California Digital Library

The Planets project is developing a service-oriented environment for the definition and evaluation of preservation strategies for human-centric data. It focuses on the question of logically preserving digital materials, as opposed to the physical preservation of content bit-streams. This includes the development of preservation tools for the automated characterization, migration, and comparison of different types of digital objects as well as the emulation of their original runtime environment in order to ensure longtime access and interpretability. The Planets integrated environment provides a number of end-user applications that allow data curators to execute and scientifically evaluate preservation experiments based on composable preservation services. In this paper, we focus on the middleware and programming model and show how it can be utilized in order to create complex preservation workflows.

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.

For millions of legacy documents, correct rendering depends upon resources such as fonts that are not generally embedded within the document structure. Yet there is significant risk of information loss due to missing or incorrectly substituted fonts. In this paper we use a collection of 230,000 Word documents to assess the difficulty of matching font requirements with a database of fonts. We describe the identifying information contained in common font formats, font requirements stored in Word documents, the API provided by Windows to support font requests by applications, the documented substitution algorithms used by Windows when requested fonts are not available, and the ways in which support software might be used to control font substitution in a preservation environment.

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 challenge of digital preservation of scientific data lies in the need to preserve not only the dataset itself but also the ability it has to deliver knowledge to a future user community. A true scientific research asset allows future users to reanalyze the data within new contexts. Thus, in order to carry out meaningful preservation we need to ensure that future users are equipped with the necessary information to re-use the data. This paper presents an overview of a preservation analysis methodology which was developed in response to that need on the CASPAR and Digital Curation Centre SCARP projects. We intend to place it in relation to other digital preservation practices discussing how they can interact to provide archives caring for scientific data sets with the full arsenal of tools and techniques necessary to rise to this challenge.

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.

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.

TIPR, Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories, is a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create and test the Repository eXchange Package (RXP). The package will make it possible to transfer complex digital objects between dissimilar preservation repositories. For reasons of redundancy, succession planning and software migration, such repositories must be able to exchange copies of archival information packages with each other. Every different repository design, however, describes and structures its archival packages differently. Therefore each type produces dissemination packages that are rarely understandable or usable as submission packages by other repositories. The RXP is an answer to that mismatch. Other solutions for transferring packages between repositories focus either on transfers between repositories of the same type, such as DSpace-to-DSpace transfers, or on processes that translate a specific dissemination format into a specific submission package. Rather than build translators between many dissimilar repository types, the TIPR project has defined a standards-based package of metadata files that can act as an intermediary information package, the RXP, a lingua franca all repositories can read and write. In this paper we present the assumptions and principles underlying the TIPR concept of repository-to-repository exchange, and proceed to describe three aspects of the TIPR project: the RXP format itself; the tests we are conducting to prove and improve the use of the RXP; and finally, issues that have arisen in the course of the project so far.

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.

In this paper, I consider whether virtual worlds are history in two senses of the word. The first explores the implications of the life-cycle of virtual worlds, especially of their extinction, for thinking about the history of computerbased technologies, as well as their use. The moment when a virtual world “is history” – when it shuts down – reminds us that every virtual world has a history. Histories of individual virtual worlds are inextricably bound up with the intellectual and cultural history of virtual world technologies and communities. The second sense of the virtual world as history brings us directly to issues of historical documentation, digital preservation and curation of virtual worlds. I consider what will remain of virtual worlds after they close down, either individually or perhaps even collectively.