Note to self - SAA2009 tweets

SAA2009 tweets are 'archived' here.

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009

Just back from the 2009 Balisage Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently and Balisage XML Conference : the presentations and updated papers will be published over the next few weeks. They were all very informative and to a high standard. Topics of particular interest included:

Performance of XML-based applications

One of the components of their XML-based publishing system discussed was the Schema, Addressing, and Storage System (SASS) - a data store that provides a unified view of metadata and content for publications they host which relies on the concept of storing metadata and related resources in a file-system based set of XML files along with the use of XQuery to feed these resources to an XSLT-based display layer.

XML in the browser

Explored how new XML vocabularies could be integrated into the browser. Thereby providing a new way forward for XML in the Browser.

Towards markup support for full GODDAGs and beyond: the EARMARK approach

Examined Overlapping markup and the utilisation of the standoff approach to markup to address the issues created by the purely hierarchical approach.

TNTBase: Versioned Storage for XML

Presented an open-source versioned XML database created by the integration of Berkeley DB XML into the Subversion Server.

Agile Business Objects Management Application for Electronic Records Archive Transfer Process

How XForms and Genericode are assisting the National Archives and Records Administration(NARA) in their goal to provide archivists with a modernised system with automatic workflow for the digital archive business process

“A practical introduction to EXPath: Collaboratively Defining Open Standards for Portable XPath Extensions.”

Covered the benefits to be derived from a Collaborative approach to the definition and implementation of standardised extensions in XPath which the core XML technologies such as Xquery and XSLT, Xproc, XForms would be able to utilise in a uniform way.

Automatic XML Namespaces

Explored the difficulties with Namespaces and proposed ways of addressing them.

Describing agents: EAC-CPF

Draft schema and documentation for Encoded Archival Context - Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families is now online.

The digital estate

A couple of weeks ago Dave Thompson at the Wellcome mentioned to me that he had been interviewed by the BBC's world service on the subject of digital wills - see a post on the subject on Wellcome's blog. I also stumbled on some interesting references relating to digital estate planning via the Law Professors Blog Network, which includes a blog dedicated to wills, trusts and estates.

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/trusts_estates_prof/2009/03/planning-for-digital-estates-updated-company-list.html

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/18/death.online/index.html?iref=t2test_techmon

Many of us have digital materials online (or offline) that we want to pass on to friends and family. By outlining where materials are and supplying account credentials, we can ensure this happens. It could be done in regular estate planning, or simply keeping a note somewhere safe (and telling the right person where to find it!). There are also online services springing up to help people make arrangements for passing on the relevant information. Research libraries have an obvious interest here; digital material is an important part of a person's archive, and unless someone knows it exists, where to find it, and how to access it there is little prospect of saving it for future generations.

Secure Delete

So, I have a bunch of files on one offline system. I transfer them to another offline system. They were on some media in between and that media is "walkable" and so I don't want those files to remain on that media for very long. I could just delete them, but probably better to securely delete them. Then if the media walks, inspite of my good intentions, locking it up, etc. the data doesn't. Hooray!

Carved in Silicon

Just found an article on the BBC site that is of interest - 'Rosetta stone' offers digital lifeline. Some nice pointers to research on the life of CDs and DVDs with numbers to use at presentations and it is comforting to read that what we're trying to do Just Aint Easy(tm).

I rather like this too:

"...the digital data archivists' arch enemy: magnetic polarity"

(I added the bold!)

Does that make digital archivists like the X-Men ? ;-)

ntfsprogs

I imagine nothing new to you folks, but handy all the same.

http://man.linux-ntfs.org/

and in particular:

http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html

We Choose The Moon

Now this real time lunar landing strikes me as a great use of archives...

open source forever, right?

As much a note to self as anything, but also a cautionary tale...

Open source libraries (I mean software libraries rather than big buildings with books - so apologies for the non-technical readers!) - are very useful. Sometimes they can vanish - projects go under, people stop being interested, and soon a code base is "unsupported" and maybe, one day, might vanish from the Web. Take, for example, the Trilead Java SSH Library, the demise of which I think must be fairly recent.

