OMB E-Gov InitiativeNARA is working with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to implement the President's Management Agenda for expanding electronic government. The President's E-Government Strategy is engaged in 24 government-wide initiatives to integrate agency operations and information technology investments. The goal of these initiatives is to eliminate redundant systems and significantly improve the government's quality of customer service for citizens and businesses through a variety of E-Gov Initiatives. This will ultimately make it simpler for citizens to receive high-quality service from the Federal Government, while reducing the cost of delivering those services.NARA is the managing partner of one of these 24 initiatives, entitled E-Government Electronic Records Management (E-Gov, ERM) Initiative. This initiative will provide the tools that agencies will need to manage their records in electronic form, addressing specific areas of electronic records management where agencies are having major difficulties.The projects that are part of the ERM Initiative are organized into four issue areas, each with a lead Federal agency. Of the four issue areas, NARA is the lead agency on the issue area relating to the transfer of permanent records to NARA (i.e., issue area 4). Issue area 4 focuses on the transfer of electronic records in formats not previously accepted by NARA. The articulated goal is: “to provide the tools for agencies to access electronic records for as long as required and to transfer permanent electronic records to NARA for preservation and future use by government and citizens.” This paper discusses the process, products, and lessons learned in issue area 4.Issue area 4, Transfer of Permanent E-records to NARA expands both the number of formats NARA can accept, and the media and techniques that can be used by Federal agencies when transferring their permanently valuable electronic records to the National Archives of the United States.This project has three major components that will facilitate the transfer of electronic records to the National Archives for preservation and future use by Government and citizens.Additional Transfer MechanismsBefore the Electronic Records Management Initiative, NARA regulations specified that agencies transfer permanent electronic records to the National Archives of the United States via open-reel magnetic tape, 3480-class tape cartridges, and CD-ROM. As part of the Initiative, NARA revised its regulation, effective January 29, 2003, to expand the transfer methods to include higher density DLT tape media and media-less File Transfer Protocol. http://www.archives.gov/about_us/regulations/part_1228_l.htmlMetadata and XML Schema ProjectThe objectives of the Records Management Metadata and Schema Project were to identify the metadata needed to transfer electronic records to NARA and to create the XML schema to encapsulate those metadata elements. This XML records transfer schema was completed and registered in a Federal repository in June 2003.Additional Transfer FormatsNARA and partner agencies identified six priority records electronic formats for NARA to use in developing transfer guidance. These formats include:• Email with attachments (issue date September 30, 2002),• Scanned Textual Images (issue date December 23, 2003)• Portable Document Format (PDF) (issue date March 31, 2003),• Digital Photography (issue date November 12, 2003)• Digital Geospatial Records (issue date April 15, 2004)• Web Based Records (issue date September 17, 2004)This paper describes the collaborative process NARA is using to work with Federal agencies in accomplishing the goals of issue area 4, it provides examples of records transfer guidance issued by NARA, and discusses lessons learned.

The long term archival of analogue data, especially photographic images, has to minimize at least two risks: 1) the total destruction of the image e.g. through fire or water, and 2) the intrinsic decay of the images through the natural aging of the medium has to be slowed down as much as possible. Both risks can be minimized by appropriate storage (location of storage, fire protection, climate control etc.). As a consequence of optimal storage, access to the archived images will be very restricted and difficult. Further, the intrinsic decay of the images due to aging cannot be stopped totally but only be slowed down. Since all copying of analogue media such as photographs, film, video etc. always and inevitably imposes a decrease in quality, the original has to be preserved. It is usually possible to interpret analogue media such as photographs without the use of technical means. Metadata such as image description, photographer, timestamp etc. are often recorded together with the image on the same media (e.g. notes on the back of a photograph) and which therefore can not be separated from the image and the risk of loosing the connection of the metadata with the image is usually very low.• With respect to long term archival and compared to analogue data, digital data has completely different properties:• Given the proper procedures, digital data can be copied infinitely oft (infinite number of generations possible). The “original” and the “copy” are identical and cannot be distinguished. Therefore the notion of an “original” looses its sense in the digital domain.There is no slow decay in the digital domain. Digital data either can be read completely, or there are errors reading the data that invalidates the whole data set. In order to recognize the occurrence of read errors, special algorithms (“checksums”) have to be used.What reasons may cause the loss of data within the digital domain? The following short overview is especially targeted to the problems of long term archival where not only the image object alone but also the information about the object, the metadata, has to be stored. For digital archives, another difficulty arises: digital media can only be read and interpreted by using technical devices. A computer tape looks the same to the human observer if it's empty or if it contains images, texts or other data. A vault with 10'000 CD-ROMs that are not labeled is almost without value if there is no other information available. The consequence is that improper archival strategies can lead to a fatal loss of information at many different levels. If only at one of these levels information is lost, the whole archive will be virtually worthless or at least the value will be diminished severely.

