Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Digital Collections that Persist:
Learning from the Corporate Sector
Bernard Reilly, Center for Research Libraries

Preservation of the massive amounts of digital content created and exchanged today is beyond the capacity of many traditional libraries, museums, and archives. As a result, the survival of much data will rely upon actions taken by consortia of scientists and researchers, institutes, and corporations like ProQuest and the Associated Press. Bernard Reilly will report on a CRL study, funded by the National Science Foundation, of how some of those organizations have managed to maintain digital data and content for significant periods of time, and what libraries and archives might learn from them. 

Trusted Digital Repositories: What You Need to Know
Beyond the "Alphabet Soup" of Standards
Robin L. Dale, University of California, Santa Cruz

“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 in 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, and 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 is more fact than myth. Yet that evidence is grounded in a multitude of standards and other documents that 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 evaluating the services that comprise one and potentially even partnering to build one.

Audio Preservation Digitization:
Best Practices and Smaller-Scale Solutions
Andy Kolovos, Vermont Folklife Center

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.  Andy will focus 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. Andy 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
Sarah Stauderman, Smithsonian Institution Archives

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 have 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.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Preserving Digital Art:
New Media and Social Memory
Richard Rinehart, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Works of digital and Internet art represent some of the most compelling and significant artistic creations of our time. These works constitute a history of alternative artistic practice, but because of their ephemeral, technical, or otherwise variable natures, they also present significant obstacles to accurate documentation, access, and preservation. Without strategies for preservation many of these vital works—and possibly whole new genres such as early Internet art—will be lost to future generations. This talk will outline the problems and the latest innovative approaches to preserving new media art, including the Variable Media Initiative and the Media Art Notation System.

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.

Electronic Collections and the Law:
Atticus Finch Visits the Digital Archives
Ken Withers, The Sedona Conference®

The digital information explosion is affecting the law – that supreme expression of the historical relationship of ethics and morality to society. Litigants who used to bury each other in paper are now burying each other in electrons, bringing into question the nature of information, evidence, and truth. Judges are rendering opinions on such diverse issues as the appropriate format for digital preservation of evidence, the value of metadata, and the efficacy of Boolean search methodologies for text retrieval. Suddenly the legal profession has discovered the value of good digital archiving practices. What does this mean for you? It means that there is a market for research, development, and the application of new digital preservation and management technologies that reaches far beyond museum and libraries, and that there is the prospect of fruitful partnerships between academia, government, the corporate world, and the legal profession to advance mutual interests in digital preservation.

Collaborative Adventures in Digital Preservation:
Creating and Sustaining External Partnerships
Katherine Skinner, Emory University

This presentation will address some of the major opportunities and challenges that are presented by cross-institutional collaborative activities in the field of digital preservation. We will consider a range of questions including: How do collaborative activities in digital preservation benefit institutions and the communities that they serve? 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 facilitate collaboration in digital preservation? How can collaborative activities increase our capacities to act as successful cultural stewards in the digital arena? And what can we envision external partnerships offering in terms of the stability and sustainability of our growing cyberinfrastructure?

Building a Successful Digital Preservation Program
Shelby Sanett, Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science

What is a successful digital preservation program and what might you consider when building yours?  Shelby Sanett recently completed a seven-year study of the digital preservation program at the National Archives of Australia. The study focused on three core areas of practice in the emerging digital preservation program: staffing, costs, and policy. These programmatic activities must be planned for and managed effectively at the strategic and tactical levels in order for a digital preservation program to be successful in the short and long term. The talk will explore the areas studied with emphasis on the skills needed by information professionals who will work in the digital preservation arena, the types of policies needed to support a digital preservation program, and an overview of cost issues relative to sustaining a digital preservation program.

Toward an Emerging Global Consciousness
David Liroff, Public Service Media

Marshall McLuhan famously popularized the idea of "the global village", a world in which time had ceased, space had vanished - a world of simultaneous happening. Less well known is the fact that McLuhan's mentor was a Jesuit paleontologist named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who - more than a half century ago - anticipated the Internet when he envisioned a membrane of information enveloping the world. These days, de Chardin's vision seems to be well on its way to being realized. So it is fully appropriate when we address the challenges of persistence of memory and sustaining digital collections to do so in the context of an emerging global conciousness in which every object, every memory, has its place in a greater order.