At the close of day 1, we heard a summary of the findings of the international survey on the impact of copyright law on digital preservation. That indicated that the UK had one of the strictest set of constraints of all the countries looked at - in terms of who is permitted to carry out certain acts in the name of preservation and what those acts are. Other countries have more relaxed exemptions and that doesn’t appear to be causing the major rightsholdfers [sic] any significant financial loss. That should give us hope for some change in the law in the UK at least. And Horst Foster, making the keynote speech opening day 2, appeared to echo this at the European level, implying that the case for change had been made and accepted, although he was notably cautious about making any promises as to when this change might come about. -- da blogQuestions: should we just ignore the copyright problems like Internet Archive and Google? -- Digital Curation Blog
Trends in archives and libraries are toward JPEG2000 as an image storage format, even though it has to be converted before browsers can use it. Oya Rieger, talking about digitization of books, cited the smaller file size compared to JPEG, and the support of archival features such as incorporation of metadata into the file.Oya Rieger has been speaking about their large scale book digitisation processes. They first entered an agreement with Microsoft, and later with Google; they were naturally very disappointed when Microsoft pulled out, although this did give them unrestricted access to the books digitised under that programme. On the down-side, they suddenly found they need 40 TB of storage to manage these resources, and it took a year or so before they could achieve this. Oya related their work to the OAIS preservation reference model, and it was interesting to see not only that infamous diagram, but also a mapping of actual tools to the elements of the process model. It’s worth looking at her paper to see this; I noted that they were using ADORe for the archival storage layer, but there were several other tools that I did not manage to note down. -- Digital Curation BlogPREMIS is gaining traction as a format for preservation metadata. For instance, the British Library is using PREMIS 1.1, along with METS and MODS, for an eJournal archiving project. The article is available on the D-Lib site.
Stephen Abrams gave a presentation on JHOVE2, which is still in the design and prototyping stages. It's getting obvious from various discussions that the problems in JHOVE are becoming more of a concern. -- File Format Blog
Alex Ball is talking about the problems in curating engineering and CAD data. In what appears to be a lose-lose strategy for all of us, engineering is an area with extremely long time requirements for preserving the data, but increasing problems in doing so given the multiple strangleholds that IPR has: on the data themselves, on the encodings and formats tied up in specific tightly controlled versions of high cost CAD software, coupled with “engineering as a service” approaches, which might encourage organisations to continue to tightly hold this IPR. An approach here is looking for light-weight formats (he didn’t say desiccated but I will) that data can be reduced to. They have a solution called LiMMA for this. Another approach is linking preservation planning approaches with Product Lifecycle Management. In this area they are developing a Registry/Repository of Representation Information for Engineering (RRoRIfE). Interesting comment that for marketing purposes the significant properties would include approximate geometry and no tolerances, but for manufacturing you would want exact geometry and detailed tolerances. -- Digital Curation BlogRichard Wright talking about storage and the “cost of risk”. In early days dropping a storage device meant losing a few kilobytes, now it could be GBytes and years of work. Storage costs declining and capacity increasing exponentially roughly related to Moore’s law (doubling every 18 months). Usage is going up, too, and risk is proportionate to usage, so risk is going up too. Risk proportional to no of devices and to size and to use… plus the more commonly discussed format obsolescence, IT infrastructure obsolescence etc. So if storage gets really cheap, it gets really risky! -- Digital Curation Blog
Question from Steve Knight about how we move to a position where there is a market for digital preservation solution? -- Digital Curation BlogSarah Jones on developing a toolkit for a Data Audit Framework: to help institutions to determine what data are held, where they are located and how they are being managed. 4 pilot sites including Edinburgh and Imperial already under way, UCL and KCL in planning. Detailed workflow has been developed as a self-audit tool. Four phases in the audit process, the second being identifying and classifying the assets; looks like major work. Turns out the pilots are related to department level rather than institutions, which makes sense knowing academic attitudes to “the Centre”! I did hear from one institution that it was difficult getting responses in some cases. Simple online tool provided. DAF to be launched tomorrow (1 October) at the British Academy, together with DRAMBORA toolkit. -- Digital Curation Blog
In discussion, we felt that the point of David’s remarks was that we should understand that perfection was not achievable in the digital world, as it never was in the analogue world. We have never managed to keep all we wanted to keep (or to have kept) for as long as we wanted to keep it, without any damage. -- Digital Curation BlogOne recurring them, picked up at the outset by Lynne Brindley and in Steve Knight’s closing remarks, was that ‘digital preservation’ is not the term to be using in discussions with our institutions and the world, echoing remarks on the DCC blog which Brian later picked up on here. Steve prefers the phrase ‘permanent access’. which is indeed outcome-focussed. However, we’ve also said in PoWR that preservation isn’t always forever, so I would prefer something a little more all-embracing - ‘long-lived access’ might fit. -- JISC PoWR
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