Education
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Persistence of Memory
Stewardship of Digital Assets
November 1-2, 2005
Boston, MA
What is Persistence of Memory? This conference, taught by a faculty of national experts, addressed the question of digital longevity. Institutions are rapidly acquiring collections of digitized and born-digital resources. Without intervention, these materials will not survive even a single human career. This two-day conference highlighted evolving best practices for digital preservation to help you with the life-cycle management of your institution’s collections.
Intended Audience? Librarians, archivists, museum professionals, information technology specialists, chief information officers, and administrators responsible for managing and preserving digital resources.
Tuesday, November 1, 2005 |
Keynote Address:
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What is a Digital Asset? "Digital asset" can be used to refer to a wide range of formats and genres, some of which have close analogs in the real world and others that exist only in virtual space. Pearce-Moses will explore the meaning of "digital asset" in terms of functions and characteristics and how different contexts give different senses to the concept. A richer understanding of the use and components of digital assets can help frame the larger question of stewardship. |
Use Requirements and User Needs Reilly will report on a number of recent analyses of the users of born-digital primary historical and cultural evidence. The analyses yield new information about the behaviors and needs of researchers in three fields: history, cultural studies, and political science. The ways in which these research communities obtain and use digital content have large implications for libraries and archives, and may require fundamental changes in the curatorial paradigm. |
Internal Cooperation "Internal Cooperation: Not An Oxymoron" addresses how to form, manage and motivate staff teams to undertake technology projects. Looking at examples from both medium and large art museums, the presentation will explore the psychology of teams. Best practices for teams including setting up rules, defining missions, encouraging museum-wide communication, operating within the organizational structure, and celebrating success will be reviewed. |
External Consortia: Collaboration for Success “As digitization moves from small discrete projects conducted within individual institutions to larger multi-departmental, multi-institutional, and international programs, collaboration becomes an increasingly vital consideration.” (National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials, 2002.) Bishoff will explore how collaboratives can increase the likelihood of success, address characteristics of successful digital partnerships, barriers to success, and examples of models for successful digital collaboration based on her work with numerous statewide collaboratives, including the Colorado Digitization Program. |
Wednesday, November 2, 2005 |
Recovering from Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding it caused was a blow of unimaginable proportions to the city of New Orleans, both in terms of its ferocity and the scope of its effect. Two months after the initial storm, the city’s cultural institutions are just beginning what will undoubtedly prove to be a long and difficult recovery process. In a city that is frequently predicted to return to normalcy in a radically different economic and social environment, these institutions have a vital role to play. Given the resource constraints of most of these institutions, what role can they realistically play? In this brief talk, Patch will try to touch upon this issue as he examines the difficulties of recovery from the viewpoint of his own institution and his place within it. What did we do right? What did we do wrong? How will the actions we took and intend to take now serve us going forward? |
Obsolescence and Risk As more and more digital assets are held by cultural institutions there is more and more concern about risk management and insuring these “collections” against loss. Carrying digital assets into the future is more than carrying insurance, though there are also a growing number of institutions that also insure against loss. What are the appropriate steps needed to protect digital assets? How does the fast-changing landscape of computer hardware and software affect the long-term risk of carrying digital assets forward into not only our future but also future generations? This talk will discuss issues and bring forward protective measures for digital collections. |
Technology: Storage and Backup The recent RLG/OCLC report on Trusted Digital Repositories states that the purpose of such repositories is to "provide reliable, long-term access to managed digital resources to its designated community, now and in the future." In other words, digital resources are being preserved so that they can be used. The immediate requirement for such accessibility is that the digital assets be interpretable, and thus renderable into humanly-sensible form. However, for this to happen the data must first be available for interpretation. Thus, the initial responsibility of a preservation repository is the long-term storage of the assets under its managed care. A repository storage strategy must ensure both data viability, the ability to retrieve the data from their storage medium, and fixity, the assurance that the retrieved data have not changed from their original form. This presentation will identify the pertinent issues surrounding digital preservation storage strategies and then illustrate them with a case study of the Harvard University Library's Digital Repository Service (DRS), a large-scale preservation repository for more than 3 million assets (over 11 TB) in production operation for over five years. |
Metadata for Preservation In order to keep digital content alive over time, archives need to monitor the technological environment and user expectations, analyze their collections, and plan appropriate preservation strategies. Preservation metadata – the information that characterizes a digital object in order to facilitate preservation – is a critical component of any preservation program. During the past decade, initiatives around the world have worked to define the information required to preserve digital objects. Each study has built upon the foundations of the ones before, refining the library and digital archive community’s understanding of digital formats and digital preservation processes. The state of the art is represented by the final report, including a data dictionary of preservation metadata elements, of the international PREMIS working group and the ongoing efforts to establish a Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR). This presentation will review the role of preservation metadata in a digital archive, focusing on PREMIS and related metadata standards, scenarios for the creation of preservation metadata, and the role of the GDFR. |
Legal, Economic and Moral Obligations Recognizing that obligations may vary depending on the legal status of the collector, these observations are confined primarily to the obligations of non-profit operating foundations. It is likely that we are more willing in practice to set a higher bar for these public institutions than for an individual private collector. In the absence of a general law of charities in the United States, it is useful to begin by attempting to find some shared sense of "moral obligation" as it may impinge on the persistence of memory and as it may apply to the use and stewardship of digital assets in the context of collecting institutions. It is proposed that business strategies can be - indeed, usually are - drawn from the moral obligations that we identify and enshrine in mission statements. These strategies can describe, for example, the activities inherent in the appropriate relationship of a collecting institution to the public good, and these strategies, in turn, provide an appropriate context for considering the impact of specific legal obligations and for defining the nature of financial obligations and opportunities. |
Financing Digital Preservation This talk will present the strategic perspectives on financing digital preservation effectively. The ends of information are human ends and the creation of digital resources are often driven by immediate human information desires rather than long-term visions. The audience and other stakeholders define the economic factors by which digital information is valued, used, and ultimately retained. In looking to finance digital preservation there are a number of different issues to consider, including business planning, risk management, possible revenue streams, and a clear cost-benefit relationship. This talk will explore all these issues and offer a means to develop a cost-and-benefit justification for digital preservation to help secure the financial underpinning needed to make institutional digital preservation a realistic proposition. |
Do What You Do Best: The Case for Establishing Preservation Domains At the very heart of every discussion regarding the sustainability of digital preservation is a deeper, logically prior set of questions that must be addressed. These questions regard the mission, the longevity, the reputation, and the trustworthiness of the institution or institutions engaged in such practices. This is so because digital preservation requires a level of commitment that is different in kind from other preservation activities, even if it shares some of its basic principles and practices. However, librarians and archivists are well acquainted with the practices of long-term planning and the exercise of imagining future readers and future needs; and significant work has been done to advance the science/art of preserving the integrity of the many googolplex of bits, the creation of the ideal metadata wrapper, and the “open-est” of open source repositories. Yet the whole enterprise is very much a human endeavor and as such must be informed by the very practices that preceded it - viz., curatorial practice, institutional collaboration, national investment in infrastructure, and domain specialization - if we hope to succeed. By engaging our colleagues and inviting them to “do what you do best,” we open up new possibilities for integrating digital preservation into the core activities of every working librarian and archivist, and as such stand a much better chance of sustaining digital preservation in the normal course of events. |