Do you think your information remains safe inside a cloud? Do you have another truly trustworthy place where you can store all your precious information? These questions lead us to the basic problem behind this paper: None of the official instances are interested in materials possessed by average Joes and Janes. You will have to be politically or otherwise important person to get your personal life story into official digital repositories. We at the Digitalia (Research Center on Digital Information Management) at South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, believe that there is a strong need for a digital preservation service that would give ordinary citizens the right to decide what to do with their personal information. It is not right that common folks must rely on cloud drives with dubious terms and conditions or unreliable portable or optical devices to store their precious digital information. This article describes an initiative of a low cost full-scale digital archive solution that will be available to common people.
One of the most widespread formats used to represent high quality image data is the TIF format. TIFF is a well-known, established, flexible, adaptable file format for handling images and data within a single file. The flexibility of TIFF allows for many different variants and can also include metadata, which follows other format definitions such as IPTC-data, EXIF-data or ICC-data for color transformation. Therefore TIFF is a complex file format that can be problematic for the use in archives, even though it is still the most common option for most GLAM institutions. The aim of the TI/A initiative was to find a proper subset of tags for the use of TIFF in archival environments. To select proper features in such a recommendation, it was necessary to analyses existing files first. In this paper we present the results of two surveys that have been done in this context: A) The analysis of about 4 million TIFF files stored as digital assets in memory institutions. The files represent a large variety of TIFF formats, regarding e.g. compression schemes, quantization depth and date of creation. B) A survey about the number, use and relevance of digital files in archives, museums and libraries. The survey was done in the context of an ongoing project of the Swiss government to find a sustainable strategy for archiving digital cultural heritage objects.
The software most North Americans use to archive websites is notably deficient in capturing streaming media. This paper reports on a project to re-architect the Heritrix web crawler in a newer approach to archiving websites. The project focuses on web content produced by contemporary young composers, and also explores developing relationships with these creators that address other web archiving issues such as copyright and high quality capture
In recent years, research and technology made considerable progress in increasing the speed and the safety of the entire digitization process of ancient collections. Despite this, imaging ancient, fragile or un-opened documents remains a formidable challenge. We employ an alternate digitization technique for handwritten documents, exploiting x-ray tomography: Virtual X-ray Reading. Thanks to the high penetration of x-rays, we can acquire 3-dimensional (3D) tomographic images of a multi-page document without opening it. The x-ray contrast necessary for the readability is produced by the chemical composition and the consequent strong x-ray absorption of the iron gall inks - largely used for European handwritten documents. We present the development of this technology, from the chemical investigations of the inks to the tomography of an unopened Venetian testament and of an 18th century, 200-page, handwritten book.
Since 2007 Museum of King Jan III's Palace at Wilanów and Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Mechatronics are together developing precise, structured light-based scanning methods. This cooperation was established in order to elaborate solutions allowing documenting characteristics of the surface of different cultural heritage objects. The gathered data are intended to support the processes of conservation, education, historical analysis as well as the sharing of the visualizations of the especially fragile objects. In order to fulfill those requirements for most of the historic artifacts, scanning with a spatial resolution of at least 2500 points per square millimeter is needed. As a result of those assumptions, files of a very large size are produced. Today's software environments for such a huge data processing and applications to visualize those data are very limited. Consequently, this raises the need for either a significant simplification of visualization process or a reduction of the shared results of measurements (by showing data concerning only a small parts of the heritage objects). Which path would be most suitable for the endusers? Should this insufficiency of the visualization software cause a reduction of the quality of the measurement processes?
An image-based relighting algorithm has been extended so that it can accommodate environment based lighting. Camera mounted flash photographs, employed in the original relighting algorithm, are also used to achieve the environment map based relighting results. In addition to preserving the simple equipment and setup utilized in the original relighting approach, the new method allows professional studio lighting effects, simulation of museum gallery illumination, and outdoor lighting at particular times of the day and year.
The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) [1] is a widely accepted and fast growing standard to present images as web-resources. The IIIF-standard defines an URL-syntax to access, transform and reformat the desired image. An IIIF-server converts the image on-the-fly based on the desired parameters and transfers the image using the HTTP protocol to the client. We designed and implemented an advanced, extremely flexible, fully IIIF compliant server in C++11 offering advanced features that go beyond the IIIF standard. Due to its flexibility, can easily be integrated into existing environments and thus facilitates the transformation of existing archiving platforms to support the IIIF protocol.
On the technical level, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) offers a common standard for referring to images or parts of images using a well-defined URL-based syntax. This allows transformations like scaling, rotation, mirroring, and format conversions to be applied. However, for the full integration of digital objects in other environments, interoperability has to go beyond mere technical specifications for access. Nontechnical metadata such as image descriptions, annotations, and references to other objects (e.g., texts, transcriptions, and other visual representations) must be available as well. Using the example of digital facsimiles of the scientific notebook of Jacob I Bernoulli and its transcriptions, we show how XML together with the IIIF Image API allows for a seamless integration and merging of image and text sources in the same environment.
The continued challenge for data in any discipline is sustainable access, open source file formats, and the capacity for linked data. Collaborations with European and American colleagues indicates a shared concern, but with a less focused effort for establishing and recognizing the need for a more integrated approach to truly linked data, and the need for high level metadata embedded within datasets. Many related fields and disciplines have begun to focus on the need to integrate and assess approaches from colleagues – from materials science to archeology, botany, biology and chemistry. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) has brought together a more cohesive approach to data management on the global scale. Developments for linked scientific data generated on heritage materials has continued to develop within the Library of Congress Preservation Research and Testing Division has engaged with colleagues in RDA and internationally to build upon existing standards and authorities, allowing greater credence for humanities and cultural heritage linked data. Further developments in the CLASS-D database structure enable the unique capability to link a range of types of scientific instrumental analyses back to original source materials, track samples and derivatives over time, and further the capability for web-accessible access to heritage collections.