LibCognizance: Digital Preservation

Showing posts with label Digital Preservation. Show all posts

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Preservation Techniques

LibCognizance Audio-visual Preservation , Digital Preservation

Preservation techniques vary based on the type of material and the risks involved (e.g., data corruption, paper deterioration, or film degradation). Digital methods like migration, emulation, and cloud storage are essential for modern archives, while traditional techniques like microfilming, deacidification, and encapsulation continue to protect physical records.

TRUST to build Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs)

LibCognizance Archives , Digital Library

Digital repositories are information systems to collect, store, manage, preserve, and provide access to the content to the users.

TRUST to build Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs)

Digital repositories are information systems to collect, store, manage, preserve, and provide access to the content to the users. The content is either deposited by the content creator owner or third party. The collection is managed and curated by using standard metadata tools. The repository offers a minimum set of basic services eg. store, search, and access to the content.

A Concept of Trustworthy Digital Repositories has been evolved to increase the capability of the repositories in long term preservation, access and, build trust among the users about the sustainability and usefulness of these repositories over time. Developing trustworthy digital repositories will require the integration of new methods, policies, standards and technologies in the process of digital preservation.

What is digital preservation?

Digital preservation is the process of managing access to digital material irrespective of technological advances in a long time, making the format and media to access digital content obsolete.

According to a working group within the Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) to draft a definition for digital preservation during the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2007 Midwinter Meeting, “Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time.” (http://www.ala.org/alcts/resources/preserv/defdigpres0408)

It is important to develop the trust between the repositories and the communities that they intended to serve. The users must have trust in the repositories about their reliability and capability of managing the data they hold. Digital preservation is the process of managing access to digital material irrespective of technological advances in a long time, making the format and media to access digital content obsolete.

TRUST Principles

All efforts in the information world revolve around the one aim of making information Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. FAIR Data Principles are a set of guiding principles that provide the framework for scientific data management. (https://librarycognizance.blogspot.com/2018/08/fair-data-principles-for-scientific.html). To keep that data FAIR over time in digital repositories. And to maintain the trustworthiness of digital repositories in communities they serve, TRUST principles came into existence after several months of consultation with RDA (Research Data Alliance and discussion within the digital repositories community.

TRUST principles are a set of guiding principles to ensure trustworthy data management in digital repositories. TRUST principles are endorsed by Open Data Preservation Foundation and are recently published (May 2020) as an article for Scientific Data. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0486-7)

Open Preservation Foundation(OPF) is an independent, not for a profit membership organization, with a vision of open, sustainable preservation. It is an open-source community of digital preservation practitioners around the world. The organization provides practical digital preservation solutions and facilitates the best practices that support enduring access to digital collections.

According to Martin Wrigley, executive director of the Open Preservation Foundation, “We endorse these principles in our capacity as an advocate for best practice in digital preservation and in recognition of the fact that they are vital to securing a sustainable future for our digital information.”

Trust principles are a set of guiding principles that reminds the digital repositories stakeholders about the importance of developing and maintaining the repositories infrastructure in the way to cater to the needs of data to the community in a long run without any hindrance of technology change. TRUST is to build and maintain the trust of communities in the data repositories that they are reliable and capable of appropriately managing the data they hold.

Transparency

Transparency in the policies of any repository in areas like data deposition, data preservation, and data discovery. Clearly communicating the users about:

(i) policies in terms of the use of data holdings and digital preservation policies.
(ii) features and services that give an indication about the capability of repositories in holding sensitive data.

Responsibility

How responsible a digital repository is demonstrated by how well the data in repositories are managed by following metadata standards compliant with the community norms, which enhance the discoverability and usefulness of data. Responsibility involves:

(i) technical validation, documentation, quality control, authenticity protection, and long term preservation of data.

(ii) privacy and protection of sensitive information.

(iii)managing the intellectual property rights of data producers.

User Focus

Each digital repository should embed the best data practices being followed in its users’ communities. The user community involves the data depositors, users accessing data, funders, journal editors, institutions related to that community. User focus of the repository is demonstrated by:

(i) continuously monitoring and identifying the community changing expectations and needs with time and

(ii) evolving best practices to meet these requirements.

Sustainability

Sustainability involves ensuring:

(i) uninterrupted access to its data holdings for current and future user communities.

(ii) planning for disaster recovery, risk mitigation, and long term preservation of data. (iii) Securing funding to enable ongoing usage and to maintain successful rendering of services.

Technology

Technology involves:

(i) the fitness and maintenance of software, hardware tools to run a data repository.

(ii) proactive decisions and preparations to incorporate new tools and technical services to ensure uninterrupted access to data when technology changes and a mechanism to prevent, detect and respond to security threats

(iii) implementing appropriate standards, technologies, and tools for data management and curation.

