California Digital Library

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.

This paper explores the purpose and development of best practice guidelines for the use of preservation metadata as detailed in the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata within documents conforming to the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS). METS is an XML schema that provides a container format integrating various forms of metadata with digital objects or links to digital objects. Because of the flexibility of METS to serve many different functions within digital systems and to support many different metadata structures, integration guidelines will facilitate common practices among institutions. There is constant tension between tighter control over the METS package to support object exchange versus each implementation's unique preservation metadata requirements given the different contexts and implementation models among PREMIS implementers. The PREMIS in METS Guidelines serve primarily as a standard for submission and dissemination information packages. This paper details the issues encountered in using the standards together, and how the METS document changes as events pertaining to the lifecycle of digital assets are recorded for future preservation purposes. The guidelines have enabled the implementation of an exchange format and creation/validation tools based on the PREMIS in METS guidelines.

The Chronopolis Digital Preservation Initiative, one of the Library of Congress' latest efforts to collect and preserve atrisk digital information, has completed its first year of service as a multi-member partnership to meet the archival needs of a wide range of cultural and social domains. In this paper we will explore the major themes within Chronopolis.

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.

The Web is increasingly becoming a platform for linked data. This means making connections and adding value to data on the Web. As more data becomes openly available and more people are able to use the data, it becomes more powerful. An example is file format registries and the evaluation of format risks. Here the requirement for information is now greater than the effort that any single institution can put into gathering and collating this information. Recognising that more is better, the creators of PRONOM, JHOVE, GDFR and others are joining to lead a new initiative, the Unified Digital Format Registry. Ahead of this effort a new RDF-based framework for structuring and facilitating file format data from multiple sources including PRONOM has demonstrated it is able to produce more links, and thus provide more answers to digital preservation questions - about format risks, applications, viewers and transformations - than the native data alone. This paper will describe this registry, P2, and its services, show how it can be used, and provide examples where it delivers more answers than the contributing resources.

Effective digital preservation depends on a set of preservation services that work together to ensure that digital objects can be preserved for the long-term. These services need digital preservation metadata, in particular, descriptions of the properties that digital objects may have and descriptions of the requirements that guide digital preservation services. This paper analyzes how these services interact and use this metadata and develops a data dictionary to support them.

This paper will describe the tools and infrastructure components which have been implemented by the CASPAR project to support repositories in their task of long term preservation of digital resources. We address also the capture and preservation of digital rights management and evidence of authenticity associated with digital objects. Moreover examples of ways to evaluate a variety of preservation strategies will be discussed as will examples of integrating the use of these infrastructure components and tools into existing repository systems. Examples will be given of a rich selection of digital objects which encode information from a variety of disciplines including science, cultural heritage and also contemporary performing arts.

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.

Library and Archives Canada has a wide mandate to preserve and provide access to Canadian published heritage, records of national significance, as well as to acquire the records created by the Government of Canada, deemed to be of historical importance. To address this mandate, Library and Archives Canada has undertaken the development of a digital preservation infrastructure covering policy, standards and enterprise applications which will serve requirements for ingest, metadata management, preservation and access. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the efforts underway to engage digital recordkeeping activities in the Government of Canada and to influence and align those processes with LAC digital preservation requirements. The LAC strategy to implement preservation considerations early in the life cycle of the digital record is to establish a mandatory legislative and policy framework for recordkeeping in government. This includes a Directive on Recordkeeping, Core Digital Records Metadata Standard for archival records, Digital File Format Guidance, as well as Web 2.0 and Email Recordkeeping Guidelines. The expected success of these initiatives, and collaborative approach should provide a model for other digital heritage creators in Canada.

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.