A collaboration between the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin has resulted in the development of strategies and a cyberinfrastructure model for the management and preservation of 1) primary archaeological data, 2) the process history generated as those data are analyzed, manipulated, and interpreted, and 3) the final interpretive results. This project draws on the concept of reflexive archaeology to map the lifecycle of archaeological research, and the evolving archive that such research creates, to provide a richer view of both data and process that will make it easier for the data to be reused and to evaluate the interpretations.

A fundamental issue of digital preservation is that information resources must often out-live the systems that are used to maintain them at any given time. It is also important to consider sustainability across the boundaries of collection environments. Portability is an essential consideration. The project called “A Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation of State Government Digital Information,” administered by the Minnesota Historical Society, is developing strategies and systems to provide enhanced online access to state legislative materials. The project is testing software and strategies to collect and provide access to state legislative documents and associated contextual information. The long-term sustainability of the effort will require interoperability among a various parties, including (1) those who might share responsibility for the preservation of legislative resources from Minnesota, and (2) collecting institutions from other states who would like to make use of the project's methods and software. The author is investigating characteristics of the state legislative information system that are most likely to support or hinder portability of software and digital objects across the boundaries of organizations. The findings from this investigation should be relevant to information professionals responsible for digital collections or collection management systems that must be sustained across the boundaries of specific technical or organizational arrangements.

This paper presents the activities and first results of a case study-based research on preservation of digital art, with an overview of key challenges surrounding the creation, management and longterm accessibility of digital art and investigation of experimental testbeds to tackle these challenges. An outline of the results of the onsite visit conducted at the pioneering ZKM Media Museum is also provided. So far, the theoretical aspects of the problem of digital art preservation and curation have been examined without much grounding in experimentation, and not responding to the theoretical and methodological dilemmas posed by digital art (e.g. transience, emergence, and lack of fixity). One of the reasons for this is that research in digital art requires an experimental testbed in which to examine the implications of different preservation approaches and the impact they have on the works of art themselves. The goal of this investigation is to develop a theoretical framework against which languages and their notational systems proposed for preserving digital art can be evaluated.

Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent ArchiviNg (SHAMAN) is an EU-funded project focusing on the development of an integrated preservation framework. Through grid technologies, the SHAMAN framework promotes a distributed approach in preservation systems, whereby ingest, persistent storage, access, presentation and manipulation of digital information is managed for long-term consumption. In order to understand the ever-evolving requirements for functionality in information systems, the SHAMAN team, led by HATII at the University of Glasgow, conducted an in-depth investigation of user needs for preservation solutions. The results were used to inform the development of a corresponding Assessment Framework. The purpose of the Assessment Framework is to evaluate the degree that the SHAMAN outputs are consistent with the identified user requirements and to measure the overall success of the project. The SHAMAN outputs are instantiated as functional prototypes that reflect preservation requirements in three distinct domains: memory institutions, industrial design & engineering and e-Science. Following the specifications of the assessment framework, the software artefacts produced by SHAMAN for each prototype must be assessed to validate their conformance with user and system requirements. To this end, a software validation methodology has been devised, which builds on the SHAMAN Assessment Framework to verify that the SHAMAN software satisfies the reasons for its development. This paper documents the SHAMAN Assessment Framework and explicates the relationship between assessment and software validation in the SHAMAN project.

Since the start of the National Anthropological Archives digital imaging program in 1999, the archive has produced over 100,000 digital assets from archival material to include sound recordings. Several of the projects have promoted outreach and access to the collections through avenues of collaboration. Working with both source communities and researchers, our collections are continually reaching new audiences and are being used in creative ways. In a web 2.0 and social networking world, the NAA is looking ahead towards new ways to promote access. This paper highlights considerations, challenges and successes in achieving these projects.

Instituting digital asset management (DAM) in cultural heritage institutions tends to be a major IT initiative. What is often overlooked is that DAM in isolation merely provides a resource intensive organizational tool for digital assets within the institution. The more important aspects of a DAM implementation are the workflow processes and procedures that are integrated into the application, the links the application makes internally and externally to other institutional systems, and ultimately how the implementation changes and enhances the institution's business processes surrounding the use of digital assets. When the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, decided to undertake a DAM implementation as part of their revamped digital imaging program, their final solution combined MediaBin, an enterprise-level DAM product from Autonomy, with data links to their collection management system, AdLib, and Microsoft SharePoint, a collaboration and business process portal toolkit, with an eye toward further integration in the future.I was commissioned as an outside consultant to help the Rijksmuseum Archive conceptualize their internal business workflows and processes involving digital assets; as they existed and how they might change and be enhanced. Working with the ICT Director, Rob Hendriks, we evaluated systems to layer the actual tasks of these workflows and processes on top of the chosen DAM software. The choice of the DAM application was influenced by its ability to connect to possible front ends, SharePoint being only one of the choices evaluated. The museum had prior experience working with SharePoint making its choice a logical decision. The integration that resulted has been in use for about two years, with additional functionality added in subsequent versions. It has allowed the museum to be more efficient and consider new opportunities. Training of users was fast-tracked; most users never see the MediaBin interface which can be confusing for non-imaging personnel. Users interact with a simplified SharePoint interface, trimmed down to basic functionality. SharePoint also serves as the enabler for request forms, project tracking, and order fulfillment.The model we will describe in our presentation is in many ways an evolution of DAM ahead of the actual maturation of DAM applications, especially for the cultural heritage sector. In the future, a traditional DAM application could be best of breed components rather than an integrated system; a file system or repository like Fedora, a metadata container or wrapper within a database, and a digital asset transformation engine like ImageMagick. Interfaces and workflows to suit the audience would be layered on top via products like SharePoint or open source wiki or CMS systems. The key differentiator for each institution would be the business processes and workflows that make the integration truly functional for the organization, and the flexibility to plug in other systems which feed data to, or need access from asset records. What we have accomplished in a still somewhat traditional manner could be pushed toward a more deconstructed, open and agile development environment.

