Digital Lives Research Seminar

On Monday I attended the Digital Lives Research Seminar Authenticity, Forensics, Materiality, Virtuality and Emulation and the presentations will be appearing online soon via the Digital Lives pages

There was a packed programme of speakers with a huge array of experience, of direct relevance to the AIMS work were the following:

Helen Broderick, British Library described her work as Curator, Modern Literary Manuscripts including cataloguing the born-digital material in the Ronald Harwood archive. The paper part of the collection had already been listed by a colleague and Helen encouraged hybrid collections to be tackled as single entity and this is what I intend to do with the Stephen Gallagher material at Hull.

Helen described using QuickView Plus software to view and used two screens (one to display the digital file and the second to record descriptive notes). Other thorny issues to be tackled include email and how this could be made available to others without infringing Data Protection and other privacy concerns.

Seth Shaw, Duke University gave an account of the current work at Duke, openly admitting that work on arrangement and description was very sporadic! They are looking to standardise their policies, documentation etc with the search interface another element on his todo list! It was clear that practice was being shaped by their experiences echoing the underlying element of the best practice guidelines that AIMS will produce based upon our combined experiences.

It was good to see colleague Michael Olson, Stanford University who gave an account of the forensics work at Stanford including the approach adopted for the Stephen J Gould material and outlined the resources in the Forensics Lab.

Gabriela Redwine, Harry Ransom Centre (University of Texas) provided an update on the forthcoming Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections (see http://mith.info/forensics/) due to be published later this year. It came as no surprise to those present that the biggest challenge the research had identified was legacy hardware and software; other challenges included trust and authenticity. This led to a discussion around some of the ethical issues surrounding born digital materials and that we should be looking to multiple sources of information to build-up a complete picture (metadata, creator and forensics).

Erika Farr & Naomi Nelson, Emory University gave a fascinating account of their work on the digital material in the Salman Rushdie archive and the multi-disciplinary approach to tackling this collection. After discussion and consideration they agreed to respect the hybrid nature of the material; to balance the needs of the researcher and the donor but also the desire to provide an authentic ‘experience’. They had originally distinguished between paper and born-digital material with separate agreements but quickly revised this to one based on content and NOT format. They discussed with the donor his relationship with the PC and how he used it whether he customised parts etc to understand this aspect better. They were even able to recover files from a laptop he had accidentally damaged. The use of an emulator does give a totally different perspective to the born digital material that simply allowing access to the content can ever do. Whether this approach is always possible or practical remains to be seen.

Our host Jeremy John, British Library described their approach and workstream including imaging the disk and creation of digital replicates – viewed via original software and emulator and then facsimile versions for user viewing. He encouraged using hash values generated by two systems as additional level of verification. The British Library policy was to disk image wherever possible and were actively using emulators using a virtual machine based on the original hardware OS.

I was able to give a quick introduction to the AIMS project and from the questions that followed some of our work regarding access and use is of particular interest to others.

Jeff Ubois highlighted the main issues that arose from the Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2010 earlier this year including complexity of media with the need to compare donor agreements, interface design, suitability of tools re Facebook etc identified for future consideration and action. He also spoke about the public/private boundaries and mentioned a Research Libraries Group project ‘Good Terms’ about engaging with public companies for digitisation programs.

There's a New Course in Town

Hello Fellow Digital Practitioners,

Given the multiple postings on the Digipres lately in regard to education for digital preservation and curation professionals, I thought it was good timing to plug a new course offering from the University of Virginia's Rare Book School. Fresh off the press (so to speak) is "Born Digital Materials: Theory & Practice", taught by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and Naomi Nelson, former Interim Director for the Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL) at Emory University and incoming Director for the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University. I was lucky enough to be a member of the beta class although Matt & Naomi are such pros that one wouldn't have known that this was their first time around with this course.

As articulated in the course description, this class is aimed at an audience of archivists, librarians, curators and other individuals tasked with managing collections of born-digital content. Over a five-day period, topics such as materiality of digital objects, preservation metadata, emulation, migration, authentication of electronic records, and access strategies for these types of collections was discussed. Lectures and discussions were interspersed with hands on labs involving conducting donor surveys, using hex viewers, installing emulators and getting to use VINTAGE PCS AND MACS FROM DAYS GONE BY to enable file sleuthing! Needless to say, great fun was had by all. And we learned stuff too.

I would urge any and all who are engaged in digital preservation and stewardship to enroll in this course when it is next offered (likely Summer 2011). A great strength of the course are the complimentary interests and professional experiences that both Matt and Naomi bring to the course. It was a great asset that we also had a small class of colleagues anxious to share their real-world experiences as well. Don't let the reading list or computer forensics scare you - Enroll!

DigCCurr Professional Institute 2010

During the week of May 16th – 21st, I attended the DigCCurr Professional Institute: Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The week-long course was entirely focused on best practices for digital preservation and curation with a balance of theory and hands-on labs using some of the common tools for the assessment of files and for the creation of curation workflows. The participants were a wide-array of librarians and archivists from all parts of the United States. The faculty (listed below) are, for the most part, well known in digital curation circles. I found this week of study to be entirely relevant to my work for the AIMS project and I would make the recommendation that this course would be highly useful to those engaged in archival processing, preservation and/or data curation.

