1. Digital Curation: Round One
Digital Curation: Round One by Gretchen Gueguen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Digital Curation: Round One
Hi, thanks for coming today. My name is Gretchen Gueguen, I’m currently the Digital Archivist at the University of Virginia, where I’ve been since May 2nd. But today I’m going to talk with you about a project I worked on earlier in the year, and through the past 3 years before that at East Carolina University.
Gretchen Gueguen
University of Virginia
Formerly of East Carolina University

2. Agenda What is Digital Curation The Digital Curation Lifecycle Model
Case Study: The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library,
So here is a little overview of what I’ll cover:
First we’ll talk about what Digital Curation is
Then I’m going to talk with you about one particular model: The Digital Curation Lifecycle Model
And then finally, we’ll take a closer look at The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library

3. What is Digital Curation?
Preservation
Collection
So, what is “Digital Curation”…
The Digital Curation Center, a UK group that does a lot of work in this area, has defined this term as “the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. So this covers the whole spectrum of actions that might be carried out with digital materials. It is more than just preservation. Actually, preservation is only part of curation…
Digital curation then includes things like:
Collecting verifiable digital assets
Providing digital asset search and retrieval
Certification of the trustworthiness and integrity of the collection content
Archiving
Maintenance
Selection

4. Key elements of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model
The Digital Curation Lifecycle Model was created by the Digital Curation Centre to graphically represent in an understandable way all the processes involved in digital curation, but it is a bit difficult to follow. So I’m going to break it down for you…

5. Key elements of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model
Data
any information in binary digital form, is at the centre of the Curation Lifecycle.
We start with data: The donut hole, as it were; the center of the solar system.
Data is what it’s all about: digital objects, databases, datasets…it’s the stuff we are “curating”

6. Key elements of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model
Full Lifecycle Actions
Description and Representation Information
Preservation Planning
Community Watch and Participation
Curate and Preserve
The next ring shows the “Full Lifecycle Actions”
These are the things that are continuous and ongoing. There really doesn’t have to be an order in which they occur, they don’t necessarily rely on each other, and they aren’t completed. These activities are also relevant to many different sequential actions.

7. Key elements of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model
Sequential Actions
Conceptualise
Create or Receive
Appraise and Select
Ingest
Preservation Action
Store
Access, Use and Reuse
Transform
Next the sequential actions build on each other:
These are the things that you generally do once in a lifecycle, life ingesting material or appraising it

8. Key elements of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model
Occasional Actions
Dispose
Reappraise
Migrate
The Occasional actions are like decision points, they interrupt the regular flow of activity and spur new action.
They are related to the sequential actions in that two types of action: migration and re-appraisal come at the preservation action step and the other, disposal, is a result of the appraisal step.

9. The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library
Case Study
The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library
Okay, so I’m going to move on to the actual case study now, which is related to a project I worked on at ECU, The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library.

10. The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library: the 4 W’s
Who:
Joyner Library at East Carolina University+
What:
A digital library of books+ about eastern North Carolina
When:
, initial project
, partnership project
So, I’ll start with the Who, What and When.
Who was a collaborative group. The project started at the J.Y. Joyner Library, the main academic library at East Carolina University. As the project grew more partners came on board from area museums mainly relating to the agricultural and social community in the area in the 18th and 19th centuries. This collaboration was made possible through a grant from NC ECHO, a statewide body that manages the distribution of LSTA funds through grant projects among other activities.
What began then as a digital library of books about eastern North Carolina, grew to include museum artifacts, maps, videos, and original lesson plans created for the project.
When spanned from the initial creation of the collection of digitized books in 2003 up through the creation of the joint Digital Library with all the partners in 2007

11. The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library: the 4 W’s
Where:
You are here.
I mention where, eastern North Carolina, and specifically Greenville, for a particular purpose. Eastern North Carolina is a distinct cultural region within the state. During the Colonial period it was the seat of government and economically powerful. It’s counties were some of the highest producers of tobacco in the world. But today it contains some of the poorest areas in the state, with poverty rates as high as 32% in 2009.
This is related to one of the primary reasons why this project was undertaken…

12. The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library: the 4 W’s
Why:
ECU is the largest university in the eastern region, serving some of the poorest and most under-served counties in the state.
Material on eastern NC not widely available
The expertise and interest existed in the library to create a great digital project.
ECU is the largest university in the eastern region, and the third largest in the state overall. Institutionally speaking there is a large drive to provide a high level of service to the region in addition to the student and faculty population at the university. The ENCDL project provided a unique opportunity to really showcase and put at the forefront some of the treasures of the community and make them more broadly accessible across the state.
In addition to this sense of mission, the expertise and interest existed in the library to work on the project. An experimental vibe had taken root there in the late nineties and the staff were really excited to take advantage of the possibilities of new media.

