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Open Access Publications from the University of California

The California Digital Library (CDL) was pleased to host the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2009) at Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on October 5th and 6th, 2009.

iPRES 2009 was the sixth in the series of annual international conferences that bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage.

The promise of digital preservation will be realized when it is truly integrated into the mainstream of digital scholarship, culture, and commerce. iPRES 2009 continued the discussion of creating our digital future.

Cover page of LIFE3: Predicting Long Term Digital Preservation Costs

LIFE3: Predicting Long Term Digital Preservation Costs

(2009)

This paper will provide an overview of developments from the two phases of the LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature) project, LIFE1 and LIFE2, before describing the aims and latest progress from the third phase. Emphasis will be placed on the various approaches to estimate preservation costs including the use of templates to facilitate user interaction with the costing tool. The paper will also explore how the results of the Project will help to inform preservation planning and collection management decisions with a discussion of scenarios in which the LIFE costing tool could be applied. This will be supported by a description of how adopting institutions are already utilising LIFE tools and techniques to analyse and refine their existing preservation activity as well as to enhance their collection management decision making.

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Cover page of The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Charter: Enabling Collaboration to Achieve National Digital Preservation

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Charter: Enabling Collaboration to Achieve National Digital Preservation

(2009)

The Library of Congress proposes extending the success of the NDIIPP (National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program) network by forming a national stewardship alliance of committed digital preservation partners.

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Cover page of Into the Archive: Potential and Limits of Standardizing the Ingest

Into the Archive: Potential and Limits of Standardizing the Ingest

(2009)

The ingest and its preparation are crucial steps and of strategical importance for digital preservation. If we want to move digital preservation into the mainstream we have to make them as easy as possible. The aim of the NESTOR guide "Into The Archive" is to help streamlining the planning and execution of ingest projects. The main challenge for such a guide is to provide help for a broad audience with heterogeneous use cases and without detailed background knowledge on the producer side. This paper will introduce the guide, present first experiences and discuss the challenges.

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Cover page of e-Infrastructure and Digital Preservation: Challenges and Outlook

e-Infrastructure and Digital Preservation: Challenges and Outlook

(2009)

Undoubtedly, long-term preservation has raised a great deal of attention worldwide, but in a broader perspective the attention is out of proportion compared to the number of real operational solutions – not to mention the big picture of a comprehensive digital preservation infrastructure. Up to now, the existing digital preservation infrastructure mainly consists of a small number of scattered trusted long-term archiving data repositories, which have the control of and the responsibility for our digital heritage. The ongoing discussion on e-Infrastructure points out that we are still lacking reliable structures which support the expected integrated digital preservation infrastructure provided jointly by cultural heritage organizations, data centers and data producers. The slow development towards a global integrated digital preservation infrastructure in combination with adjacent pressing questions for the information infrastructure in general has led to an extended strategic discussion within the last years in Europe and the US: In studies, position papers and evaluation approaches we find elaborated building blocks for a roadmap and definitions for a more advanced landscape. With a focus especially on the German situation and on existing and ongoing practical experiences, the paper discusses reasons and strategic aspects which maybe can illuminate the prohibitive factors for the unassertive progress.

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Cover page of A Translation Layer to Convey Preservation Metadata

A Translation Layer to Convey Preservation Metadata

(2009)

The long term preservation is a responsibility to share with other organizations, even adopting different preservation methods and tools. The overcoming of the interoperability issues, by means of the achievement of a flawless exchange of digital assets to preserve, enables the feasibility of applying distributed digital preservation policies. The Archives Ready To AIP Transmission a PREMIS Based Project (ARTAT-PBP) aims to experiment with the adoption of a common preservation metadata standard as interchange language in a network of cooperating organizations that need to exchange digital resources with the mutual objective of preserving them in the long term.

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Cover page of Towards a Methodology for Software Preservation

Towards a Methodology for Software Preservation

(2009)

Only a small part of the research which has been carried out to date on the preservation of digital objects has looked specifically at the preservation of software. This is because the preservation of software has been seen as a less urgent problem than the preservation of other digital objects, and also the complexity of software artifacts makes the problem of preserving them a daunting one. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to want to preserve software. In this paper we consider some of the motivations behind software preservation, based on an analysis of software preservation practice. We then go on to consider what it means to preserve software, discussing preservation approaches, and developing a performance model which determines how the adequacy of the a software preservation method. Finally we discuss some implications for preservation analysis for the case of software artifacts.

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Cover page of Distributed Digital Preservation: Technical, Sustainability, and Organizational Developments

Distributed Digital Preservation: Technical, Sustainability, and Organizational Developments

(2009)

Representatives from a variety of distributed digital preservation initiatives will serve as panel members and discuss the technical adaptability, economics, and functionally compelling benefits of using cooperative distributed digital preservation networks to preserve the vast array of at-risk digital content produced by our societies and their institutions.

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Cover page of Cost Model for Digital Curation: Cost of Digital Migration

Cost Model for Digital Curation: Cost of Digital Migration

(2009)

The Danish Ministry of Culture is currently funding a project to set up a model for costing preservation of digital materials held by national cultural heritage institutions. The overall objective of the project is to provide a basis for comparing and estimating future financial requirements for digital preservation and to increase cost effectiveness of digital preservation activities. In this study we describe an activity based costing methodology for digital preservation based on the OAIS Reference Model. In order to estimate the cost of digital migrations we have identified cost critical activities by analysing the OAIS Model, and supplemented this analysis with findings from other models, literature and own experience. To verify the model it has been tested on two sets of data from a normalisation project and a migration project at the Danish National Archives. The study found that the OAIS model provides a sound overall framework for cost breakdown, but that some functions, especially when it comes to performing and evaluating the actual migration, need additional detailing in order to cost activities accurately.

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Cover page of Mainstreaming Preservation through Slicing and Dicing of Digital Repositories: Investigating Alternative Service and Resource Options for ContextMiner Using Data Grid Technology

Mainstreaming Preservation through Slicing and Dicing of Digital Repositories: Investigating Alternative Service and Resource Options for ContextMiner Using Data Grid Technology

(2009)

A digital repository can be seen as a combination of services, resources, and policies. One of the fundamental design questions for digital repositories is how to break down the services and resources: who will have responsibility, where they will reside, and how they will interact. There is no single, optimal answer to this question. The most appropriate arrangement depends on many factors that vary across repository contexts and are very likely to change over time. This paper reports on our investigation and testing of various repository "slicing and dicing" scenarios, their potential benefits, and implications for implementation, administration, and service offerings. Vital considerations for each option (1) efficiencies of resource use, (2) management of dependencies across entities, and (3) the repository business model most appropriate to the participating organizations.

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Cover page of ArchivePress: A Really Simple Solution to Archiving Blog Content

ArchivePress: A Really Simple Solution to Archiving Blog Content

(2009)

Blog archiving and preservation is not a new challenge. Current solutions are commonly based on typical web archiving activities, whereby a crawler is configured to harvest a copy of the blog and return the copy to a web archive. Yet this is not the only solution, nor is it always the most appropriate. We propose that in some cases, an approach building on the functionality provided by web feeds offers more potential. This paper describes research to develop such an approach, suitable for organisations of varying size and which can be implemented with relatively little resource and technical know-how: the ArchivePress project.

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