Institutional Repositories July 2007 DIGITAL CURATION creating, managing and preserving digital objects Dr D Peters DISA Digital Innovation South Africa

Topics What is digital curation? Curating digital objects Digital repository functions Role of metadata in digital preservation

Information density vs. life expectancy Paul Conway, School for Scanning, Chicago, 1999

Future scenario Where will our descendents find today’s information - in 50 years time? In what media will it be presented? What must happen in the space/ time between creation and presentation?

Chain of preservation Authenticity  Committing to storage  Maintaining in storage  Retrieval  Presentation Transmission  Over time and across technologies  Technological approaches  Archival practice

What is digital curation?

Digital Curation: lifecycle

Paradigm shift Preserve an electronic record? Software translation Beyond safe storage Future representation of components

What is a Digital Information Object ? METADATA DATA Representation Information

Strategies for digital preservation Research agenda  Archival systems  Methods and tools  Policy and legal framework Education and training  Advocacy workshops  Develop suitable educational qualifications  Operational training in digital curation Centre of excellence  Third party service provider: commercial / consortial  Lead a shared community of practice  Trusted digital repository

What is a digital repository?

Digital Repository Business model for sustainability Agreements with participants Appropriate technological infrastructure Production-level archiving system Define trusted archiving service model

Attributes of a Trusted Digital Repository “…an organisation that has responsibility for the long-term maintenance of digital resources, as well as making them available [through time and across changing technologies] to communities agreed on by the depositor and the repository.” Research Libraries Group

Trusted Digital Repository Administrative responsibility Organisational viability Financial sustainability Technological suitability System security Procedural accountability

OAIS Information Model SIP = Submission Information Package AIP = Archive In formation Package DIP = Dissemination Information Package

Functions of Ingest

LevelMetadataAuthors Names ProjectsThesesPublicationsDatasets L0 L1 L2 L3 L4 UStellenbosch Access Model No Access Access To be confirmed View by owner

The role of metadata in digital preservation?

Metadata and Digital Preservation Metadata is the glue of any digital preservation strategy:  Within a digital repository, “metadata accompanies and makes reference to each digital object and provides associated descriptive, structural, administrative, rights management, and other kinds of information.” Clifford Lynch (D-Lib Magazine, 1999)

Preservation Metadata Viability  bit stream is intact and readable from digital storage media Renderability  translation of the bit stream into a form that can be viewed by humans, or processed by computers Understandability  providing enough information that the rendered content can be interpreted and understood by users PREMIS Metadata Framework to support the preservation of digital objects

Creating the Wrapper Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard (METS)  Digital Library Federation-sponsored initiative  XML document format for encoding metadata necessary for  management of digital library objects within a repository  exchange of such objects between repositories (or between repositories and their users).

METS & Digital Preservation As a vehicle to express/contain various types of metadata  Descriptive, administrative, structural, rights, technical As a vehicle/wrapper for information and digital repository management  OAIS (SIP, AIP, DIP)

Like Nesting Dolls General Frameworks Cedars OCLC/RLG Descriptive MARC Dublin Core OpenURL OAI ONIX Archive Packaging METS AIP Structural Data Represent ation Info Administrative Rights Technical (NISO, ViDE, etc.)

Content Management Systems General Requirements  Handle repository functions  Representation  Structural organisation  Aggregation  Networked distribution Preservation Requirements  Defined preservation strategy  Metadata support  Integrity checks D-Space MySQL Fedora

Review What is digital curation? Preserving digital objects Digital repository functions Role of metadata in digital preservation Legal rights management

Sneak Preview… Normalising to open formats - open standards. XML schema for preservation - metadata and where to put it. Identifying data format types programmatically. Normaliser and file namer plugin architecture…well, maybe. Integration with 3rd party software applications (e.g. DSpace, Fedora, Eprints)

More information… PADI Preservation Metadata Bibliography: PREMIS: JHOVE: PRONOM: OAIS: pdf/CCSDS B-1.pdf METS: DISA: Digital Imaging South Africa

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