Regular
No keywords found
 Filters
Month and year
 
  6  0
Image
Pages 2 - 5,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

In 2009, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded a research project that sought to steward born digital archives as well as provide a methodology for others to do the same. Born Digital Materials: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship (AIMS) is the result (http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/). A partnership among the Universities of Virginia, Hull (UK), Stanford, and Yale, this international partnership had thee main areas of focus: process eleven hybrid collections, cultivate a new community of digital archivists, and create a methodology that others could adapt to their local practices. This comprehensive methodology broke the complex workflows down into four main parts: collection development; accessioning; arrangement and description; and discovery and access. Each of these parts represents a highly complex and involved set of services. Each partner used the methodology on the various collections that were identified and also consulted with other libraries and archives across the globe. The result is a flexible framework that can be adapted to any level of organization. It presents a detailed decision tree that allows an archivist to work through the daunting task of stewarding born digital content.This past summer, the University of Virginia Library was able to test much of our methodology in our approach to capturing the historical events related to the resignation and reinstatement of UVa's President, Theresa Sullivan (http://sullivan.lib.virginia.edu/about/). These actions provided a unique and compelling opportunity for the library to demonstrate its leadership in this environment and forge new relationships with units across the university—all working together to provide a comprehensive archive of events as they unfolded.Born digital materials offer a unique challenge to any organization's digital preservation strategy and infrastructure. For example, there are serious tensions among keeping the original physical media, a forensic or logical disk image of its content, and what is ultimately archived. This content creates a labyrinth of ethics and infrastructure that anyone dealing with born digital materials must navigate. With the Sullivan Archive, we can add to that problem set, the myriad of third party agreements that must be taken into account before any of this content can be made available. In sum, born digital stewardship poses a series of questions that deeply disrupt the role of libraries and archives and the future of the historical record.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013
  7  0
Image
Pages 6 - 11,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

Cost can be viewed as the amount required to resource inputs into an activity, and there will usually be a need to evaluate these inputs against the outcomes or benefits. Cost modeling techniques exist in many areas, to help to calculate and anticipate the costs of a given activity.However, there are areas where there is still insufficient knowledge about potential costs, and this is relevant for the domain of digital preservation. Particularly in this area, costs can only be understood in relation to benefits, and the benefits of investing in digital preservation have to be assessed against the potential threats that organizations face. For example, an analysis of the risks of format obsolescence or of a failure of business continuity should motivate organizations to undertake digital preservation when it becomes evident that the potential loss of value of not doing so overcomes the cost.In order for cost models to be useful, it is critical that they are linked to an analysis of the risks in the given domain. Risk analysis should be the foundation of cost modeling so that all costs can be traced back to a specific set of threats that are applicable to the relevant domains and contexts. For some domains where extensive risk analysis has already been done and the benefits are well defined, this may be fairly straightforward. For other domains it might be more difficult. That is the case of digital preservation, where the costs and benefits are not currently widely and well understood but there is also anxiety about not engaging with digital preservation. Many organizations struggle to understand its value and the reason for this is that there is an insufficient focus on the role of risk in decision-making and preservation planning.The European Commission's FP7 funded 4C project aims to address a number of issues that relate directly to the cost determinants of digital preservation, one of the most important being an assessment of risk. The objective is to define a clearer economic landscape within which organizations can operate with confidence and where commercial and community-driven organizations can provide solutions that are reliable and effective, but also economic, timely and sustainable. Large memory and archiving institutions are dealing with an ever increasing amount of digital data and there is a concomitant need for scalable and effective solutions and services to emerge that enable them to tackle that challenge. Medium and smaller organizations, as also entities in the private sector, face different types of challenges and a diversity of solutions are required. The cost of digital preservation needs to be understood through a number of different lenses. Benefits, value and sustainability are three different perspectives that must influence cost but a fundamental understanding of risk – and risk in relation to organizational mission – is of crucial importance. This can bring a new view to digital preservation, making it possible to analyze scenarios and take decisions based on perceptions of objective added value, and not only as objective costs and subjective values.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013
  8  10
Image
Pages 12 - 14,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

