DPC

Report reveals major gaps in long term management of valuable digital assets

15th February 2006

A 'state of the nation' report today reveals that less than 20% of UK organisations surveyed have a strategy in place to deal with the risk of loss or degradation to their digital resources - despite a very high level of awareness of the risks and potential economic penalties.

With the release today of the report, Mind the gap: assessing digital preservation needs in the UK, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) aims to help government, public institutions and private companies turn high awareness into concerted action.

The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

It gives me great pleasure to announce that The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has become an allied organisation of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC).

The ICPSR (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ICPSR/) is, like the DPC a membership organisation.  It encourages and facilitates research and instruction in the social sciences and related areas by acquiring, developing, archiving, and disseminating data and documentation relevant to a wide spectrum of disciplines, and by conducting related instructional programs.

Chris Rusbridge, a Digital Preservation Coalition Board Director, said:

Significant properties are essential characteristics of a digital object which must be preserved over time for the digital object to remain accessible and meaningful. Proper understanding of the significant properties of digital objects is critical to establish best practices and helps answer the fundamental question related to digital preservation: what to preserve?

The importance of significant properties has been highlighted by a number of notable digital preservation initiatives in recent years. These include a range of projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the European Union, in which work has been undertaken to investigate the factors affecting decisions on significant properties, to establish generic models for determining them, to develop tools and services for describing and extracting them, or simply to understand complex digital object types, using the concept of significant properties as a starting point.

JISC, the British Library and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are organising a joint workshop on 7th April at the British Library Conference Centre. The intention is to bring together the relevant projects and report on progress to date.

Neil Grindley (JISC) Welcome and introduction

Keynote Speaker Andrew Wilson (NAA) Presentation PDF 199KB

Stephen Grace (CeRch) INSPECT Project Presentation PDF 1.3MB

David Duce (OBU) JISC Study 1 - Vector Images Presentation PDF 1.6MB

Mike Stapleton, (SSL) JISC Study 2 - Moving Images Presentation PDF 561KB

Brian Matthews (STFC) JISC Study 3 - Software Presentation PDF 1.1MB

Richard Davis (ULCC) JISC Study 4 - e-Learning Objects Presentation PDF 1.0MB

Adrian Brown (PLANETS) Preservation Characterisation in PLANETS Presentation PDF 1.5MB

Roger Lloyd (Barclay Wealth) Industry / Media Presentation PDF 839KB

Colin Neilson (DCC) SCARP Project Presentation PDF 719KB

Stephen Rankin (on behalf of David Giaretta) (DCC) Digital Object Semantics Presentation PDF 453KB

Cal Lee (UNC Chapel Hill) SIGPROPS Presentation PDF 193KB

Andrew Wilson (NAA) Comments/summary

Chair, Chris Rusbridge (DCC) Discussion

Frances Boyle (DPC) Closing Remarks

Key to acronyms:

Photographs

 
 The Organisers

Good news the already popular PDF file format adopted by consumers and business alike is one of the most logical formats to preserve today's electronic information for tomorrow.

According to the latest report released today by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), Portable Document Formats (PDF) is one of the best file formats to preserve electronic documents and ensure their survival for the future.  This announcement will allow information officers to follow a standardised approach for preserving electronic documents.

Information management and long-term preservation are major issues facing consumers and businesses in the 21^st Century.  This report is one of a series where The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) aims to think about and address the challenges facing us.

The Digital Preservation Coalition has examined JPEG 2000 in a report published today.  The report concludes that JPEG 2000 represents a great stride forward for the archival community.  The format now allows for greater compression rates and a recompression rate that is visually lossless.

The findings come as the Digital Preservation Coalition launch its latest 'Technology Watch Report' written by Dr. Robert Buckley, a Research Fellow with Xerox, 'JPEG 2000 - a practical digital preservation standard?'.  The report looks in-depth at the new format and the challenges it has to cope with.  JPEG 2000 is widely used to collect and distribute a variety of images from geospatial, medical imaging, digital cinema, and image repositories to networked images. Interest in JPEG 2000 is now growing in the archival and library sectors, as institutions look for more efficient formats to store the results of major digitisation programmes.

Programme

Background

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), now in its sixth year, seeks to be a proactive membership organization fostering joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK.

At the start of the new chapter in its history, the DPC would like to hear from its members and to provide them with an opportunity to shape its next, hopefully equally successful and productive, phase. So please do attend this event which will go some way to inform DPC activities and priorities.

About the Day

The morning session will comprise of presentations from the five short-listed DP Award projects. This will provide you with an opportunity to learn more about the diverse and fascinating projects that were showcased at the Conservation Awards ceremony in September. We will also hear the Judges' perspective into how they evaluated the projects. You may even pick up some tips for the 2009 DP Awards!

http://www2.digitalpreservationcoalition.co.uk/advocacy/2007-shortlist.html

This session will be chaired by Kevin Ashley, the Chair of the Judging Panel.

