This paper will provide insights into an innovative preservation environment being developed by the SHERPA-DP project. SHERPA-DP, led by the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), builds on the work of the original SHERPA project and aims to create a collaborative, shared preservation environment for e-prints repositories framed around the OAIS Reference Model. The project brings together a number of academic institutional repository systems with the existing preservation repository established by AHDS, to create an environment that fully addresses the requirements of the different phases within the life cycle of digital information.

As more and more organizations are paying serious attention to designing and building digital repositories, it is becoming increasingly apparent that while OAIS represents a valuable reference model, there are a large number of issues both buried inside it and sitting on the fringes of it that need careful attention and expansion as we move forward in implementing digital repositories. If these repositories are to be more than simply locked digital closets that house the output of organizations and communities then there will need to be closer attention paid to the fact that these repositories operate not in isolation, but rather as features of a much broader digital landscape. These practicalities affect implementations in all sectors; including government, academic and commercial organizations.At the government level, while major national libraries and archives are eager to embrace digital repositories with all their promised benefits, they yet face enormous challenges of operating in a new digital world of legal e-deposit with vast amounts of data in what could be innumerably different formats arriving at ingest with alarming speed. The potential multiplicity of publishers that they will have to deal with, along with the legal accountability issues of such deposits, demands that they build not just an archive to hold the content received, but also build, or interface with existing, supporting systems that will deal with such issues as workflow control, calendaring, reporting and communications support.Using the OAIS model to implement institutional repositories in the academic world brings with it a different, but equally challenging set of issues that must be addressed. Experience to date, indicates significant resistance from faculty members towards the deposit of materials in these institutional repositories and it has been shown that an essential ingredient to building successful repositories is the provision of adequate authoring support tools and services. Additionally, implementing in the academic world there are not just technical questions around the longer term sustainability of open source models but also more practical challenges such as how to make the assets deposited in these repositories usefully available to eLearning systems.In the commercial world, there is no shortage of challenges either. Stored assets held by media industry organizations represent major sources of potential revenue through reuse, reversioning and re-purposing. A major focus for these companies will be protection of the assets and the need to tightly interface with corporate financial and other operations such as customer service systems. For these organizations control of rights will be a major concern. and the DRM monster still lurks in the closet!It will be too late to fully realize the benefits of repository investments if we only take these factors into account when we get to the implementation stage of OAIS based repository models. The issues involved range from the micro to the macro in nature.At one end of the spectrum are straight forward technical issues that individual organizations can deal with internally at the earliest stages of design by carefully looking at how to fully exploit the capabilities of such technology elements as web based architectures and XML capabilities. At the other end of the spectrum though are issues such as digital rights management, where interested parties must come together to drive the development of new standards at an international level. This will not always be easy though as these parties can have widely diverging views of what they hope to achieve from future standards.This session will explore the issues in more detail and take a look at some of the steps that must be taken to ensure that we can realize the benefits of these repositories without falling into a mire of problems. These steps will involve both design and implementation actions at the organizational level and new standards work at a global level.

Florida State University Libraries' Digital Library Program is one of six founding members of the MetaArchive of Southern Digital Culture <http://www.metaarchive.org>. This partnership with the research libraries of Auburn University, Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Louisville, and the Virginia Polytechnic and State University is funded under the auspices of the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program to build a collaborative digital preservation network of Southern cultural heritage materials. The partnership was established to explore a new model for distributed, collaborative digital archiving and preservation. The new model spans multiple state jurisdictions, and includes public, private and governmental participants. Joining this very large and distributed partnership made the FSU Digital Library realize that with collaboration comes growth. Since 2003, the FSU Libraries have considered the questions, “What must be in place for a prototypical digital library program to engage in multiple large-scale collaborations?” and “How can new and or established digital library programs create a model workflow that will support collaborative efforts with as little added work as possible?” This paper considers those questions in the context of the FSU-NDIIPP partnership, and suggests evaluative criteria for building bridges and opening silos.

Traditional preservation arguments focused on two technological options, emulation [4, 5] and format conversion [1, 2, 3] or a combination of both [6]. All provide solutions to some preservation scenarios but also list limitations of scalability [3] and unsustainable loss [7], respectively, a common belief which led us to employ a procedural hybrid focused on access and usage, incorporating migration on access advantages described by LOCKSS [3].This strategy is based on the philosophy that any preservation action made directly to the original digital objects must be postponed until absolutely necessary, arguably forever. However, access is given immediately by employing current-era rendering programs and translating to current-era digital formats which are sufficiently-featured to fully represent the intellectual content in need of preservation. Therefore, we will argue that access, to mix and remix digital content, generates sufficient and necessary incentives [8, 15] to extend the life of digital objects, and indirectly that of digital formats, for as long as they are relevant to some user subgroup.Additionally, we will introduce assessment and measurement processes complementing the Rosenthal's LOCKSS model. We will develop the main argument by showing the relationships between the three distinct classes of costs incurred by any preservation program. We will show how INFORM methodology [10] is used to time the selection of new programs and formats. Lastly, we will show how translation loss can be measured, managed and validated, by employing a process built on the project at the Library of Congress to analyze the sustainability of digital formats [11].