The DigCCurr faculty are as follows:

UNC Chapel-Hill: Dr. Helen Tibbo, Dr. Cal Lee, Dr. Richard Marciano, & Carolyn Hank University of Michigan: Dr. Nancy McGovern University of Toronto: Dr. Seamus Ross University of Cologne: Dr. Manfred Thaller

Highlights of the Institute, aside from meeting a bunch of energetic and forward thinking librarians and archivists, was the focus on the importance of creating policies for one's institution for digital preservation & curation and the opportunity to get an overview of some of the tools that have been developed to help stewards of digital content manage their collections responsibly.

For those of you keen on drafting policies in regard to digital preservation and digital curation, both ICPSR and OpenDOAR provide examples of policies that can be used as guidelines for your institution. Curious about the readiness of your institution's repository to manage digital curation activities? DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment) is a tool meant for assessing risk associated with an institutional repository in terms of its readiness to manage curation activities. TRAC (Trusted Repositories Audit & Certification) provides a suite of tools for the audit, assessment, and potential certification of digital repositories. It establishes documentation requirements for an audit, outlines a process for certification, and establishes a framework for determining the sustainability of digital repositories. Auditors come from the outside of your organization.

I could go on (but I won't) since the week was packed with great hand-on labs and lectures. If you're interested in getting more information you can certainly contact me. One last thing I'll add is this; although this wasn't part of the formal program, I did have the opportunity to learn about a new project underway in Vancouver called Archivematica. It's an open source set of tools knit together for the management and preservation of born digital collections and archives. The 0.6 alpha version was just make available for download a couple of weeks ago - Check it out! And if you want an assessment from January 2010, check out Chris Prom's blog.

Practical Approaches to Electronic Records

On Friday I attended the excellent Practical Approaches to Electronic Records event in  Dundee. The programme included thought provoking discussions from Dr Ian Anderson (HATII) and Malcolm Todd (TNA) who both stressed the importance of demonstrating ‘value’ and ‘relevance’ to our organisations, and the need to develop new partnerships with colleagues working in digital forensics, ICT departments and universities to tackle the challenge of digital preservation. WillIam Kilbride (Digital Preservation Coalition) offered some interesting personal reflections on digital preservation and the conclusion that it is not about ‘data’, ‘access’ or ‘risk’ but about people and outcomes.

The afternoon was especially timely as it featured two demonstrations of ingest tools -  something the AIMS project is currently working on. Viv Cothey showed us the work he has done at Gloucestershire Archives on the SCAT tool and this was followed by Peter Cliff demonstrating the BEAM Ingest tool being developed at the Bodleian. Both tools have adopted a modular approach to utilise many of the excellent and widely adopted 3^rd party tools such as PRONOM, Jhove and FITS and this is the obvious route to follow as we seek to create an ingest tool that is integrated with the Fedora digital repository.

The day ended with Chris Prom summarising his work to identify and compare many of the open source tools that are available. He encouraged everybody to get involved with a software project and listed the elements that he thought made an excellent Open Source project citing archivematica as a good example as it provided regular updates, clear documentation, availability of source code and support wiki.

ECA 2010

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to present a poster about the AIMS project at the 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving at Geneva. The poster attracted a fair amount of interest and in particular the intention to share the tools and best practice with other institutions – many of the other sessions and some posters presenting what were quite institution-specific solutions.

Reflections on the conference

– though with 7 simultaneous sessions there was only some much any one person could see!

Programme & keynote speeches 

First session after the initial keynote welcome was an interesting session “Envisioning Archival Description” by Victoria Lemieux & Geoffrey Yeo about using visualisation software to represent data and reflect relationships between words, as tested using the British Cabinet papers. There wasn’t enough time for a live demonstration, but the potential of offering an intuitive visual mechanism for looking at large volumes of data was really interesting. Information about word frequency for example could also be used by the archivist to assist with describing the records. The $64,000 questions are the cost of the software and what data / formats this is appropriate for?

There was also a good overview from Robert Sharpe of Tessella about obsolescence, characterisation and preservation planning with particular emphasis on the Planets Framework of tools.

Jaap Kamps “What makes a User Click?” was a timely reminder of the different search strategies between experts and novices and something we must return to when considering making born digital archives accessible on-line.

Jane Stevenson gave a review of the Archives EAD editor for the Archives Hub that can now include links to digital objects but emphasised that the files need to be stored locally – they are not a repository. Also reminded me that we (Hull University) owe the Hub some data!

Day 1 ended with a session by Daniel Pitti, who I met many years ago as EAD took-off in the UK, giving an account of a new 2 year project which seeks to create tools to automatically extract authority records using the new Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) standard. The project will start with an initial body of more than 30,000  EAD finding aids and look to combine this with more than 10m name authorities from the Library of Congress and OCLC. The aim is to take a step beyond personal name indexes and show a network of relationships (eg between correspondents). With the University of Virginia being one of the project partners it is hoped that AIMS can collaborate with this project further down the line.

Days 2 and 3 to follow...

Digital Forensic Lab at Stanford University

Hi,

I am so lucky to work as digital archivist at Stanford. One of the reasons is that Michael Olson from our Digital Library System Service group set up a digital forensics lab last year at Stanford. We have Forensic Tookit and EnCase installed in a FRED (Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device) in the lab. Michael also maintains a blog about Digital Forensic at Stanford University.

DigCCurr

Hello,

I'm getting geared up to attend the 2010-2011 DigCCurr Professional Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill next week. I'm looking forward to meeting my peers in the field, learning more about the life cycle of digital objects and getting some hands-on experience with tools to assist with their management over the long haul.

I'll be posting more about this institute once I've actually attended it; in the meantime, here's a bit of info:

DigCCurr Institute

Liz