So Now It's Digital: What Next?

Wednesday, April 16th, 10:15 - 11:20

speaker: Dr. Samantha Hastings

spent a lot of time, energy, and resources over how to digitize, standards, etc.

in the middle of all this, we got sideswiped by the things that were born digital

today we'll talk about issues around how do we protect the longevity of access to these resources?

issues

what do you think are the issues surrounding protection of access?

future accessibility

subject access

cost, each year (maintain, migrate, new content, preservation)

technical skills of staff (IT as well as library)

maintain storage units and hardware

business consultant or MIS guys often don't "get it"

storage

protect anything

start with the idea that you protect everything

we won't know the value of anything for the future

for instance, information captured with the image (auto-generated camera and scanning data)

keep this in the metadata just in case

in many instances, your metadata may cost more per item than the digitization itself

open source

problem with proprietary packages is that they may be less open to migration

the more open source you use, the better

"what format can this be migrated from and to? can I export this into another program with different formats?"

will your hardware support these formats? do you have the older hardware when needed for accessibility?

NASA and their magnetic tape reader -- had only one machine, that broke, and parts were no longer for sale

plan for obsolesence

every couple of years, try every 20th disc to check that the planned lifespan is working and the data isn't corrupted (despite what the format is supposed to do)

paper and microfilm will last longer, so keep microfilm backups if you can

plan for new media

we get more options every day (Bradford's law)

nanotechnology movement is interesting, but it's like terrorism to the preservationists

you can't be sure you're making the right decisions

the work we do has to do with the quality of people's lives and the future of civilization

we need to take it seriously

degradation

if you migrate data on a constant basis, there will be some degradation

pixels, 1's and 0's will degrade

refreshing the data, moving the data, keeping ahead of new media

internet archive: huge set of servers, Brewster-Kale, in DC in a bunker out

these kinds of large repositories are great--takes responsibility out of individuals

plan for disaster

Katrina is a good example; what the Iraq war has done to libraries there

how do you protect your stuff from this?

museum attitude toward protecting our objects

electronic media is fragile to particular things like dust, electro-magnetic pulse

easiest done with LOCKSS model

be sure you have several copies in several places

at her university, certain people are designated to keep backup files at their home, off campus (records on who has what)

OAIS

can crosswalk, non-proprietary format

biggest plus is that it has the most flexibility in the way things are packaged and stored

gives you most choices in the best formats

will let you know when it's getting close to degredation

(preservation metadata)

can import and export in various packages

Cathy Hartman and work on the NDIPP project, using this for archiving federal websites

strategies

• viability (how long can you keep this stuff alive? 5 - 10 year window adequate on some things; 20 * * years is probably the most you can hope for in any media)
• authenticity (how do you know it's the true thing and hasn't been manipulated?)
• emulation (can you pretend to be old software/old format?)
• universal virtual machine (UVM; computer smart enough to pretend to be any format/operating environment; very promising)
• format migration (being able to anticipate the variety of formats--multimedia collection complexifies this)
• format normalization (you can take proprietary extensions off of some of your formats)

this is important; we need to preserve our cultural heritage before we go to Mars

longevity of access

• want to say to our funders, our public, and ourselves that we are protecting what we are responsible for
• it's not the same as collection development, where you pick and choose
• the unknowns are too huge for this

life cycles

• our digital objects depend on us, our policies, state government (funders)
• life cycle of what's important to the people
• some people may not see this as so important
• you need to be able to do these things in a crunch, with no money, be innovative
• librarians are typically good at this
• example of library in Carver Bay, what they did to get a new library branch (with game room)

problem of resources

don't wait until you have funds, resources, or training

just do it--you'll be surprised by how able you are to deal with what comes up

time, workflow, becoming efficient is more important than the amount of time that we spend on things

future of digital libraries

• huge area of jobs that deal just with curation of data
• but those 0's and 1's mean nothing unless they represent an object that's of value to someone
• we've been sold short by the idea that we just need to curate the data
• normally they are bachelor's-level positions that may not understand the mission of libraries
• role in learning and human development
• revisions to American Art Museum: glass wall that looks into their conservation area
  • you can see people doing the work of conservation
• this is part of the sell for the importance of preservation and the investment to begin with
• will be a change to where you may not even realize it's a digital library that you're playing in
• lines of "real" vs. "digital" are no longer demarcations

you need a clear mission with good goals

Texas resources

• Cathy Hartman has a Digital Projects Lab at UNT
  • guidelines for preservation
  • worked with State Library of Texas
  • it's free
  • Daniel Alemnah working with her, looking at tags and automated metadata systems; also PREMIS
• UNT SLIS
  • all library schools are a great resource; UT archive program is great
  • they love to help people
• general libraries
  • especially academic libraries, who get better funding for these projects
  • harder to sell your expense on this in a public library
  • it's cheaper to store things on a terabyte drive than all those books in a building with climate/maintenance costs
• State Library
  • Danielle Plummer; TXHDI
• Amigos (OCLC)
  • alot of training and workshops
  • have a preservation officer
• Photographic Preservation Society (Ft. Worth)
  • digitize much of the Cowgirl Museum's collection
  • Ft. Worth Public Library
  • Nathan (Hall) is Digital Project Manager at PPS

other resources... (See slides up at txla.org)

• Clifford Lynch and CNI
• Brewster Kahl and Internet Archive
• California Digital Library (NDIPP WAS project)
  • Daniel Greenstone (?)
  • came up with idea of crosswalking
• Cornell
  • Kodak funding; done this for about 10 years
  • mainly training
• Colorado Digitization Project
  • guidelines and practices for small to medium-sized libraries
• Library Technology Reports
  • conglomerate; highly recommended
  • Feb/March 2008 issue is on preservation of digital collections
• South Carolina Digital Library
  • guidelines for 3-D objects
  • state-wide license for ContentDM

email: hastings at sc.edu

Q/A:

• of what possible use is normalization?
  • it doesn't gain us anything in the end. and every single object is different, regardless of they are all pieces of music, etc. UVM works very, very well and may work in the longrun.

• are those just conceptual?
  • no, we have them. they will take anything and translate it into an open-source nonproprietary project. You have to know a lot to begin with (PHP, MySQL, etc.), and that's the problem--finding people that know this in our libraries.

• what do you think about archivists and libraries?
  • the archivists tend to want to box things. but i don't think we can avoid getting to the item level. we can't catalog things by boxes, we have to get down to the item level and record the dates of letters, etc. we need to find the commonalities of our two missions, instead of concentrating on our many differences.
  • the metadata has more value than the digitized object, because we wouldn't know to find papyra scrolls unless we first found tags--those tags were metadata.

• how can you address potential copyright problems when you migrate from one format to another?
  • it doesn't matter. i think it matters who has the original object, and who has rights to reproduction. migration is reproduction for preservation, not for profit, so I think this will stand up in courts.

• i purchase media, and it was VHS to DVD and now to Blu-Ray. What should we do about this?
  • long-term switch to access, versus ownership of those digital objects. long-term, our access will be online instead of physical access. I'm not even getting DVDs to my house; I'm downloading movies through Netflix. This is how it's moving.
  • keep your core collections for your users and accreditation agencies, in print. it's not cost-effective to get rid of all the paper. i like the cool technology; i think we need to be smart about how we meld them and offer variety in what formats we offer.