While all university faculty have substantial and growing bodies of work in the published scholarly, research, and pedagogical literatures, this constitutes but a small portion of useful material they generate throughout their careers. Much valuable content remains unpublished in personal collections. Due to small staffs, lack of space, and chronic under-funding, personal and scholarly papers of only the most notable faculty will be preserved in University Archives and manuscript collections. Minds of Carolina is a search for means to provide access to the extensive and rich unpublished contributions of faculty and preserve this material for the foreseeable future. It is an exploration to produce a feasible way to capture the works that would otherwise die on individuals' digital desktops, in filing cabinets, or on rapidly aging media.The Minds of Carolina project seeks, through a variety of research methodologies, to explore the nature of these intellectual assets and develop tools, methods, and guidance to assist faculty (and potentially a much wider audience) in identifying materials of enduring and widespread value within their personal, unpublished collections; describing and contextualizing these materials to optimize their retrieval and use; and depositing them in a durable digital archive based on long-standing archival principles and practices.

When imaging science and technology comes up for discussion the topic of digital preservation should be right in the mix. Unfortunately digital preservation is not something enough people have considered as an aspect of emerging imaging technology. Not all data, or digital images in this particular instance, should be saved far into the future but those worth maintaining need more consideration than they are getting now. The problems of digital preservation will have an impact on the development of imaging science and technology, and learning about digital preservation is the first step in being able to achieve preservation goals.There are four primary communities who will be most affected by digital preservation: industry, digital labs, home consumers and collection managers. Acknowledging the relationships and points of interaction between the communities will facilitate preservation activities. There are basic concepts that can be put into practice now to help maintain digital images and foster ongoing research. All four communities must recognize the pivotal roll education plays in long term digital preservation.

In Part I of this study, presented at IS&T's 19th Non-Impact Printing Conference, we tested the validity of current light-fade end-points for predicting the print-life of consumer digital output prints. It was demonstrated that current light-fade end-points generally under-predict the print life of home consumer prints, as perceived by typical end-users. The objective of Part II of this study is to go into more detail about the first-phase conclusions, as well as to assess possible alternative metrics. This study investigates how well end-points derived from colorimetric parameters correlate to end-user perception. End-points are evaluated based on both the 1976 CIELab and CIE-2000 color difference formulae. Color regions of interest, such as skin tones and neutrals, are looked at independently to improve the correlation of colorimetry-based metrics to the psychophysical results.

The fading of inkjet imagery has been the subject of many studies. This study explores the multidimensional nature of this issue using a single dye based inkjet ink set.The aim is to show which variables are important to consider in the restoration of dye based inkjet images. As such images make their way into museum collections the variables influencing the fading process become important when preserving the cultural heritage. This study also identifies where inkjet media and ink technology is not yet up to the task and illustrate the archival properties, colour science and image physics of such imagery.The influence of media type, printed colour and ink load are the primary variables explored. The correlation of the fading characteristics with ink coverage and penetration are also included.The effect of light fading on image noise is also considered and a comparison of the characteristics of light and gas fading is made.Whilst this study focuses on one ink set as an example a diverse set of media has been examined in order to illustrate the wide range of results that can be achieved. This illustrates the importance of the characteristics of the inkjet media in both the fading characteristics and any restoration process envisaged. An equivalent study with a different ink set would clearly give different results.

The permanence or stability of a document based on dry toner printing technology depends critically on three components that when combined form the image. These factors are the toner, the substrate paper and the fusing process that is used to produce the final document. Archival behavior is not guaranteed by any component alone and those preparing documents intended for long term permanent use have to be aware of all the potential pitfalls that arise in using such a system to make a document of record. The practice of dry toner based electro-photography has changed over the years. While previous experience and history has led to the awareness of the permanence issues with this technology, the technology is not standing still and newer printers incorporate new aspects that provide new challenges to understanding what approach is best for the conservation of these prints. This paper attempts to put the current understanding of image permanence of such prints in a historical perspective.

In all printing processes, the quality of ink adhesion is of primary importance to ensure legibility and permanence of the transmitted information. However, contrary to other processes that use a fluid ink penetrating the support, electrophotography consists in depositing a fine layer of powder containing pigments and fusing it to paper. The mechanisms involved in obtaining good adhesion at toner / paper interface have thermal, rheological and physico-chemicals origins.In this paper, the three main mechanisms of adhesion are reviewed, namely mechanical anchoring, adsorption and diffusion. Experimental modifications of paper roughness, surface energy and diffusion potential are described and analysed in order to determine the dominating parameters to achieve good toner adhesion.For the complete paper see the 2004 Proceedings for the 56^th TAGA Annual Technical Conference.

This case study examines the development of the OCLC Digital Archive, a third-party service that provides (1) tools for the capture of individual online resources and offline collections; (2) a repository in which those resources and collections can be stored for preservation purposes; and (3) an administration module, which allows depositors to manage their archived resources after submission.The OCLC Digital Archive complies with the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). OAIS is a framework, implementations of which vary. The case study focuses on OCLC's development of requirements based on the OAIS and member input, highlighting factors that influenced our decisions.Several categories of factors influenced the three-year development project. These factors include the nature of OCLC, the institution developing the archive; the local depositor community; and the global digital archiving community. Implementation decisions affected include object types and formats accepted into the archive, access methods, preservation metadata creation, types of tools developed, rights management capabilities, and preservation planning.