Preserving Digital Collections Andrea Goethals Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA)

Outline FCLA? The Motivation to Preserve Preservation Key FCLA Digital Archive Digital Preservation Infrastructure

The FCLA … Has 46 full-time staff Provides centralized automation support for over 50 libraries at Florida’s 10 public universities Is attached to UF only administratively Runs the largest central ILS in US

Motivation to Preserve Are we living in the “Digital Dark Age”? –BBC’s 1986 Domesday Book vs. original 1086 Domesday Book Amount of digital information –93% of world info produced in 1999 (UC Berkeley 2000 study: “How Much Information”) Rate of technological change –‘Antique’ if 15+ years old Source: oldcomputers.net

Preservation Key: Fault-tolerance through Redundancy Centralized (A) Decentralized (B) Distributed (C) Source: Dodge, 2003

FCLA Digital Archive (FDA) Operational Fall  ? Funding help from IMLS Goals: –Establish a working digital preservation archive for the use of the libraries of FL’s public universities –Identify costs involved with sufficient granularity to support reasonable cost-recovery pricing –To disseminate tools, procedures and results for the widest national impact

FDA Preservation Approach Still in flux (!) Dark archive Automated – DAITSS (Dark Archive In The Sunshine State) 2 levels of preservation (bit-level, full) Always keep the originals Plan for migrations from the very beginning Combination of ‘traditional’ format migration, migration on request, and normalization ( archival data formats, converting to standards, canonicalization )

FDA Business Plan Free! –(Until the end of the grant period, then cost-recovery) All data contributions through libraries Libraries are our customers, we are building in customer options

FDA Ingest Example PDF AVI XML CIP

FDA Ingest Example PDF AVI XML CIP SIP XML

FDA Ingest Example PDF AVI XML CIP SIP XML AIP XML TIFF Database Records XML

Digital Preservation Infrastructure Commonly-accepted terminology –OAIS Model (Partially helpful to us) Good Typology of Preservation Strategies –Thibodeau’s matrix Preservation Metadata –METS (LOC) - Technical metadata still developing NISO Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images (MIX schema) LOC A/V prototyping project –PREMIS (OCLC, RLG)

Maintain original technology Preserve Technology OBJECTIVE Preserve Objects Specific APPLICABILITY General Programmable Chips Emulation Viewer Re-engineer Software Virtual Machine Universal Virtual Computer Version Migration Format Standardization Rosetta Stone Translation Typed Object Conversion Persistent Archives Object Interchange Format Source: Thibodeau, 2002.

Digital Preservation Infrastructure File Format Knowledge-base –Format info (Global Format Registry, PRONOM, FCLA) –Archived specifications –Recommended submitted formats and why? –Recommended migrations and normalizations (FCLA, Nat’l Archives of Australia) Migration Experiments (Harvard) Economic information for preservation –‘Fair’ billing models (effect of formats, preservation strategies)

Digital Preservation Infrastructure Digital Archive Software –Open-source archive software Fedora, DAITSS, DSpace –Software for automatic format recognition, technical metadata extraction –What can read this format? (PRONOM, Global Format Registry?) –File format converters Open source software (Ghostscript, etc.)

Dodge, Martin. An Atlas of Cyberspaces, DSpace FCLA Digital Archive / DAITSS Fedora Project Global Registry for Digital Format Representation Information Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Library of Congress A/V Prototyping Project METS MIX National Archives of Australia PREMIS PRONOM Thibodeau, Kenneth. “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years”, The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective, Conference Proceedings, July 2002.