The OAIS reference model (ISO 14721:2012) has been widely accepted as a theoretical foundation for digital archives, but there has been relatively little discussion of internal elements of an OAIS-compliant repository in the context of traditional archival theory and practice. Based on the experience of the archives of the National Gallery of Art, this paper presents practical concepts for creating a small digital archival repository within the OAIS framework built on recognized archival principles of provenance, group level management, and hierarchical organization.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013
  7  0
Image
Pages 15 - 18,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

Audio-visual media have recorded the 20th century in way no other era has been recorded. Film, audio and video have enabled significant people and events to be witnessed by millions of people. The problem of preserving this amount of information in the original analogue formats has been monumental and despite the best efforts only a fraction of the original recordings made survive worldwide. The skills required to adequately preserve and make accessible the remaining records have been honed for only the past two decades. And now the world has moved into the digital realm.This has engendered a new set of problems and demanded audio-visual archivists acquire a new set of skills while still requiring the original skills to manage the legacy collections. The costs required to digitise a legacy collection are largely beyond reach of all but the best resourced archive, and yet this is required if a collection is to be preserved and accessible. Consequently hard financial decisions about the way a collection is to be managed into the future need to be made by those responsible. Risk management is a crucial part of the decision making process.Digital collection preservation requires more than the creation of digital surrogates. It is a continuum starting with ensuring the original file is intact, the development of strategies for managing the changing environment of files types and hardware evolution, and minimising the potential for loss by negligence or malicious attack.The prioritization of collection digitization needs to take all of these factors into consideration in order to balance a collection's preservation needs with its potential for access and exploitation. Issues such as technical obsolescence, succession planning and risk analysis need to be considered along with the organization's strategic business needs such as revenue potential and key stakeholders.This presentation will outline how the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia developed a strategy for the prioritization of all collection items in a consolidated manner that recognized efficiencies and synergies, developed new workflows, harnessed the potential of new technologies, addressed at risk priorities and provided for long term planning.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013
  7  0
Image
Pages 19 - 24,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

From 2000 to 2010, the great majority of artists submitting video art work to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin did it in DVD format. To archive these works in an HPC storage resource where they will be actively managed and preserved, the DVDs have to be converted into files that can fulfill both preservation and access functions. A survey of the technical lineage of the pieces as well as best practices in digital and in video preservation were important to decide the configuration of an automated workflow and the components of a SIP to submit the video files to storage. Quality video metrics were used to achieve a losseless conversion of the DVDs and were included in the workflow to verify the integrity of the conversions. Metadata about the files is gathered to dynamically customize the conversion processes according to the characteristics of the input DVD. Process information and technical metadata are recorded in a METS document that forms part of the SIP. Built with open source software, the workflow is integrated to the iRODS implementation of the storage resource as part of the ingest process.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013
  6  0
Image
Pages 36 - 42,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

This paper presents and interprets data on digitization error gathered from four 1,000 volume random samples that represent the full range of source volumes digitized by Google and the Internet Archive over a six year period and deposited in the HathiTrust Digital Library. The paper summarizes the research method for the project and then presents summary findings on the distribution of page-image error. The findings suggest that the imperfection of digital surrogates is a transparent and nearly ubiquitous attribute of large-scale digitization and one that introduces new complexity in preservation repositories. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013
  12  2
Image
Pages 43 - 47,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

In this paper we present methodologies for using automated image analysis to determine levels of information content for photographic collections and a corresponding spatial resolution for digitization. The approach described is an extension of work in the paper “Establishing Spatial Resolution Requirements for Digitizing Transmissive Content: A Use Case Approach” presented at Archiving 2011.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013
  13  1
Image
Pages 48 - 53,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