A quick Google search suggests the following:

http://www.trilead.com/SSH_Library/

Which helpfully says:

"Trilead SSH for Java The freely available open-source library won't be anymore developed nore supported by Trilead." (sic.)

Unsupported, in this case, also means unavailable and there are no links to any code from here.

Other sites link to:

http://www.trilead.com/Products/Trilead-SSH-2-Java/

which gives a 404.

None of which is very helpful when your code is telling you:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/trilead/ssh2/InteractiveCallback

(Should any non-technical types still be reading, that means "I have no idea what you are talking about when you refer to a thing called com.trilead.ssh2.InteractiveCallback so I'm not going to work, no way, not a chance, so there. Ner.").

Now, had I been more awake, I probably would have noticed a sneaky little file by the name "trilead.jar" in the SVNKit directory. I would have also duely added it to the the classpath. But I wasn't and I didn't and then got into a panic searching for it.

But, and here is the moral of the tale, I did find this:

"Also, in the meantime we will put Trilead SSH library source code into our repository (it is also distributed under BSD license) so it will remain available for the community and we still will be able to make minor bugfixes in it when necessary." [SVNKit User Mailing List, 18th May 2009]

Hooray for Open Source!

The open source project SVNKit, which made use of the open source library, was able - due to the open licensing - absorb the SSH library and make it available along with the SVNKit code. Even though the Trilead SSH Library is officially defunct, it lives on in the hands of its users. Marvellous eh?

All which is to say: 1) check the classpath and include all the jars and 2) open licensing means that something at least has a chance of being preserved by someone other than the creator who got fed up with all the emails asking how it worked... :-)

Automatic Metadata Workshop (Long post - sorry!)

Sometimes I wonder if automatic metadata generation is viewed a little like the Industrial Revolution; which is to say that it is replacing skills and individuals with large scale industry.

I do not think it is really like that at all, being much more about enabling people to manage the ever increasing waves of information. It isn't saying to a weaver, "we can do what you can only faster, better and cheaper"; it is saying "here is something to help you make fabrics from this intangible intractable ether".

What got on this philosophical tract? The answer, as ever, is a train journey - in this case the ride home from Leicester, having attended a JISC-funded workshop on Automatic Metadata Generation. Subtitled "Use Cases" the workshop presented a series of reports outlining potential scenarios in which automatic metadata generation could be used to support the activities of researchers and, on occasion, curators/managers.

The reports have been collated by Charles Duncan and Peter Douglas at Intrallect Ltd. and the final report is due at the end of July.

The day started well as I approached the rather lovely Beaumont Hall at the University of Leicester and noted with a smile the acronym on a sign - "AMG".

Now, I'm from Essex so it is in my genes to know that AMG is the "performance" wing of Mercedes and looking just now at the AMG site, it says:

"Experience the World of Hand Crafted Performance"

a slogan any library or archive could (and should) use!

(Stick with me as I tie my philosophising with my serendipitous discovery of the AMG slogan)

I couldn't help but think a AMG-enabled (our sort, not the car sort) Library or Archive is like hand crafting finding aids, taking advantage of new technology, for better performance. I also thought that most AMG drivers don't care about the science behind getting a faster car, but just that it is faster - think about it...

Where was I? Oh yes.

The workshop!

It was a very interesting day. The format was for Charles, Peter or, occasionally the scenario author, to present the scenarios followed by an opportunity for discussion. This seemed to work well, but it was unfortunate that more of the authors of the scenarios themselves were unable to attend and give poor Charles and Peter a break from the presenting!

The scenarios themselves were around eight metadata themes:

1. Subject-based
2. Geographic
3. Person-related
4. Usage-related
5. File Formats
6. Factual
   
7. Bibliographic
8. Multilingual/Translated
   

I'll not cover all the scenarios here, but you are encouraged to visit the project Wiki where you can find more information and look out for the final report, but here are some things I got from the day:

1. AMG to enhance discovery through automatic classification, recommendations on the basis of "similar users" activity ("also bought" function), etc. Note that this is not "by enhancing text-based searching".
   