20/20 hindsight is perfect, yet looking forward to 2020 the future is not yet so clear as to what it holds for digital preservation. Will we look back to now from 2020 and see a digital dark age or the beginning of a golden ambient intelligence environment? This paper will look at a classic information management metaphor, the information container and extend it to identify the challenges facing digital preservation as we move from managing information containers, through content to information context. This paper will then discuss the research agenda and challenges that need soon to be faced and resolved to move our community forward, navigating through the Semantic Web towards the ambient intelligence context sensitive environment: where digital information becomes a ubiquitous process of perception and communication.

This is a brief abstract of the ‘Web 2.0 and Access to Digital Archives’ presentation at the IS&T Archiving 2006 conference. A webcast of the full presentation is available online at: http://archivemati.ca/papers-presentations.Much of the activity in the digital archiving community over the past decade has been focused on critical (and necessary) preservation issues like file formats, preservation metadata and repository architectures. However, the purpose of establishing digital archives is to ensure the ongoing accessibility and usability of the digital information that they preserve.One of the key concept in the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model is that of the ‘Designated Community’ and the archives' responsibility to make preserved information available and understandable to this community. So how do we make digital information more accessible, usable and understable to designated communities?This presentation reviews the technical and functional architectures of digital archives access systems and speculates whether and how Web 2.0 technologies might be used to improve the quality and effectiveness of these systems.Web 2.0 is mostly a marketing buzz-word that is currently being used to refer to a number of next-generation web trends and technologies. These are characterized by open system architectures, integrated web services, rich client interfaces, syndication, personalization, and location-specific services.However, Web 2.0 trends are much more than a new set of tools and technologies. Web 2.0 is most recognizable by a shift towards de-centralized management of information (e.g. folksonomy tagging, Wikipedia, etc.) which includes an explicit trust in the end-user and systems that get better as more people use them. It is these emerging practices that offer the most promise to improving the accessibility of information that is preserved in digital archives.

We conducted a preliminary field study to understand the current state of personal digital archiving in practice. Our aim is to design a service for the long-term storage, preservation, and access of digital belongings by examining how personal archiving needs intersect with existing and emerging archiving technologies, best practices, and policies. Our findings not only confirmed that experienced home computer users are creating, receiving, and finding an increasing number of digital belongings, but also that they have already lost irreplaceable digital artifacts such as photos, creative efforts, and records. Although participants reported strategies such as backup and file replication for digital safekeeping, they were seldom able to implement them consistently. Four central archiving themes emerged from the data: (1) people find it difficult to evaluate the worth of accumulated materials; (2) personal storage is highly distributed both on- and offline; (3) people are experiencing magnified curatorial problems associated with managing files in the aggregate, creating appropriate metadata, and migrating materials to maintainable formats; and (4) facilities for long-term access are not supported by the current desktop metaphor. Four environmental factors further complicate archiving in consumer settings: the pervasive influence of malware; consumer reliance on ad hoc IT providers; an accretion of minor system and registry inconsistencies; and strong consumer beliefs about the incorruptibility of digital forms, the reliability of digital technologies, and the social vulnerability of networked storage.

Alma-DL, Alma Mater Studiorum Digital Library, is a complex project started by CIB (Inter-library Centre) of Bologna University late in 2001, with the aim to develop an organizational and a technological infrastructure to collect, organize, archive, integrate and offer an access to the digital contents that our University acquires or produces and makes available primarily to institutional users and when possible worldwide. Alma-DL has completed its beta-test phase and can now evaluate its first outputs. This contribution intends to focus on the two subprojects that represent more original outputs of the digital library project that is the OAI compliant platforms developed to collect, archive and distribute the digital contents produced by the University of Bologna. The DigLib: digitization of the cultural heritage of Bologna University and the Open Access Institutional Repositories and E-Journals projects offer paradigmatic solutions in the field of digital image and file archiving, metadata storage and exchange, e-content management, integration and fruition. Finally, the contribution points to immediate future action plans that have been devised as further steps of the development of the Digital Library services.

This paper addresses the outcomes of a project executed by the National Library of the Netherlands to explore the possibilities of a National Digital Repository for long-term preservation and permanent access to digital still images of cultural heritage institutions. The project was carried out in 2004-2005.

This paper describes the production workflow for building a digital archive of David Edelberg's Handel LP collection and discusses the issues in phonograph data acquisition in general. Metadata elements from the metadata data dictionary for phonograph records are listed.