A grant normally is for 1 to 3 years and up to $150,000. The Commission expects to make up to 3 grants in this category, for a total of up to $300,000. The Commission provides no more than 50 percent of the costs of Digitizing Historical Records projects.

 

 

Deadline: May 5, 2009 Challenge grants augment or establish endowments that support humanities activities in education, public programming, scholarly research, and preservation. Examples include:

• faculty and staff positions,
• fellowships,
• lecture or exhibition series,
• visiting scholars or consultants,
• publishing subventions,
• maintenance of facilities,
• faculty and staff development,
• acquisitions, and
• preservation or conservation programs.

Deadline: May 5, 2009 Challenge grants augment or establish endowments that support humanities activities in education, public programming, scholarly research, and preservation. Institutions may use the income from invested funds to meet ongoing humanities-related costs. Examples include:

• faculty and staff positions,
• fellowships,
• lecture or exhibition series,
• visiting scholars or consultants,
• publishing subventions,
• maintenance of facilities,
• faculty and staff development,
• acquisitions, and
• preservation or conservation programs.

Deadline: July 1, 2009 These grants support national or regional (multi-state) education and training programs on the care and management of, and the creation of intellectual access to, library, archival, and material culture collections.

• digitizing collections;
• arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;
• cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving image, art, and material culture;
• preservation reformatting;
• deacidification of collections; and
• preserving and improving access to humanities resources in “born digital” form.

Deadline: May 14, 2009 Preservation Assistance Grants help small and mid-sized institutions, such as libraries, museums, historical societies, archival repositories, ... and colleges and universities, improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections. These may include special collections of books and journals, archives and manuscripts, prints and photographs, moving images, sound recordings, architectural and cartographic records, decorative and fine arts, textiles, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, furniture, and historical objects.

• General preservation assessments
• Consultations with professionals to address a specific preservation issue, need, or problem
• Purchase of storage furniture and preservation supplies
• Purchase of environmental monitoring equipment for humanities collections
• Education and Training

Deadline: February 18, 2009

The goals of the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program are to:

• bring together humanities scholars and digital technology specialists from different disciplines to share ideas and methods that advance humanities research through the use of digital technologies;
• reflect on, interpret, and analyze new digital media, multimedia, and text-based computing technologies and integrate these into humanities research;
• prepare current and future generations of humanities scholars to design, develop, and use cyber-based tools and environments for research;
• devise new and creative uses for technology that offer valuable models that can be applied specifically to research in the humanities.

NEH strongly encourages applicants to develop proposals for multidisciplinary teams of co-applicants, partners, and collaborators that will offer the necessary range of intellectual, technical, and practical expertise. This program is designed to bring together humanities scholars, advanced graduate students, computer scientists, and others to learn new tools and technologies and to foster relationships for future collaborations in the humanities. Partners and collaborators may be drawn from the private and public sectors and include appropriate specialists from within and outside the United States.

The Endangered Archives Programme is offering a number of grants every year to individual researchers world-wide to locate vulnerable archival collections, to arrange their transfer wherever possible to a suitable local archival home, and to deliver copies into the international research domain via the British Library.

The specific focus of this Programme is upon archives relating to the pre-industrial stages of a society's development, whether in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or even Europe.

These grants will be the primary means by which Arcadia will contribute to the urgent task of identifying, preserving and making accessible such archival collections before they are lost to international scholarship forever.

 

British Library Endagered Archives award winners for 2008

Overview of NEH programs

Preservation information from ALCTS and ALA

"This curriculum is a teaching aid for an Introduction to Preservation course at Library and Information Science schools. It encompasses issues for libraries, archives, museums, and collections-holding institutions of all kinds. Educators are encouraged to modify, rearrange, and enrich the lesson plans in any way they see fit. Please read the section titled Before You Begin to gain a better understanding of the way the curriculum works."

Persistence of Memory:
Sustaining Digital Collections
December 9-10, 2008
Chicago, Illinois

 

 

This is my description la la

Goal of This Unit:

* To acquaint and/or refresh those who need to become familiar with issues of collection management, serials records functions, and preservation.

 

This place is an amazing place to hike.

Founded in 1970, the Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust is a nonprofit land trust headquartered in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania. The Trust is staffed by professionals and volunteers dedicated to the stewardship of the lands that are protected by the Trust in its Pennypack Preserve natural area. The Trust offers a variety of programs and services including, but not limited to:

• Trails in the Preserve open free to the public to explore
  and enjoy the natural world all year long
• Professionally managed natural area restoration
• Urban deer herd management
• Volunteer training
• Meeting facilities for community organizations
• Professional education and internships

Albert Music Hall. Traditional musical gatherings of the NJ Pinelands. An evening of live country, bluegrass, and pinelands music each Saturday night at 7:30 PM. Year round

MetaArchive/LOCKSS Distributed Preservation Networks Workshop

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)
June 20, 2008 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Omni William Penn Hotel

This all-day workshop will provide information and training for institutions seeking to build or join LOCKSS-based distributed digital preservation networks. Please consider attending if you are interested in learning more about the technical logistics and operational considerations of hosting or participating in a Private LOCKSS Network for distributed preservation.