Many cultural heritage institutions are currently spending significant resources photographing their works of art for a variety of applications with distinctly different requirements. To create reproductions of their artwork, cultural heritage institutions employ a range of technology and a variety of workflows. A similar variety is used to publish these images in a number of output media. This project was undertaken to explore these workflows and the image quality of the reproductions they generate. The objectives of this project were to: (1) determine the optimal reproduction processes in use in cultural heritage institutions today, (2) document the image quality inherent in current workflows in print and online, (3) define key quality criteria based on objective and subjective metrics, and (4) use this information to develop a framework to serve as a guideline for museums to follow when reproducing fine art. To work towards these objectives, a series of experiments were developed to evaluate the image quality attainable with the current reproduction workflows.Key findings of the project included that (1) achieving accurate tone reproduction at capture is crucial, (2) acceptable reproductions are achievable using a digital press, (3) following standardized workflows, ISO printing standards, and viewing standards substantially reduces the need for manual post-processing, (4) camera make, lighting, and file format had little impact on the ranking results, (5) internet-based experiments may be successfully used when evaluating image preference and, (6) while workflows still vary considerably, some commonalities were found for workflows producing images that were generally ranked highly across the experiments. These workflows were used as a basis for the development of the recommended guidelines, which included the following recommendations and considerations:• Workflows covering the whole image interchange cycle should be documented in detail. No undocumented processing should be performed along the image interchange cycle.• ICC profile-based color management should be used to achieve best results.• The use of targets to ensure a proper capture setup is recommended.• Defining imaging goals and talking to users is indispensable to help set expectations.• Guide prints did not prove useful in these experiments and are not recommended as proofs (though more testing may be needed). They could, however, be used for a visual ‘reality check’ on press• Closing the communication loop in the image interchange cycle is of the utmost importance.The three-year project was financially supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Detailed information on this project, including the final report, can be found at www.artimaging.rit.edu.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013
  9  1
Image
Pages 54 - 57,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

The success of any cultural imaging program is measured by the ability to deliver quality visual representations of original objects to a wider and increasingly global online audience. Any phase in the artwork reproduction cycle, from the initial digitization procedure to the ingest process used in the end user viewing device can introduce distortions that if left unchecked can result in a less than optimal audience experience.A growing number of institutions worldwide have adopted Metamorfoze and FADGI imaging protocols to create more consistent and measurably accurate representations of original artworks. Unfortunately, the range of this improved image quality does not always extend to the desktops and devices used by the typical internal or external user. A number of factors contribute to the loss of image quality as images typically pass through multiple digital systems and devices with varying levels of standards support.The focus of this paper is to illustrate potential methods for objective image analysis and quality assurance that extends the process control from the initial digitization all the way through to the most important experience—that of the end user.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013
  4  0
Image
Pages 58 - 60,  © Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2013
Volume 10
Issue 1

As scholars have become increasingly reliant upon the electronic versions of scholarly journals, long term preservation of these resources has become of major importance and a growing need for the library community. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of The Netherlands, was one of the very first cultural heritage institutions to become aware of the emerging importance of digital resources. With the establishment of the e-Depot the KB has created in 2002 the first solution to provide permanent access to scholarly information. This goes beyond the national depository role of the KB as it also preserves publications from international, academic publishers that do not have a clear country of origin. The next step for the KB is to position the international e-Depot as a European service, which guarantees permanent access to international, academic publications on a European level. There is a danger that e-journals become “ephemeral” unless we take active steps to preserve the bits and bytes that increasingly represent our collective knowledge. Besides the threat of technical obsolescence there is the changing role of libraries. In the past libraries have assumed preservation responsibility for materials they collect, while publishers have supplied the materials libraries need. These well understood divisions of labour do not work in a digital environment and especially so when dealing with e-journals. So we need new models and organizations to ensure safe custody of these digital objects for future generations. The KB has invested in order to take its place within the research infrastructure at European level and the international e-Depot serves as a trustworthy digital archive for scholarly information for the European research community.

Digital Library: ARCHIVING
Published Online: January  2013