In the last few years much progress has been made in digital preservation theory and technology. Yet for many small to medium sized archives and memory institutions there are still significant obstacles to implementing best practice solutions to meet the digital continuity requirements of their user communities. Three critical barriers are intellectual complexity, technical complexity and cost. Inspired by a call to action in a recent UNESCO Memory of the World report [1], the goal of the Archivematica project is to lower each of these barriers and give archivists the tools, methodology and confidence to begin preserving digital information today. Archivematica integrates a number of open-source tools to create a comprehensive digital archives system that is based on a practical analysis of the OAIS functional model. The system is free and full access is given to the source code repository and technical documentation under the open-source GPL license.

Long-term retention of authentic electronic records is of significant importance to the pharmaceutical industry, from many standpoints including legal, regulatory and intellectual property protection. The risk of losing access to critical business information in the future could potentially be detrimental to a pharmaceutical business. The industry in the main has relied on a variety of archival approaches, such as using file systems and content management systems and keeping operational systems alive beyond their intended lifetime; unfortunately, none of these approaches are sustainable in the long-term and do not address the serious issue of loss of access through technology obsolescence.The eArchive service has been developed by AstraZeneca to manage the long-term preservation of electronic records, and to begin to address the issue of technology obsolescence. The system is intended to ingest and reliably maintain electronic records from all areas of the global business with retention periods ranging from seven years to many decades. A wide variety of both proprietary and non-proprietary formats are used for the creation of AstraZeneca records; to date, there has been little focus on generating records in formats suitable for long-term preservation. As a result, many records requiring long-term retention may become at risk of format obsolescence unless action is taken. The eArchive service contains mechanisms to mitigate against such risks and facilitate continued access to authentic content throughout a records retention period. In addition to ensuring continued access, strict records management policies must also be enforced. Material must be disposed of once its retention period has been reached, as long as it is not required for ongoing litigation (on legal hold).This paper describes a practical and extensible approach employed by the eArchive service for providing cost-effective and sustainable access to electronic records over time. The solution has been developed in accordance with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model and AstraZeneca's own enterprise architecture. Consideration has also been given to records management activities, such as appraisal and disposition that are not described within the OAIS reference model.The primary approach has been to maximize the use of robust COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) products to form the core of the solution. Customizations are applied where appropriate. Concepts and tools developed by the EU Planets program have also been incorporated into the design, as well as aspects of metadata standards such as PREMIS and Dublin Core.Format migration has been adopted as the long-term preservation mechanism, in addition to a policy of accepting only a limited number of “Preservation Ready” formats. As a result, many of the format migrations will take place prior to ingest into the eArchive system. This paper will describe in detail the approach to preservation policy, identification and selection of preservation pathways and methods of validating the authenticity for long-term preservation of digital images. The tiered fidelity model, based on business requirements, will also be introduced and described in detail.

The EU-funded SHAMAN (Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent ArchiviNg, http://www.shaman-ip.eu/) project is investigating the long-term preservation of large volumes of digital data in a distributed environment, by developing a preservation framework that is verifiable, open and extensible. During the initial stages of the project, a detailed user requirements analysis led by HATII at the University of Glasgow was conducted across three domains: memory institutions, industrial design and engineering, and e-science. This research pinpointed the needs and expectations that end-users and service providers feel should be met by such a preservation framework. This paper gives an overview of the requirements that were gathered, formulated and adopted by this project. It then discusses the outcomes of this empirical research and indicates both how these outcomes are being implemented within SHAMAN and how external parties may also benefit from the findings.Approaches to digital preservation are often still ad hoc and based on a single institution focus. They frequently do not take into consideration the needs of the variety of actors who will come into contact with a system throughout the preservation lifecycle. This paper provides an insight into the preservation practices that a broad range of real-world organisations would like to follow and provides a discussion of how SHAMAN intends to meet the needs of the identified users.

During the past decade a growing number of practitioners, educators, and cultural heritage funders have explored the idea of a convergence of library, archives, and museum functions. The rise of digital collections and services has served as an impetus for much of this thinking along with a search for economic efficiencies and enhanced and integrated user access to materials. With the growing interest in, and actuality of, LAM convergence, there is a pressing need for educators of LAM professionals to consider how this new reality changes educational requirements and programs. This paper discusses digital curation as a promising area of convergence in both professional practice and professional education and provides a model that seeks to identify both common requirements and institutional differences. We have developed a Matrix of Digital Curation Knowledge and Competencies for identifying and organizing the material to be covered in a digital curation curriculum. The Matrix is organized along six dimensions: mandates, values and principles; functions and skills; professional, disciplinary or institutional / organizational context; type of resource; prerequisite knowledge; and transition point in the information continuum. Within the context of potential LAM education convergence, one of the fundamental questions is the extent to which offerings must vary based on the professional, disciplinary, institutional, organizational, or cultural context in which students plan to work. LAM convergence is not likely to result in complete unification, but the growing importance of digital curation activities in supporting the missions of all three types of institutions poses exciting new opportunities for collaboration in professional education.