13. The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library: and 1 H
How:
ASP.net interface
Digitization
Lesson Activities
Finally, the nitty gritty:
Book digitization was done in-house on a Zeutschel scanner. Artifacts were professionally photographed and accompanying video descriptions created
A TEI XML transcription created for every book and indexed using TextML
Artifact metadata created in SQL database and exported to simple XML records to facilitate searching alongside TEI XML. This was non-standard metadata but relatively robust. Additional summaries, author biographies, and curator “tours” of artifacts were also created
The Site interface created using ASP.NET
Lesson activities created using the repository of books and artifacts were added to site interface
Transcription
Metadata

14. So here is just a quick overview of the site as it appeared when the project was completed in 2007… this is the home page with access to different formats and methods for browsing.

15. You could browse a list of the books by title

16. Or, as geography is considered a very important access point for this collection, you could browse through all items by county.

17. When viewing an artifact there was an accompanying video and short narrative description (a voice-over in the video)

18. Books had a similar record page, and the text can be viewed in a single page with transcription and image

19. Or read in a flash-based book viewer created using a tool called Zoomify

20. The classroom activities included lesson plans as well as lists of materials by reading level and alignment with the North Carolina Standard Course of Study…the state curriculum guidelines for K-12 education…

21. Case Study: The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library
The End.
So, basically we thought that was that in 2007
..until
…until

22. Case Study: The Eastern North Carolina Digital Library
, creation of Joyner Library Digital Collections, a sister repository more broad in scope
, migration of ENCDL into JLDC
I started at ECU in 2008 and the first task I set out on with Digital Collections was to create a more broadly based repository service, called imaginatively Joyner Library Digital Collections. The idea was that this repository would be the general infrastructure and backbone for future projects. It would be a platform to serve many different kinds of objects from many different kinds of collections.
We knew from the beginning that ENCDL should become part of the repository, but we didn’t really embark on it until the system was pretty robust in 2010.

23. Just for comparison’s sake, here’s a quick overview of the repository
Just for comparison’s sake, here’s a quick overview of the repository. This is the home page

24. This is one of the generic “collections” which is really just a link to results from a specific search.

25. This is an example of the home page of a collection within the repository. Just an extra static page with some information about the materials in the collection.

26. And here is a specific item, in this case a diary.
So what you can see is that the repository is pretty generic and stripped down. It’s built to suit pretty much everything, but be flexible enough to give us some personalization as was seen in the last slide with the particular collection home page.

27. Comparing ENCDL JLDC TextML / ASP.net
Non-standard metadata (aside from TEI transcriptions)
Two basic material types
Non-standard filenaming
Significant supplementary documentation for each object
Text and Image/artifact in different search and browse
Extensive web-presence with educational activities
TextML / ASP.net
Metadata standards (METS, MODS, MIX, TEI)
Variety of materials
Each object has Persistent Identifier (PID) and consistent filenaming
Full-repository search
Basic web-presence, but robust searching tools
It wasn’t just the user experience that had updated either.
While we continued to use some of the same basic tools like TextML and ASP.net,
we used more standardized metadata,
we supported a wider variety of formats including audio, as well as a variety of texts, manuscripts, photographs, and artworks.
We implemented the idea of persistent identifiers
and focused on some new (at that time) ideas in search functionality like
cross-collection searching
and faceted search results.

28. Digital Curation Round One…
So, next I’m going to use the lifecycle model to frame our migration planning and implementation process.

29. Applying the lifecycle model
Community Watch and Participation
What are the common standards endorsed by our community?
JPEG2000
EPUB
PREMIS
NC ECHO’s PMDO
Flash
HTML 5
Curate and Preserve
What are the standards that will best fit our curation and preservation needs?
To begin with we were actively involved in Community Watch and Participation to determine the best practice standards endorsed by our community. We are also involved in determining the best ways to curate and preserve the project as well as standards for the JLDC repository. We investigated many new standards for both digital objects and metadata including:
JPEG2000
EPUB
PREMIS
NC ECHO’s PMDO
Flash
HTML 5
Our analysis of these standards took into account, cost, fit with the repository architecture, community support, and long-term benefits

30. Applying the lifecycle model
Preservation Planning
What actions are in the best long-term interest of the ENCDL? JLDC?
Meetings with stakeholders
Web analytics
Reproduction requests
Review of infrastructure
Migration
Digital objects, metadata, web application
So as part of preservation planning (i.e. determining how best to care for these materials in the long term (in the dark blue)), we carried out several activities to formulate a plan. We then initiated a preservation action, namely: the migration action was initiated, which will involve a transformation

31. Applying the lifecycle model
Create a new collection in the repository
Create a “PID” for each digital object into the repository
Create METS/MODS/MIX/TEI/PREMIS record for each
Incorporate supplemental metadata
Create new PREMIS records for each
Create new hybrid object type for image + video
JPEG2000 for all images
pdf and epub for books
The analysis done in the prior steps helped us to formulate a basic plan for migration:
We would create a new collection in the repository for this material.
Each item would then have a persistent URL in the new system that we could redirect the old link to.
A new metadata record meeting our new standards would be mapped.
Supplemental information would be incorporated both within the metadata and through links to external documents.
I note here that part of the migration process involved the decision to adopt a new standard across the repository for preservation metadata: PREMIS
We needed to create a brand new technical “type” of object to support the museum artifacts: image + video
We also decided to adopt the JPEG2000 standard.
The reasons we went in this direction were the smaller file size
and zooming without flash and “tiling” that JPEG2000 afforded
We also adopted pdf and epub as download formats.

