In this paper we present the results from The Danish National Bit Repository project. The project aim was establishment of a system that can offer flexible and sustainable bit preservation solutions to Danish cultural heritage institutions. Here the bit preservation solutions must include support of bit safety as well as other requirements like e.g. confidentiality and availability.The Danish National Bit Repository is motivated by the need to investigate and handle bit preservation for digital cultural heritage. Digital preservation relies on the integrity of the bits which digital material consists of, and it is with this focus that the project was initiated.This paper summarizes the requirements for a general system to offer bit preservation to cultural heritage institutions. On this basis the paper describes the resulting flexible system which can support such requirements. The paper will explain principles and design, as well as how both design and implementations can be used by any institution or company with requirements to bit preservation.

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Electronic Records Archives (ERA), built to hold the avalanche of electronic records being created by the federal government of the United States, recently reached a major milestone. On September 30, 2011 ERA's initial development phase ended and the operations and maintenance phase began. Begun in 2005, ERA incrementally deployed important functions starting in 2008, when the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) started ingesting its existing collection of electronic records into ERA and piloting the records management functions that allow federal agencies to create records schedules and transfer their permanent electronic records to NARA.As of January 30, 2012 ERA was storing more than 131 terabytes of records in a wide variety of formats from the United States Congress, federal Agencies, and the George W. Bush White House. This volume is just the beginning of what ERA will manage and store, though. For example, NARA has recently received around 300 terabytes of electronic records from the 2010 Census, currently being prepared for ingest into ERA. NARA is relying on ERA every day to perform a key part of its basic mission, and ERA provides a flexible foundation on which NARA can build increasingly sophisticated functions over time.ERA's successes are critical to the mission of the archives, but the challenges the project encountered and the lessons NARA learned along the way may be more valuable to the digital preservation community. This paper will provide a summary of what ERA is and highlights of the project's accomplishments, but will also discuss important decision points in planning and development, external constraints, lessons learned from the experience, and challenges remaining in the future. Lessons learned include the importance of project governance, strategies for maintaining control of the project, and the necessity of constantly communicating to ensure that stakeholder expectations are realistic. Challenges included managing a large number of disparate requirements for records governed under different legal frameworks and working under the constraints of legally mandated timeframes for records ingest and access. NARA's response to these challenges involved a solution architecture that includes a common architectural pattern shared by different instances within a system of systems. NARA will be relying on this flexible software framework, along with standardized interfaces and data elements, to adapt ERA now that the system has moved out of initial development and into the operations and maintenance phase.

The Portal to Texas History is a gateway to humanities collections within the digital library of the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries (http://texashistory.unt.edu). Currently, materials from more than 190 content partners are available and the number of partners continues to grow. While ever-increasing numbers of partners and assets are signs that digitally preserving and making resources Web-accessible is a desirable thing, universities, cultural heritage institutions, and funding agencies increasingly expect measurements that report the impact and value resulting from digitizing and preserving assets. Because the Portal is fairly unique in both the number and scope of its content partners, it serves as a good case study for measuring the impact of digitization for two key digital library stakeholder groups: content providers and users. This paper reports the initial findings of a study of the impact of digitizing assets, specifically: (a) a framework of impact areas and indicators, and (b) findings for the Portal's content partners and users.

This paper has provided details on the LE of the data on magnetic tape, hard-disc drives, flash memory, and optical discs. For archival purposes, only the M-DISC presently meets the requirement of long-term data retention (more than 100 years). This disc has been rigorously tested, and the results are very positive.The main weakness of the M-DISC is its relatively small capacity. This weakness is being addressed by our current research on a permanent solid-state solution, one whose density will enable a capacity of several terabytes in the format of a solid-state drive. Though it will be much more expensive than an M-DISC, the convenience of having several terabytes in a single, removable form of storage should be very attractive to the archival community.

Searchable indexes and digital browse aids play an essential role in providing easy access to an archive's records. FamilySearch is making tools available to archives to help them index their records. Learn what the FamilySearch indexing system is and how it can help you add digital browse aids to published images, create searchable indexes of records, and link existing records or indexes to images.FamilySearch has different indexing environments and deployment options available to fit the needs of all archives, regardless of your size or location. You can use the system to either recruit and manage your own volunteer workforce or leverage the 200,000+ volunteers already involved in the indexing program.

Purpose: This research aiming at a survey of the existing status of digital preservation among the members of the IIPC was carried out by the identification of maintenance methods and strategies, digital repositories, standards, storage formats and tools and levels of access and security.Method/approach: The research is based on a descriptive and analytic survey. According to this method, the community in question has been surveyed within two groups of digital archiving and permanent access as regarded digital preservation using questionnaires. The questionnaires were sent electronically to the community in question including 11 members of the IIPC.Finds: %90/91 of national libraries apply on-line magnetic media and tape library, %81/82 SAN technology, %90/91METS standard and the OAIS reference model, %90/91 PDF format, TIFF, MP3 and WAVA, %100 back-up supply, %45/45 access to the entire collection for free, access with restricted copyright and free access to the collection of digital records in part and %100 the mechanism of verification and access control management.Conclusion: According to the results of this research, on-line magnetic media and tape library are appropriate for storage and long-termed preservation of back-ups and digital resources at national libraries due to their high quality and considerable life span and the SAN for better integration and allowing for the sharing of back-up facilities.

