Education
PAST CONFERENCES
Persistence of Memory
Stewardship of Digital Assets
November 28-29, 2007
Seattle, WA
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.
An article about this conference is available in our News Archive.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007 |
Keynote Address: Paul Conway reviews a decade of progress toward a shared goal of preserving our digital cultural heritage. He provides the context by considering the traditional moral, legal, and economic obligations that have motivated preservation action up to the present. He then frames the discussion for the remainder of the conference by highlighting a set of critical unmet needs in the digital world that is the focus of so much of our concern. |
That All-Important Metadata |
Digital Preseration Readiness: Trends Garnered from NEDCCC's IMLS Grant A wide variety of potential risks exist for our digital collections. From 2005-07, an NEDCC project to determine digital preservation readiness has uncovered challenges and good practices across the spectrum of cultural heritage institutions. This session will look at trends from the NEDCC project, other risk factors, and the importance of "digital disaster planning" to institutions which are building digital collections. |
Trusted Digital Repositories: What You Need to Know Beyond the "Alphabet Soup" of Standards “So what is a ‘trusted digital repository’ and do any really exist?“ “I want to build a trusted digital repository – how do I do that?” “I’m thinking about contracting with XYZ Digital Archiving – are they a trusted digital repository?” These questions and others will be addressed within this presentation. “Trusted digital repositories” are a hot topic within libraries, archives, and museums as all of us struggle to manage our growing digital content, regardless of whether it is born digital or digitized content. For most of us however, trusted digital repositories seem to be part unicorn, part leprechaun & pot o’gold at the end of the rainbow. Do they really exist? And how can we tell? Thankfully, the answers to those questions exist and the evidence underlying them are more fact than myth. Yet that evidence is grounded in a multitude of standards and other documents which can be difficult to understand and relate to your institution. As the presentation title suggests, this session aims to tease out what is meant by a trusted digital repository and how institutions can go about building or evaluating the services that comprise one. |
Preserving Digital Art This talk proposes a new approach to conceptualizing digital and media art forms. This theoretical approach will be explored through issues raised in the process of creating a formal declarative model for digital and media art (alternately known as a metadata framework, notation system, or ontology). The approach presented and explored here is intended to inform a better understanding of media art forms and to provide a practical descriptive framework that supports their creation, use, documentation and preservation. |
Thursday, November 29, 2007 |
Ingest in Time: Getting Content into a Repository An overview of the UC Libraries’ Digital Preservation Repository (DPR) will provide context for discussion of processes and workflows required for successful ingest of digital assets into a preservation system. Especially initially, preparation for ingest requires close collaboration between DPR staff and the submitting organization. Audience members will gain an understanding of the roles and responsibilities of service providers and of submitting institutions and will become familiar with some of the decisions they may face when preparing to submit content to a repository. A series of use cases will illustrate a variety of ingest challenges CDL has faced since launching the DPR as well as how those challenges have been resolved. |
Audio Preservation Digitization: Best Practices and Smaller-Scale Solutions Aimed at an informed but non-technical audience, this presentation will provide an introduction to current best practices for audio preservation digitization in the archival context. My focus is on providing information and strategies to smaller collections and repositories for confronting the challenges of audio digitization and digital file management and storage. Audio preservation has moved inescapably into the digital domain. I will provide a (very) brief overview of the types of analog and digital source recordings commonly found in archival collections and discuss the range of activities encompassed by standards-based audio digitization—from the playback of analog source material to the storage and management of digital audio files. Emphasis will be placed on providing general insight into the nature of analog and digital audio, understanding what digital standards mean, and providing suggestions for preservation assessment, vendor selection and scalable, sustainable approaches for the archival storage of digital audio files. |
Magnetic Videotape Recordings: Preservation, Assessment, and Migration This is an overview of the strategies taken to preserve videotape, whether analog or digital, with an eye on best-practices. The lecture will outline storage and handling standards for videotape collections; prioritization of collections for reformatting; and reformatting options. Legacy videotape comes in many different formats, each with its own playback device; in addition, magnetic media has a documented life span of only 10 to 30 years. Duplication, either to contemporary videotape formats (usually digital), or to data files is considered preservation; managing the process requires grounding in the principles of electronic media preservation. The decisions made regarding any video preservation must be documented to justify actions and to ensure access in years to come. |
Collaborative Adventures: Promoting and Preserving External Partnerships This presentation will address some of the major challenges and opportunities that are presented by cross-institutional collaborative activity in the field of digital preservation. We will consider a range of questions including: What are some of the emerging models for cross-institutional ventures in distributed digital preservation? How are such programs governed, and what roles and responsibilities are undertaken by their affiliated institutions? What standards and software tools are helping to facilitate collaboration in digital preservation? And what can we envision external partnerships offering in terms of the stability and sustainability of our growing cyberinfrastructure? |
Making Digital Preservation Affordable: Values and Business Models Simon Tanner will discuss the strategic perspectives towards being able to effectively finance digital preservation. 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. Simon will explore all these issues and offer a means of developing a cost and benefit justification for digital preservation to help secure the financial underpinning needed to make institutional digital preservation a realistic proposition. |
My Life Bits As an experiment, Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio. In this talk, we will demonstrate the software we have developed for MyLifeBits, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output. www.mylifebits.com has more information. |