 

NEH Office of Digital Humanities website

Morris, Chris. “Warner Finds Superior Source for ‘Citizen Kane’ DVD Set.” Billboard 11 August 2001. 10 April 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=keh&AN=4958025&site=ehost-live>.

Chris Morris writes this article in August 2001, just as the popularity of the relatively new home video format DVD was starting to gain popularity.  Movie titles were released incrementally in this new all-digital format.

Morris writes that the popularity of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane has created a high demand for the film to be released to the new DVD video format.  Warner Home had been working on a 60th anniversary release and it was planned for the 25 of September in that same year.  This new release was widely expected to be visually and sonically ungraded from the previous releases to home video.  Morris writes that Warner, in their attempts to rerelease Citizen Kane, had originally not been able to find a suitable quality source film.  RKO’s original camera negatives had been burned in a 1980 vault fire and as a result had also hampered past efforts a restoration.  The 1991 VHS release had featured the copy owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, however this print had dirt and scratches on it, among other defects.  Morris reports, however, that after patient and careful searching, Warner had found a new nitrate fine-grain print in a European archive and that this copy has offered better picture quality and served as an improved audio source.  The improved audio quality is very important because the original score had a very high dynamic range.  He also reports that the new DVD release would include an interview with Roger Ebert, a 1941 newsreel about the film’s premiere, and the documentary film of the Hearst-Welles conflict, The Battle Over Citizen Kane.

One might think that just like a personal computer user, large Hollywood movie studios would have countless backup copies of their master reels.  This seems not to be the case.  A fire at a single film vault destroyed RKO’s only master copy.  Orson Welles was the recipient of the actual production negatives and his copy was also lost in a fiery accident in the 1970s.  By re-mastering and fully digitizing the remaining high quality prints, the data can be stored in numerous locations very inexpensively and very safely.  As we learned in class, nitrate has a propensity to catch on fire and is very dangerous in that respect.  We also learned in class that Hollywood is usually very slow to adopt new media formats.  DVD hit store shelves in mid-1997 yet this movie was released in late 2001, almost 4 years later.  The studios might have an excuse in this case – the long and lucky search for a suitable master copy.

The PREMIS Editorial Committee is pleased to announce the release of the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, version 2.0. This document is a revision of Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata: Final report of the PREMIS Working Group, issued in May 2005. The PREMIS Data
Dictionary and its supporting documentation is a comprehensive, practical resource for implementing preservation metadata in digital archiving systems. Preservation metadata is defined as information that
preservation repositories need to know to support digital materials over the long term.

WERA (WEb ARchive Access) is an archive viewer application that gives an Internet Archive Wayback Machine-like access to web archive collections as well as the possibility to do full text search and easy navigation between different versions of a web page.

This section will provide you with all the information you will need to know about the Commission's grant programs, specifically

• the Certified Local Government Grant Program
• the Keystone Historic Preservation Grant Program, and
• the Pennsylvania History and Museum Grant Program

A blast from the past (including good old electric erasers ;)

Now updated to include preservation and circulation artifacts, and other misc. library 'technology' 

Short definition:

"Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time."

Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums [PDF: 20Mb / 118 p.] is a collaborative project of the Library of Congress and the Foundation Center. This publication lists 1,725 grants of $5,000 or more awarded by 474 foundations, from 2003 through 2007. It covers grants to public, academic, research, school, and special libraries, and to archives and museums for activities related to conservation and preservation. This publication includes:

• an introduction that explains the book's coverage, arrangement, entries, and how to research using the volume. Note: This pdf file contains hotlinks to free online grant writing tutorials and introductions to foundations offered by the Foundation Center as well as to some other widely used non-profit guidance on preservation grants found on the conservation online web site.
• a statistical analysis of grant funding in the area of preservation by foundation, recipient location, subject, recipient type (e.g., Library), grant size, and foundation generosity nationwide.
• state-by-state descriptions of projects funded in preservation nationwide including the foundation's name, limitations on giving, focus for giving, recipient(s), size of grant, and purpose of the grant described. Note: This section is hot linked in the pdf version directly to more detailed descriptions of the foundations.
• indexes by recipient, geographic area of the recipient, and subject. Note: If you do not find what you are looking for in the indices, use the find feature to search the text for your term.
• a list of all foundations that have donated to preservation with their contact information and limitations.

From the website:

About MetaArchive: Collaboratively preserving our digital heritage

The MetaArchive Cooperative provides low-cost, high-impact preservation services to help ensure the long-term accessibility of the digital assets of universities, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.

Why we need digital preservation. Today, more than 93% of the world’s information is produced as digital files, not print documents. How do we care for these new digital resources—from government websites to corporate emails and from scanned images to born-digital recordings? As evidenced by such catastrophic events as blackouts, fires, and hurricanes, as well as basic hardware and software failures, we need to act now to begin providing long-term digital preservation services for our digital history or we risk losing them altogether.