The Archive records at various tertiary institutions in Uganda are a source to important academic historical information. The use of information held in archives provides the ultimate justification for the existence of an archival institution. On the other hand archivists in tertiary institutions in Uganda are constrained by a number of obstacles in their quest to provide information to various users who come to their universities. For instance, most of the archival documents found in tertiary institutions in Uganda are mostly in paper form, they are stored in a disorganized manner; the archivists lack appropriate instruments and tools to facilitate access. In short, these archival documents are subject to deterioration. Furthermore the manual system of obtaining information from the archives is time consuming and inefficient. The users of the archives facilities must first consult the list of the available materials and then go to boxes and obtain the document or documents needed. And in case of periodic upgrades these lists are difficult to maintain. Such obstacles rotate around the lack of the use of an information system for the proper management of the archives. In the context stated above, regular users of the archives have expressed the difficulties encountered in accessing required information from the archive, yet if the current manual system is maintained the users' expectations will not be met. For easy accessibility of documents in tertiary institution archives, professional staffing and efficient policies are important. While these measures represent the necessary factors for easy accessibility of archival documents, the sufficient condition is for the tertiary institutions in Uganda to shift from a manual system of managing archive activities to an electronic based system. The efficient management of records and archives is one part of an efficient information management program. It is therefore possible to efficiently manage records and archives using information technology at the tertiary institution level. An information system for efficiently managing the archive files is therefore essential. This paper therefore discusses without technical detail (a) the significant role information technology plays in the accessibility of archival documents by staff in the archive and users of the archive respectively. (b) The problems the management of computerized data often presents since information can be manipulated easily, updated and even deleted thus undermining the accuracy and reliability of the information. Finally, the author recommends that archivists in tertiary institutions in Uganda have to rethink through their way of working in order to meet the new challenges posed by technological advances.

Microsoft Sharepoint is getting more and more popular as a document management tool in private enterprises and it is often used in the public sector as well. Sharepoint can have different roles in the corporate IT roadmap, as its best supporting teamwork and intranet. However, Sharepoint has never included tools in a proper archiving. Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences (MUAS) with partners developed and tested tools and methods in Sharepoint to include necessary metadata needed in digital archiving and a process to ingest the documents in the archive. To utilize Sharepoint in proper document or records management, additional tools are needed. In this paper, a case study to add-on these functionalities is presented.

The billion pictures shot on consumer cameras or computer generated are mostly stored in compressed data format, often vulnerable even to a single bit change. Obviously, the file format used for storage is an issue, especially at the end-of-life of the storage medium, when hardware become fragile and migration is necessary, increasing the probability of being exposed to bit errors while reading, transmitting and re-writing data.Error resiliency was a guideline for the JPEG2000 standard [9] and [5], besides this, some formats have already been designed for lossless compression (PNG, JPEG-LS, JPEG2000, BMF, TMW, LOCO-I, CALIC, …). However only few academic works target efficient lossless compression combined with error resiliency. This early approach points only luminance image, and aim to reduce local redundancies to approaching Shannon's entropy. First, an adaptative predictor based on a causal neighborhood is used to estimate the value of the current pixel, and the error signal is subsequently processed, up to run-length encoding of bitplanes using bit-patterns to store the length of the runs. At many stages of the processing, the impact of a possible bit error is minimized and after run-length encoding, the data is protected with an EDC/ECC (Error Detection Code / Error Correction Code) using log₂(N) metadata for that usage. Last, a bit shuffle (exactly a Bit-Reversal Permutation[6]) is applied for protection against burst errors. Results will be shown and compared to JPEG2000 images.

This paper presents a platform dedicated to the analysis and the online consultation of historical newspaper archives. This platform has been designed to provide a user experience as intuitive as possible by using mature open source tools. All the features are implemented thanks to the Spring framework. To meet this goal, we created a system to display tiled high-resolution images operating without a plug-in but based on an open source solution called IIPImage. The platform also allows for full-text searches thanks to the Java search library Apache Lucene and displays the results in the form of newspaper articles. In addition, we established collaborative features to provide the users with the ability to correct the content automatically generated by our document processing workflow and accessed through the browsing platform. The system is able to store all the corrections of the users, by using the couple Hibernate/MySQL. The aim is to enable continuous improvement of both the content quality and the search accuracy, by exploiting the ability of the users to recognize significant errors, in order to enhance the digital objects representing the newspaper issues.The proposed system is designed to generate metadata describing the physical layout, but also the logical structure of newspaper documents. Our article segmentation analyses a newspaper issue and recognizes articles, even if they straddle more than one page or if they spread in a complex structure. The workflow can also consider as input data, the results of optical character recognition (OCR) engines in order to provide a textual indexation of the segmented articles.By using this system, we want to create a true and representative digital object using standard formats (i.e. METS / ALTO) and containing the logical description of the content, making easier reading and understanding by the users.