TRUST principles give the benefit to both digital repositories and the user communities. A digital repository infrastructure built on these principles develops trust among user communities that they are capable of fulfilling their needs, protecting the data they hold, preserving for the long term, and enabling access to the data in the future also despite technology changes. The repositories based on TRUST principles are called Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs).

References

Quiz on Archives and Digital preservation

LibCognizance Archives , Digital Preservation

.Quiz on Archives and Digital preservation

On International Archive Day (9th June), Lets check our knowledge about Archives and Digital preservation.

What is false about Digital Preservation?

1 point

A method of keeping digital material accessible.

It is a combination of policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content overtime.

It does not involves planning and resource allocation for preservation of content.

The need of digital preservation mainly arises because of short lifespan of digital media.

Dataverse guarantees long term preservation and full credit and web visibility of researchers' data

LibCognizance Data , Datafiles

Data sharing immediately raises many questions, like the security of confidential data, the authenticity of shared data, long term preservation of data, and the use of shared data without giving credit to data creators. Here is the context of researchers' data that needs to be shared via technological means with the benefit of full credit to the researchers and research results benefitting the research community.
There are two main concerns of any researchers:

Receiving full credit and web visibility of their data, and

Assurance of long term preservation of their data in archives.

Most of the archive repositories do not fulfill both the requirements of researchers. They guarantee long term preservation without giving much credit to the researcher and researchers manage to receive credit by controlling the distribution of data themselves. Dataverse is the solution to the problem of researchers, which is an open-source web application to share, preserve for a long time, cite, explore and analyze research data.

Dataverse is a virtual archive that contains datasets and each dataset contains the descriptive metadata and data files. Data of researchers are managed in the database in the form of the datafile and descriptive metadata associated with it. Dataverse repository is an open-source web-based software that hosts multiple archives called Dataverses.

Dataverse installation worldwide is being managed by the Harvard's Institute of Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) in collaboration with Harvard University Library and Harvard University Information Technology Organization. It is also being developed at Harvard's IQSS and many collaborators and contributors are supporting it worldwide and recognized as "Harvard Dataverse."

It guarantees the long term preservation of researcher data.

It not only preserve data but also helps researchers, data creators, journals, publishers, distributors, and affiliated institutions in receiving credit.

It helps researchers receive web visibility, academic credit, and increased citation.

It allows researchers building a personal website for displaying personal research data by setting up personal Dataverse which is served up by a Dataverse repository.

It helps researchers by making their data sets more discoverable to the scientific community.

Institutions can build their Dataverse repository providing research data management solutions to institute community. With the growing database repositories worldwide there is increased visibility of the research data of any institution.

Data citations feature help institutions to take decisions for funding particular research in the future by measuring the usage of data and impact over time.

It seamlessly manages the metadata and data files of the articles published in the journals and establishes a persistent link between articles of the journals and data associated with it.

Dataverses repositories are continuously growing worldwide and the Dataverse community is working on increasing the quality of software and capability of many of its features like expanding archival features, data and metadata features of new and existing disciplines, increase adoption and contributions from the open-source development community.

References:

Archangel project: use of Blockchain technology in digital preservation

LibCognizance Archives , Blockchain technology

Archangel project: use of Blockchain technology in digital preservation

National archives of any country have a very precious collection of scientific, cultural, economic, social and historical digital records. In a rapidly changing digital world, it is important to save the national archives and transforming them with the change of technology. Long term sustainability of these digital records without any tampering, which questions the authenticity and originality of these records, is a big challenge to the Archival institutions and their governments.

History has many examples of expunging of records during major political unrest and happenings. To ensure the accessibility of digital records for long-term, the records need to be transformed into the other formats and transformation may result in a minor loss in fidelity of the original data. Currently, the archival practices are not able to cope up with these challenges.

Instead of cryptocurrencies and in the financial sector, many attempts are being done across the world to use the blockchain technology concept in other fields. Libraries are also running at this pace to find the possibilities in the various aspects of the library, digital preservation is one of them. To maintain the long term sustainability of digital records along with maintaining the authenticity and open accessibility of records to the public, the big leaders in this field along with the support of government have started the project using blockchain/ Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT): It is a technology behind the blockchain technology and other similar concepts.“It is an umbrella term used to describe technologies which store, distribute and facilitate the exchange of value between users, either privately or publicly. Blockchain is the first fully functional Distributed ledger technology, which became the most popular in the world.”¹

According to Wikipedia, “It is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions. There is no central administrator or centralized data storage.”²

Archangel Project

The digital archives of any nation must be trustworthy for the public. To make sure the public about the policies of government regarding the safety

and integrity of records while migrating the data without any alteration in their originality, a 24 months project was started in June 2017 with the title “Archangel: trusted archives of digital public records” with the multidisciplinary partnership of University of Surrey, UK and a consortium of AMIs (Archives and Memory Institutions) stakeholders including the National Archives (One of the world's largest and oldest AMI preserving the digital records of UK Government) and Tim Berners Lee’s Open Data Institute (ODI).