After a nutritious lunch and an initial briefing you will break up into groups to focus on your selected topics. We will endeavour to ensure that you are assigned to your preferred group but we cannot always guarantee this and indeed may have to assign you to another group. There will however be an opportunity to contribute views on all issues that will be covered during the day. Full details of your group allocation will be sent to you before the event.

The key recommendations, comments, issues which arise from the discussion will be shared with other participants through a 'speed reporting' session (more about this on the day) followed by the final summing up of all those 'big ideas'.

Breakout Group Themes

The following are the themes which the groups will consider. The bullet points are merely suggestions to kick start the discussions - you may wish to consider other issues within your area - so please do feel free to! Further details will be provided before the event. Please indicate your preferences for the groups, in 1-5 order where (1) is your preferred option.

1. 'Top 5' for 2008 - Planning for the Near Future:

   1. Consider what are the most (5) important issues in the digital landscape over the coming year
   2. How will these impact on digital preservation?
   3. What are the threats and opportunities that these issues will bring to digital preservation
   4. How can the DPC contribute to these discussions?
   5. How can the DPC take forward these issues on behalf of its members?
2. DPC Governance:
   1. Look at the mission - is this still relevant? If not why not? [A copy of the published goals etc will be provided]
   2. How would you improve the mission statement?
   3. Look at the goals, aims and principles. Could these be recast, reshaped?
   4. If so how, why etc.
3. DPC Activities:
   1. What type of event do you find useful e.g. workshops, conferences?
   2. What activities would you like the DPC to run that they have not previously done?
   3. Is the DPC 'Handbook of Digital Preservation' still useful?
   4. Would you like to see the Handbook updated?
   5. Would you like to see a follow up to 'The Mind the Gap' report?
   6. Would you like to see more training programmes offered through the DPC?
4. Outreach:
   1. Website - how could this be improved?
   2. What information would you like to see on the website?
   3. Awareness alerting tools. What tools work best for you? For example the 'What's New' list on the website, RSS feeds, mailing lists etc.
   4. Create some strap/tag lines for the DPC. Why are these meaningful?
   5. Suggest 5 pragmatic ways how the DPC could continue to serve its members.
5. Future Gazing - Making Ready for the Mid Future :
   1. Picture star date 2017, what will the digital landscape comprise of then for all our constituencies e.g. learners, citizens, researchers, government etc?
   2. What emerging technologies, trends (social, organizational etc), developments etc will impact on digital preservation?
   3. How can we ensure that the digital preservation component is kept on the agenda of other allied digital initiatives?
   4. How can the DPC empower its members to be fit for the 'digital preservation purpose' now and in the future?

Who Should Attend?

Colleagues from member organizations whatever your role and interest is in digital preservation or related digital asset management and stewardship areas. Your views and comments would be most welcome.

Benefits of Attendance

• A chance to learn from exemplars of good practice from the DP Award short-listed projects
• To network and engage with colleagues from other member organizations
• An opportunity to air your views on matters digital preservation
• A chance to dabble in 'digital gazing'
• To contribute to, and take forward the work and aims of the DPC
• Finally to become a shaper of the DPC

Introduction

The JPEG2000 image compression technique has been cited by experts as a new archiving format for digital images. It is both a preservation and delivery format, and has been seen as a possible alternative to the TIFF format which most institutions use as a long-term archiving standard. Produced by both imaging experts and the Joint Photographic Experts Group, it is now a recognised ISO standard. The standard JPEG file format which is so widely in use is not yet an ISO standard.

JPEG 2000 allows a wide range of uses and can support a wide range of formats and multiple resolutions. It can also offer both lossy and lossless compression modes. Most importantly it is a flexible file format which allows metadata to be built in to the file, a vital element of the digital preservation process.

However, the standard is not yet widely in use and there is as yet no native support for it in internet browsers. More investigation and practical implementations of the standard are yet to be seen but it could be used as a potential archival standard.

The workshop

This forum will look more into the details of the standard and expert speakers who are familiar with the standard or have implemented it will share their experiences. The forum will also include industry experts to talk about the creation of the file formats. Delegates will learn about the benefits of the standard, especially with regard to digital preservation and whether it is worth implementing it within their own institutions as an image storage format. Guest speakers include Bill Comstock, Harvard College Library, Christoph Becker, Vienna University of Technology, Manfred Thaller, Cologne University and Jim King, Adobe.

Who should attend the workshop?

Digital Repository Developers, Library and Archives professionals, Digital Preservation (technology watchers) future trends, Information Managers (public sector) and anyone with large numbers of images within their institutions or companies.

Cost of the workshop is £60 for DPC members and £100 for non members

Programme

The workshop will be chaired by Professor Roger James, Head of Digital Library Infrastructure, British Library.

Afternoon session

Article on Overview of E-journal Archiving and Preservation Workshop, UKSG, Serials 20 (3) November 2007

Overview and Presentations

The DPC, The British Library and JISC held a 1 day workshop looking at the issue of e-journal archiving and preservation. The workshop brought together international stakeholders from the information world, including publishers, librarians and representatives from archiving solution providers. The day was chaired by Hazel Woodward of Cranfield University and provided an opportunity to review what initiatives are currently in place and what more developments are needed.