32. Applying the lifecycle model
JPEG2000
Complicated algorithms
Inadequate software
Web application development with Kakadu
Presentation copies only at this time.
Metadata
PREMIS
Mapping and scripting multiple times
Repository structure
Modeling new object types
Functional requirements for UI and metadata
Use case scenarios in ENCDL mapped to JLDC
Now we can return to the lifecycle model to start with actions, Create, appraise, Ingest, Preservation Action, and Store steps are where the bulk of the work lies:
Really, this part could be a presentation in and of itself:
To just give you an idea of what goes on in these steps, we had three basic tasks:
First the use of JPEG2000. It’s a complicated standard with really flexible compression algorithms and we had to do a lot of tests to determine the options we wanted to use. Once we decided on that the conversion and quality assurance could take anywhere from an hour to several days depending on the size of the book.
In addition, JPEG200 isn’t natively supported by any web browsers, so we had to implement an open source delivery application call kakadu. At this time, we have only created JPEG2000 files for the derivative copies, so we are still storing 5TB of Tiff masters. For future digitization, we will use JPEG2000 as the standard.
In terms of metadata work, we needed to adapt the JHOVE tool to extract and create valid PREMIS metadata. We also had to do several rounds of mapping and scripting. For the book collection we mapped from MARC to MODS, we also had to integrate the additional summaries and biographies. For the artifacts we had to map from our homegrown XML schema to MODS.
Finally, the repository structure had to be adapted to suit the new materials. We had new combination objects of image plus video for the artifacts. We also had to develop some new features in the user interface, so we created use case scenarios from the existing site and mapped out the functions in the new repository.

33. Applying the lifecycle model
Access, Use and Reuse
Recreate the book viewer using JPEG2000
Create subject and map browse for the entire repository
Recreate ENCDL pages with repository’s stylesheet
When the site is fully migrated, we will find ourselves in the last stage, Access, Use and Reuse.
From the UI end we could now recreate the book viewer using the JPEG2000 files
We recreated a subject and map-based browse, which we could then use across the entire repository
And we also recreated the static HTML pages with the repository’s stylesheet

34. So this is where we are with the migration at this point
So this is where we are with the migration at this point. This is on our test server at the moment, and not everything is 100% operational, but you can see that the same major areas are present here, but we used the migration as an opportunity to simplify the navigation a bit.

35. The same navigational browsing capabilities are present, they are just organized together more logically

36. We recreated the county browse, and in fact, this tool is now being used across the entire repository.

37. This is an example of the title browse
This is an example of the title browse. Whereas previously books and artifacts had to be browsed separately, now they can be browsed together. As you can see it is the same results stylesheet as is used for the rest of the repository, but the default sort is alphabetically by title.

38. This is an example of one of the book records
This is an example of one of the book records. It may be difficult to see here, but there are links to open up the author biography and abstract in the metadata record, and when the derivative is prepared there will also be a link to download a copy in pdf format

39. This is the new bookviewer that utilizes JPEG2000 for native zooming
This is the new bookviewer that utilizes JPEG2000 for native zooming. The book reader offers a full-text search within the book in the upper right, the results show up below that, with links to each page with a valid result.

40. And finally, this is an example of the new image+video object
And finally, this is an example of the new image+video object. Clicking on the video tab along the top, opens up the embedded video in the same space where the image now resides.

41. The End Curation Preservation Community Watch and participation
So, once the plan is fully carried out, we will finally be finished…
…except that those continuous actions shown in the lifecycle model:
Updating and fine-tuning description
Preservation planning
Community Watch
And Curation and Preservation
Will continue and will most likely inspire future projects.

42. What Have We Learned?
Many of us will eventually need to migrate not just data, but collections and “experiences” into other repositories.
Digital Curation Lifecycle Model can help us think through Curation activities and evaluate them.
The Lifecycle Model is not linear, nor will our activities be.
The Lifecycle Model is not finite, but iterative.
So, to finish, I thought I’d take the opportunity to solidify what I think are the take-away points.
First, the realization that when we migrate data, we will also need to think about collections and “experiences” or the way that data is used and reused was key
Second, I hope I’ve shown that the Digital Curation Lifecycle Model can help us think through Curation activities and evaluate them
Finally, we realize that both the model and our curation work is neither linear nor finite.

43. Thanks! East Carolina University At-Large In Spirit… Emily Gore
Michael Reece
Joe Barricella
Justin Tew
Mark Custer
Maury York
John Lawrence
Linda Teel
Hazel Walker
At-Large
Emily Gore
Justin Vaughn
Amy Chiles
In Spirit…
Chuck Jones

44. Web: http://www.gretchengueguen.com
Contacts
Gretchen Gueguen
Web:
Eastern North Carolina Digital Library Joyner Library Digital Collections