Steve Knight by Design

Future Perfect 2012: Digital Preservation by Design - Panel

Kris Carpenter Negulescu (Internet Archive)

Gabe Nault (The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints)

Andrew Waugh (Public Records Office Victoria)

Jan Dalsten Sǿrensen (Danish National Archives)

What are the top 3 products or services that the digital preservation community needs right now(this can include something that we have but which doesn’t work properly)?

Is digital preservation a domain where we can let a thousand flowers bloom or does it require more DESIGN? If the latter what does this mean?

Q1 – Top 3 products or services

Automatic ingest for data, scalability.

Improving tools. Tools to manage records in agencies.

Formats and their longevity, format validation tools, shared registry, full text search. What are ‘good formats’ that will be around for a long time.

Good development won't happen until there is economic benefit for developers. Potential for fee based access to tools and services.

Exit strategies in all planning.

Open exchange of metadata.

Full text search engine - that span scope and scale of our collections. Support for text mining.

Standard format for database preservation (around SIARD?).

Better cost models for digital preservation. What are the economical consequences of the decisions we are making today. Tools to assess economical consequences.

Repository of all ICT documentation of systems that made the objects in our repositories.

Q2 – DESIGN or let a 1000 flowers bloom

Way NSW is doing things is completely different than at Victoria and this is fantastic. This is a time of experimentation and different approaches are essential as we just don't know yet.

Don't have a choice - we must let 1000 flowers bloom as there are so many contexts / initiatives / organisations in which digital preservation is happening.

There are common challenges so we should be able to come up with some common processes (eg OAIS). Storage/risk/cost models?

Actual DP must happen within the cultural context of the organisation/country and therefore there will be differences.

What would DESIGN mean? Who, where, when does design happen?Need a framework for requirements. Should be able to develop requirements communally.

Need a framework for development – common tools, system approaches.

Need a framework for sharing - registries.

The best solution for the problem at hand.

We need flexibility to adapt over time. We need to remove dependencies on any one tool. We need to be designing to be able to walk away from tools that don’t work/stop working/stop being useful. We need to be looking for best solutions but not be locked in.

We must challenge Not Invented Here. We must look for what is good and we must collaborate and contribute. It is essential that organisations that start things up don't get left holding all the responsibility. We must have a community that takes contributing seriously.

Some other thoughts

Orson Scott Card: The Originist .. tales from Isaac Asimov Foundation ..

“… but everything was catalogued so you knew exactly what humanity had lost forever”.

There is a market here.

We get what we pay for.

Make economics our friend.

Bware the ‘tyranny of the immediate’.

The Hon Amy Adams made it clear that we need:

•coherent government direction

•an all of government approach to digital preservation

so that

•all can make the best use of government information.

Future Perfect 2012: Digital Preservation by Design – Wrap up

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1

Jeff Rothenberg in his keynote noted that the digital preservation community has been trundling along:

•without much technological depth of understanding in most cases

•that things are not in great shape at the moment

•the need to perform serious cost and process analyses.

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1Kris Carpenter Negulescu introduced us to the Internet Archive and the singular vision of Brewster Kahle.

The Internet Archive’s latest gig is a library of every book ever published.

It is great to see, in the current environment, that there is still space for grand challenges.

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1We heard Shaun Hendy describe how data works to support innovation, raising the question of what data resides in the information in cultural heritage institutions.

How can we expose that data and how can we get it to the folk that will do for our data what Shaun is doing with his.

Papers Past has over 3 million pages. Let’s pretend that each page has 2,000 words on it.

That’s 6 billion units of data. Surely someone’s got to be interested in that? Sociologists, historians, computational linguistics folk.

What else is in our collections? How do we get into the innovation ecosystem?

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1And all our other presenters who have provided us with the skeleton of a work programme:

Formats – too much emphasis, not enough.

Emulation and migration

Preservation and archival practice.

Preservation and access as two sides of the same coin

Collaboration, specialisation, multi-disciplinary teams

Diversity, volume, mihi, proactive, progress, do the best we can

Collaboration and and communication and information sharing

Better data management.

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1

FUTURE PERFECT 2012:

PRESERVATION BY DESIGN

Lokomotiv Team Pursuit Crash – at the Manchester Track Cycling World Cup 2008.Photo by Adam Roberts.http://www.flickr.com/photos/adman_jamjar/2999411642/in/pool-909291@N20

IN DENIAL

BY DESIGN

Let’s be purposive about weaving digital preservation into the wider strategic approach to digital activities.

Let’s engage more methodically with the increasing quantity and complexity of materials going forwards.

Let’s get on with development of relationships with large institutional creators (eg newspaper publishers), academic and private research producers etc.

Le t’s start moving from short term, project funding to ongoing sustainable funding recognising the ongoing –ness as of digital preservation.

Let’s engage with the full spectrum of national stakeholders to make this work.

Let’s try and move from some of the current short term focus on front-end issues and shine the light on digital preservation and the long-tail implications of digital preservation.

The Long TailLion’s Mane jellyfish – tentacles up to 37 meters long.

It is digital preservation that will ensure maximum leverage and benefit of the digital long tail.

However, Wired Magazine noted recently that:

open data is not just about empowering the empoweredopen data is not an end in itselfmassive data dumps and even friendly online government portals are insufficient

Ordinary people need to know what information is available and they need the training to be conversant in it.

And if people are to have anything more than theoretical access to the information, it needs to be easy and cheap to use.

That means investing in the kinds of organizations doing outreach, advocacy, and education in the communities least familiar with the benefits of data transparency.

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1

Categories of design:

•Technical•Organisational•Standards•Legal•Educational•Economic.

But how about meaning?

There seems to be an underlying assumption that we are all talking about the same thing. Is this so?

What do we mean when we say digital preservation and what do we reference when we say it (the OAIS model, PREMIS)? What else?

BY DESIGN

Men's team pursuit on Monday, August 18 2008 at the Laoshan Velodrome in Beijing.Photo by Ivan Sekretarev, The Associated Press. http://therecord.blogs.com/take_the_lane/team-pursuit.html

2 - 4

How about a trusted market place for products, tools and services that support all of our digital preservation programmes?

3rd party tools from the community - PREMIS, PRONOM, DROID, JHOVE, NLNZ MET.

3rd party tools from outside the community (including primary infrastructure choices – virus checkers, fixity checkers).

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 6

BY DESIGN

Laura Campbell (Tallinn, May 2011)

‘an international preservation body with a focus on policy, perhaps assisted by an advisory expert group to identify what categories of digital objects are most at risk. The body could promote an international notion of collection, work on standards and tools, and maybe maintain a common index of preserved materials.’

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 7

BY DESIGN

New Zealand Women's Team Pursuit, UCI World Track Cycling Championships, Hisense Arena on December 2, 2010 in Melbourne, Australia.(December 1, 2010 - Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images AsiaPac)http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/3wuZJIKxMmP/UCI+Track+World+Cycling+Day+1/ZLpCfGY8FAM

Beaut

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1One more time for our sponsors:

Microsoft – major sponsor

Ex Libris – social function

Govis – lanyards

Silver & Ballard – coffee cart

Victoria University – morning tea

Mick Crouch - Convenor

iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1

Daniel Gomes (Portugeuse Web Archive), TPDL 2011

Web archiving survey

277 people working on web archiving globally

Google has 24,000 people working on front ends

Let’s turn that around.