Preserving Digital Collections Andrea Goethals Florida Center for

Preserving Digital Collections Andrea Goethals Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA)

Outline • • • FCLA? The Motivation to Preserve Preservation Key FCLA Digital Archive Digital Preservation Infrastructure

The FCLA … • Has 46 full-time staff • Provides centralized automation support for over 50 libraries at Florida’s 10 public universities • Is attached to UF only administratively • Runs the largest central ILS in US

Motivation to Preserve • Are we living in the “Digital Dark Age”? – BBC’s 1986 Domesday Book vs. original 1086 Domesday Book • Amount of digital information – 93% of world info produced in 1999 (UC Berkeley 2000 study: “How Much Information”) • Rate of technological change – ‘Antique’ if 15+ years old Source: oldcomputers. net

Preservation Key: Fault-tolerance through Redundancy Centralized (A) Decentralized (B) Source: Dodge, 2003 Distributed (C)

FCLA Digital Archive (FDA) Operational Fall 2003 - ? • Funding help from IMLS • Goals: – Establish a working digital preservation archive for the use of the libraries of FL’s public universities – Identify costs involved with sufficient granularity to support reasonable cost-recovery pricing – To disseminate tools, procedures and results for the widest national impact

FDA Preservation Approach • Still in flux (!) • Dark archive • Automated – DAITSS (Dark Archive In The Sunshine State) • 2 levels of preservation (bit-level, full) • Always keep the originals • Plan for migrations from the very beginning • Combination of ‘traditional’ format migration, migration on request, and normalization (archival data formats, converting to standards, canonicalization)

FDA Business Plan • Free! – (Until the end of the grant period, then cost-recovery) • All data contributions through libraries • Libraries are our customers, we are building in customer options

FDA Ingest Example XML PDF CIP AVI

FDA Ingest Example SIP XML XML XML PDF CIP AVI

FDA Ingest Example XML AIP SIP XML XML XML CIP XML PDF AVI XML TIFF TIFF Database Records

Digital Preservation Infrastructure • Commonly-accepted terminology – OAIS Model (Partially helpful to us) • Good Typology of Preservation Strategies – Thibodeau’s matrix • Preservation Metadata – METS (LOC) - Technical metadata still developing • NISO Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images (MIX schema) • LOC A/V prototyping project – PREMIS (OCLC, RLG)

General APPLICABILITY Typed Object Conversion Virtual Machine Emulation Programmable Chips Specific Persistent Archives Universal Virtual Computer Re-engineer Software Viewer Maintain original technology Object Interchange Format Rosetta Stone Translation Format Standardization Version Migration Preserve Objects Preserve Technology OBJECTIVE Source: Thibodeau, 2002.

Digital Preservation Infrastructure • File Format Knowledge-base – Format info (Global Format Registry, PRONOM, FCLA) – Archived specifications – Recommended submitted formats and why? – Recommended migrations and normalizations (FCLA, Nat’l Archives of Australia) • Migration Experiments (Harvard) • Economic information for preservation – ‘Fair’ billing models (effect of formats, preservation strategies)

Digital Preservation Infrastructure • Digital Archive Software – Open-source archive software • Fedora, DAITSS, DSpace – Software for automatic format recognition, technical metadata extraction – What can read this format? (PRONOM, Global Format Registry? ) – File format converters • Open source software (Ghostscript, etc. )

• • • • Dodge, Martin. An Atlas of Cyberspaces, 2003. http: //www. cybergeography. org/atlas/historical. html DSpace http: //www. dspace. org FCLA Digital Archive / DAITSS http: //www. fcla. edu/digital. Archive/ Fedora Project http: //www. fedora. info Global Registry for Digital Format Representation Information http: //hul. harvard. edu/formatregistry/ Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) http: //ssdoo. gsfc. nasa. gov/nost/isoas/ Library of Congress A/V Prototyping Project http: //lcweb. loc. gov/rr/mopic/avprot/metsmenu 2. html METS http: //www. loc. gov/standards/mets/ MIX http: //www. loc. gov/standards/mix/ National Archives of Australia http: //www. naa. gov. au/recordkeeping/preservation/digital/summary. html PREMIS http: //www. oclc. org/research/pmwg/ PRONOM http: www. pro. gov. uk/about/preservation/digital/pronom/default. htm Thibodeau, Kenneth. “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years”, The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective, Conference Proceedings, July 2002.