What we do. The MetaArchive Cooperative is building Trusted Digital Repositories to provide long-term care for digital materials. The Cooperative was formed in 2004 out of our increasing concern that the digital items that define our culture and history might be forever lost due to natural disaster, human error, or sheer neglect. The Cooperative functions as a community initiative. Its collaborative networks are comprised of libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions that seek to cooperatively preserve their digital materials, not by outsourcing to other organizations, but by actively participating in the preservation of their own content.

How we do it. To preserve digital assets, the MetaArchive Cooperative uses a systemic, forward-looking technological approach called distributed digital preservation. Our member institutions identify collections that they want to preserve. These collections are then ingested by our system and are copied, distributed and stored on secure file servers in multiple locations. These servers do not merely back up the materials, but rather provide a dynamic means of constantly checking each file and providing repairs whenever necessary. 

3 minutes of bugs eating books - set to techno music!

"Preservation is a fundamental role and responsibility of the research library," according to a new statement from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), "Research Libraries' Enduring Responsibility for Preservation."

"With digital information forming a growing share of the cultural record-joining a variety of analog formats-a new level of attention needs to be focused on preservation strategies. Research libraries must continue to invest in local preservation activities while increasingly engaging in collaborative preservation activities as well."

"The CoLibri System is an innovative internationally patented book protection system. With CoLibri, you can quickly and easily apply a special transparent, custom fitted durable and protective covering to your books."

"The National Library of New Zealand is pleased to announce the open-source release of version 3.2 of its Metadata Extraction Tool.

The Metadata Extraction Tool programmatically extracts preservation metadata from a range of file formats including PDF documents, image files, sound files, office documents, and many others. It automatically extracts preservation-related metadata from digital files then outputs that metadata in XML. It can be used through a graphical user interface or command-line interface."

Managing the Intangible: Creating, Storing and Retrieving Digital Surrogates of Historical Materials

Dates: Monday, April 30 and Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Times: Program Schedule
9:00 am to 5:00 pm each day
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Reception on Monday, April 30

Location:
UMUC Inn and Conference Center
3501 University Boulevard, East
Adelphi, Maryland 20783

The name of the listserv is DIGIPRES. For purposes of clarity, a working definition of digital preservation is included in this invitation.

**Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to information in digital formats over time.**

The unmoderated listserv shall have the following characteristics:

* cultural organization [mainly library but also archives and museums] centered
* not TOO technical but technical topics could certainly be covered
* not focused on any single digital preservation initiative but touching on them all
* Questions from practitioners could be asked and answered, such as:

* At your digital repository, how do you ...[whatever]?
* Which metadata schema do you use for your institutional repository?
* When you buy electronic books, do you attempt to guarantee long term access to the files in your license agreements?

Powerpoint presentation about shelving books and other handling tips.   Nice photo illustrations

Powerpoint presentation gives instructions on vacuuming the stacks, etc. 

"The Library of Congress, as part of the PREMIS maintenance activity, commissioned Karen Coyle to provide this study to assist the newly established PREMIS Editorial Committee, in consultation with the PREMIS Implementers Group, with its first revision of the data dictionary and schemas.  The intention is to improve the specification so that institutions trying to assess their rights to preserve materials in digital formats will be able to provide enough information in their digital repositories to make such assessments about their materials over time. In this study Karen Coyle reviews the landscape of digital rights, analyzes various preservation rights scenarios and the sorts of preservation actions that digital repositories might take, relates copyright law to preservation actions, and provides recommendations for revision where the data dictionary needs expansion."

Photos of conervation labs contributed by PADG members

From webcitation.org:

WebCite® is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL.

A WebCite® reference is an archived webcitation, and rather than linking to the live website (which can and probably will disappear in the future), authors of scholarly works will link to the archived WebCite® copy on webcitation.org.

Penn in now an institutional member of LBI

OCLC's website for the PREMIS working group

LC's site for ongoing PREMIS activity

WERA (Web ARchive Access) is a freely available solution for searching and navigating archived web document collections. It works like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine except it also allows for full-text search of the web archive. WERA is a php application based on pieces from -- and now, with Nutchwax replaces -- NwaToolset. The WERA component includes an arcretriever webapp for the fetching of records from directories of Internet Archive ARC files. See the WERA Manual for more on how WERA works, requirements, and installation. For a demo of WERA+nutchwax, see nwa.nb.no/wera. WERA development has been sponsored by the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC).

The national libraries of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, The British Library (UK), The Library of Congress (USA) and the Internet Archive (USA) acknowledged the importance of international collaboration for preserving Internet content for future generations and therefore decided to form a consortium called the International Internet Preservation Consortium.

The goals of the consortium are:

• To enable the collection of a rich body of Internet content from around the world to be preserved in a way that it can be archived, secured and accessed over time.
• To foster the development and use of common tools, techniques and standards that enable the creation of international archives.
• To encourage and support national libraries everywhere to address Internet archiving and preservation.