Archangel project is to safeguard their integrity and open accessibility for future generations through the cutting edge technologies and models based on it. It involves the creation and evaluation of new prototypes of archival practice and their feasibility which also involves exploring the public attitude towards these new models and formulating the archival policies. The project uses DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) services.

Aim:

To ensure the integrity and safety and to promote open accessibility of digital records.
Creating and evaluating the models of new archival practice using DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) for long term sustainability of archival records.
Developing a novel cross AMIs model in which we have single DLT contributed to by multiple AMIs, across disciplines and nations. Its impact is not limited to AMIs but also on any Digital Public Archives and Research Data Repositories.
To formulate digital preservation and archival policies.
To build trust among the public about the authenticity and originality of digital records in archival institutions.
Finding out solutions for the transformation of digital records with the change of technology without any change and loss of content and maintaining their originality.

To know more:

https://blockchain.surrey.ac.uk/projects/archangel.html
https://youtu.be/7C65SXR_msM

References :

https://medium.com/nakamo-to/whats-the-difference-between-blockchain-and-dlt- e4b9312c75dd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/digital-archiving-context-everything/ (Pic Credit) The National Archives blog

Storj-Decentralized Cloud Object Storage for Digital Preservation

LibCognizance Cloud computing , Digital Library

Storj-Decentralized Cloud Object Storage for Digital Preservation

On moving ahead on the lines of my topics on cloud computing like “Cloud computing and its applications in libraries”, “Emulation as a service for digital preservation” and Blockchain technology and its potential use in libraries, here is new topic of Decentralized Cloud Storage, the technique which incorporates both the technologies: Cloud computing and Blockchain technology.

In this digital era, the libraries all over the world are engaged in finding various ways and technologies of storage and preservation of digital materials. The technologies that make data storage and retrieval easy, fast, safe and secure are the motto of our library leaders, technology developers. Again the Decentralized Cloud Storage technique is going to buzz in the data storage field.

Storj- Decentralized Cloud storage Technique: It is the first cloud storage technique which is decentralized providing end to end encryption of files stored on clouds and uses Blockchain technology and Cryptography to secure the online files.

Features:

1. It allows users to store data in a decentralized manner without any need of third party or storage provider, just like in blockchain technology in which files are globally distributed in segmented form.

2. Provides end to end encryption to files, that means only the owner of the files have that encryption key to encrypt the unencrypted files and see the content and thus safe and secure.

3. Fast access to files as the data storage and retrieval is not dependent on one server.

4. Storj labs are continuously working on the data security features with their own developed apps like MetaDisk (Web app) and DriveShare (Client app).

5. Storj builds the trust of the user in data storage by removing the dependency on vulnerable servers or any organization or employees dealing with the storage of users’ files.

6. Storj claims to be cheaper than traditional cloud storage because there is no need of data centres so the cost lowers the ⅓ the price of centralized cloud storage providers.

7. It is simple in implementing and scale along with the users’ needs.

8. Data on the network will be resistant to censorship, tampering, unauthorized access, and data failures.

As this technology is in its premature stage, so to discuss its use in libraries and how much extent it can be useful to the library storage and preservation purpose is very early. But in future, it can be used as the tool for long-term storage and preservation of large volumes of various resources in libraries like research data, scholarly articles, thesis, presentations and for archival purposes. The technology is cheaper than the traditional centralized cloud storage, so the library leaders and researchers can think about this technology to be used in libraries after depth analysis and finding the pros and cons of the technology.

To know more: https://storj.io/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STORJ

LOCKSS (an award winning digital preservation tool)

LibCognizance Digital Library , Digital Preservation

As this phrase suggests that when any document have multiple copies kept in different places then it is much more safe for a longer time than the single copy of a document placed with security. Based on this principle LOCKSS program based at Standford University libraries was introduced by the Library Community after extensive research into best practices and risks of long term preservation of the contents. It is low cost, open source digital preservation system. As this is a network of libraries participating in this digital preservation program, the libraries are cooperating with one another in keeping their own copies of digital content authoritative and authentic and thus become the self sustainable in preserving their holdings for perpetual access. In this way it is Digital Preservation through Cooperation.

LOCKSS program is helpful to both Librarians’ community and publishers’ community to preserve their content for the long term.

For Libraries the digital collection can be preserved by the LOCKSS system to keep it safe and access it far into the future when the digital content is no longer subscribed i. e. even after the subscription of journals and e-books and other content is cancelled then also we will be able to access the content with the help of LOCKSS. Each participating library has the LOCKSS Box which is guaranteeing the continuous, real time access to the original publication whenever it is needed.

For Publishers the web content on their websites can remain available to access even if their websites is no longer exists for some reasons, i.e. the integrity of their web content will remain unchanged and will be available for perpetual access.

To know more: https://www.lockss.org/

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/lockss.html