The first morning session saw Anne Kenney (PDF 519KB) of Cornell University provide an overview of the e-journal archiving landscape, drawing on work that was done in 2006 to pull together the opinions of library directors and also provide a detailed review of 12 archiving solutions. This was followed by presentations from 4 different providers of archiving and preservation services. Victoria Reich (PDF 13MB) , Director of the LOCKSS program, gave an overview of LOCKSS and CLOCKSS and emphasised that the more archived copies of an item the safer it is. Eileen Fenton (PDF 593KB), Executive Director of Portico, described the service provided by Portico which archives peer review scholarly journals and to date has more than 5,800 journals from 30 publishers. Erik Oltmans (PDF 377KB), Head of Acquisitions and Cataloguing at the National Library of Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) spoke of the e-deport service which from a starting point in 1995 is now ingesting 50,000 items a day. The UK national library perspective was given by Richard Boulderstone (PDF 418KB), Director of e-Strategy at The British Library, who showed that the traditional scholarly communication process is changing and this requires new processes and durable technical architecture to ensure that archiving solutions are able to satisfy requirements now and in the future.

The afternoon session saw presentations from the publisher and university library perspectives. Steven Hall (PDF 156KB), Commerical Director at Wiley-Blackwell, demonstrated that publishers take the issue of archiving seriously but there needs to be more clarification when it comes to access. Preservation is not the same as access and access is not the same as open access. Paul Ayris (PDF 440KB), Director of Library Services at UCL, said that UCL were moving towards the e-only delivery of journals and therefore were reviewing what solutions need to be in place to ensure continued access. Paul also highlighted the potential costs of archiving.

The workshop finished with a question and answer session which enabled delegates to pose questions to the expert panel and Hazel Woodward brought the day to an end by summarising the themes of the day.

Morning session: The E-Journal Preservation Landscape
Chair: Hazel Woodward

Afternoon session: High-level Principles of E-journal Archiving and Preservation Services
Chair: Hazel Woodward

  
This one day forum was jointly organised by CILIP in Scotland and the Digital Preservation Coalition and was aimed at library and information professionals who work with digital resources.  The forum explored whether content is being locked away  behind technical protection measures and asked how we can make content accessible while upholding the rights of intellectual property owners. The forum also highlighted digital preservation issues in order to ensure long term accessibility of digital resources.

Programme

Chair: William Kilbride, Glasgow City Council Museums

The DPC held a Briefing day on different implementations of digital repositories. This event was aimed at people who are in the process of planning digital repositories and who want to find out more about available tools and the benefits of each model. The day highlighted different approaches to and aspects of repository models and was useful for those who wish to take a more modular approach to repository building. The day was also useful to people who are starting to move from strategic planning to actual repository implementation.

Sayeed Choudhury emphasised that institutional repositories should provide both an institutional service and long-term custodianship of digital academic output. He also highlighted however how there was a definite lack of discussion on the digital preservation element within repositories; preservation is very hard indeed, and there need to be more case studies. An important theme was that there is no one-size-fits-all solution and institutions should focus on their needs rather than on their systems.
Sayeed Choudhury - Johns Hopkins University: Digital Repository Models (PDF 123KB)

Dave Thompson of Wellcome Trust outlined why they chose Fedora as a system. The outstanding reasons were that it was cheap and versatile. He outlined the implementation of the relationship builder and the metadata extraction tool. As a test bed Dave chose to archive an email spam collection and the methodologies for doing this provide a good case study. The overall message was that a good approach is to manage the information and metadata, not the technology.
Dave Thompson - Wellcome Trust: Fedora at the Wellcome Library, progress and work to date (PDF 150KB)

Paul Bevan continued on the Fedora theme and how they have used it at the National Library of Wales for their digital asset management system. Their interesting project has mapped OAIS elements into the archive. Paul emphasised the importance of cross-organisation buy-in, and the technical challenges of moving digital objects into a managed environment.
Paul Bevan - National Library of Wales: Implementing an Integrated Digital Asset Management System: FEDORA and OAIS in Context (PDF 1.1MB)

Steve Hitchcock outlined the history of institutional repositories and how they have gradually developed out of the open archival initiative. The highlighted the results of a survey of repositories; for example, how only one out of the eighteen surveyed even have a preservation policy for their repository, which is a cause for concern.
Steve Hitchcock - Southampton University: Repository models and policies for preservation (PDF 581KB)

Andrew Wilson's talk outlined the SherpaDP project which investigates a distributed preservation model. This comprehensive work flow is to be the basis of a business model, not a free service; almost an exemplar for outsourced preservation services. The project will also create a handbook. He emphasised that there is a need for 'object mobility' within the model, and how each of the detailed workflow modules map to the OAIS model.
Andrew Wilson - AHDS: SHERPA-DP: Distributed Repositories/Distributed Preservation (PDF 153KB)