CREW: Collecting Repositories and E-Records Workshop
SAA 2011
Chicago, IL 8/23/2011
The AIMS partners hosted a workshop in the run-up to the 2011 SAA Annual Meeting in August. 45 participants from the US and Canada joined us in exploring the challenges, opportunities and strategies for managing born-digital records in collecting repositories.
The workshop was organized around the 4 main functions of stewardship that the AIMS project has focused on: Collection Development, Accessioning, Arrangement and Description, and Discovery and Access. In addition to the AIMS crew (no pun intended) presenting on the research done through the AIMS project, several guest presenters showcased case studies from their own hands-on approaches to managing born-digital materials. Seth Shaw, from Duke University discussed the evolution of electronic record accessioning at Duke University and his development of the Duke Data Accessioner. Gabriela Redwine discussed work done in arrangement and description at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Finally, Erin O’Meara showcased work done at the University of the North Carolina at Chapel Hill to facilitate access to born-digital records through finding aid interfaces.
In between presentations the participants engaged in lively discussions around provocative questions and hypothetical scenarios. At the end of the event, the AIMS partners felt they had gained just as much from the day’s activities as they hoped the participants had. Ideas that were discussed and case study examples will help strengthen the findings of the white paper due out this fall.
See the workshop presentations after the jump!
Showing posts with label hybrid collections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hybrid collections. Show all posts
Friday, 2 September 2011
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Photographing the digital: creating images of Hull University Archives’ digital media
A guest posting from Nicola Herbert, Digital Project Preservation Assistant at Hull University Archives
Over the last few months I have been working with the AIMS team at Hull University. My role entails getting stuck into some practical processing of the born-digital collections in the Hull University Archives as well as planning aspects of digital preservation. A lot of our work so far has been to discover and document the material that we already hold in what we thought were purely paper collections and I have written a workflow for the discovery of these items and their preparation for ingest into Fedora. As part of this workflow we decided to photograph all of the removable media we currently have and create a process for photography of new deposits when they arrive.
Why bother?
By retaining photographs of the original media alongside content we will be able to provide an image of the appearance of the original media to researchers if they request it. For the foreseeable future we are storing the image files on a shared drive, but they will eventually be stored as an element of metadata with the digital files in our Fedora Repository. We will be dealing with large numbers of media items so need to ensure consistency in the way the media is photographed and information recorded from those images.
Process
Having not previously numbered the discs, we decided on a simple running number within each accession. Despite our familiarity with labelling paper material, it seemed more complicated with digital. Our conservator advised against sticking labels (even conservation grade) onto the plastic casing of a floppy or Amstrad disc. Though a specialist CD marker can be used to label CDs, we were reluctant to permanently mark the items! After a worryingly long thought process we decided to stick to the old faithful method of writing in pencil on the existing label or case.
I then started planning the process. Despite trying to anticipate the different elements of information to include for each media type, it was only trial runs photographing actual media that gave the full picture - i.e. that Amstrad discs have three aspects to photograph (Side A, Side B and the edge). Lots of seemingly trivial questions arose - like whether to photograph the case or whether to photograph a label if blank. Getting the process right from the start will save time in the long run.
We decided to create a ‘clapperboard’ to photograph with the items for a failsafe way to ensure easy identification. I decided on a reusable form printed on a transparency which we can label with a drywipe marker. Putting theory into practice needed several trial runs; after each one I adapted the form and the procedure.
In addition I wrote up detailed notes describing the procedure for each type of media we anticipate encountering. We worked out a sensible image quality – so to ensure legibility of the labels without clogging up our servers with unnecessarily large images. Once the photographs have been taken they are renamed and filed. We also maintain an inventory of the items and record the media and label information alongside it. This ensures that if we send items (like our Amstrad discs) away to a third party we can match them to our records when they return.
This process has been satisfying to complete and enables us to tick at least one thing off our to-do list. Anyone can get this part of the process completed – even for material which is stored on a shared drive, photography of the original media is a useful process.
Over the last few months I have been working with the AIMS team at Hull University. My role entails getting stuck into some practical processing of the born-digital collections in the Hull University Archives as well as planning aspects of digital preservation. A lot of our work so far has been to discover and document the material that we already hold in what we thought were purely paper collections and I have written a workflow for the discovery of these items and their preparation for ingest into Fedora. As part of this workflow we decided to photograph all of the removable media we currently have and create a process for photography of new deposits when they arrive.
Why bother?
By retaining photographs of the original media alongside content we will be able to provide an image of the appearance of the original media to researchers if they request it. For the foreseeable future we are storing the image files on a shared drive, but they will eventually be stored as an element of metadata with the digital files in our Fedora Repository. We will be dealing with large numbers of media items so need to ensure consistency in the way the media is photographed and information recorded from those images.
Process
Having not previously numbered the discs, we decided on a simple running number within each accession. Despite our familiarity with labelling paper material, it seemed more complicated with digital. Our conservator advised against sticking labels (even conservation grade) onto the plastic casing of a floppy or Amstrad disc. Though a specialist CD marker can be used to label CDs, we were reluctant to permanently mark the items! After a worryingly long thought process we decided to stick to the old faithful method of writing in pencil on the existing label or case.
I then started planning the process. Despite trying to anticipate the different elements of information to include for each media type, it was only trial runs photographing actual media that gave the full picture - i.e. that Amstrad discs have three aspects to photograph (Side A, Side B and the edge). Lots of seemingly trivial questions arose - like whether to photograph the case or whether to photograph a label if blank. Getting the process right from the start will save time in the long run.
We decided to create a ‘clapperboard’ to photograph with the items for a failsafe way to ensure easy identification. I decided on a reusable form printed on a transparency which we can label with a drywipe marker. Putting theory into practice needed several trial runs; after each one I adapted the form and the procedure.
In addition I wrote up detailed notes describing the procedure for each type of media we anticipate encountering. We worked out a sensible image quality – so to ensure legibility of the labels without clogging up our servers with unnecessarily large images. Once the photographs have been taken they are renamed and filed. We also maintain an inventory of the items and record the media and label information alongside it. This ensures that if we send items (like our Amstrad discs) away to a third party we can match them to our records when they return.
This process has been satisfying to complete and enables us to tick at least one thing off our to-do list. Anyone can get this part of the process completed – even for material which is stored on a shared drive, photography of the original media is a useful process.
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
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 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.
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