2. AMG could encourage more people to self-deposit (to Institutional Repositories) by automatically filling in the metadata fields in submission forms (now probably isn't the time to discuss the burden of metadata not being the only reason people don't self-deposit! :-)).
3. AMG to help produce machine-to-machine data and facilitate queries. The big example of this was generating coordinates for place names to enable people with just place names to do geospacial searches, but there are uses here for generating Semantic Web-like links between items.
4. AMG for preservation - the one I guess folks still reading are most familiar with. Identifying file formats, using PRONOM, DROID & JHOVE, etc. to identify risks, etc.
5. AMG at creation. Metadata inserted into the digital object by the thing used to create it - iTunes grabbing data from Gracenote and poplating ID3 tags in its own sweet way, a digital camera recording shutter speed and appeture size, time of day and even location and embedding that data into the photo.
6. The de facto method of AMG was to use Web services - with a skew towards REST-based services - which probably brings us back to cars - REST being nearer the sleek interior of a car than SOAP which exposes its innards to its users.
   
7. Just in time AMG (JIT AMG - now there's a project acronym). When something like a translation service is expensive why pay to have all your metadata translated to a different language when you may be able to just do the titles and give your users the option to request (and get the result instantly) a translation if they think it useful.
   
8. You might extend JIT AMG and wonder if it is worth pushing the AMG into the search engine? Text search engines already do that - the full-text being the bulk of the metadata - so what if a search engine were also enabled to "read" a music manuscript (a PDF or a Sibelius file for example) and you search for a sequence of notes. Would there be any need to put that sequence of notes into a metadata record if the object itself can function as the record (if you'll forgive the pun!)?

So what does all that mean for us?

Well, it is pretty clear that futureArch must rely on automatic metadata creation at all stages in the archival life cycle and a tool-chain to process items is a feature on diagrams Renhart has shown me since I arrived. It just would not be possible to manage a digital accession without some form of AMG - anyone fancy hand-crafting records for 11,000 random computer files? (Which are, of course, not random at all - representing as they do an individuals own private "order").

I worry slightly about the Web service stuff. For a tool to be useful to futureArch we need a copy here on our servers. First and foremost this ensures the privacy of our data and secondly we have the option then of preserving the service.

(Not to mention that a Web service probably wouldn't want us bombarding it with classification requests!)

(Fortunately the likes of DROID have already gone down the "engine" and "datafile" route favoured by anti-virus companies and let us hope that pattern remains!).

I quite like the idea of resource as metadata object, but I suspect it remains mostly unworkable. It was by accident rather than design that text-based documents, by virtue of their format, contain a body of available metadata. Still, I imagine image search engines are already extracting EXiF data and how many record companies check MP3s ID3 tags to trace their origins...? ;-)

At the end of the workshop we talked a bit about how AMG can scare people too - the Industrial Revolution where I started. To sell AMG technologists talk of how it "reduces cataloging effort", but in an economic climate looking for "reductions in cost" it is easy for management to assume the former implies the later, not realising that while the effort per item may go down, there are much more items!

Whether or not this is true remains to be seen, but early indications suggest AMG isn't any cheaper - just as any new technology isn't. It is just a different tool, designed to cope with a different information world; an essential part of managing digital information.

Yep, it is out of necessity that we will become the Automatic Metadata generation... :-)

Waxwork Accessions

I decided the other day that it would be useful to have a representative accession or two to play with. This way we could test for scalability and robustness (in dealing with different file formats, crazy filenames, and the like) of the various tools that will make up BEAM and also try out some of our ideas regarding packaging, disk images and such.

It isn't really possible to use a real accession for this purpose, mostly due to the confidentiality of some of our content. But I did want the accession to be as genuine as possible and here is how I did it. Any ideas for alternatives would be great!

The way I saw it, I needed three things to create the accession:

1. A list of files and folders that formed a real accession
2. A set of data that could be used - real documents, images, sound files, system files, etc.
3. Some way of tying these together to create an accession modelled on a real one but containing public data

Fortunately Susan already had a list of files that made up the a 2GB hard drive from a donor - created from the forensic machine - which I thought would be a good starting point. Point 1 covered!

Next question was where to get the data. My first thought was to use public (open licensed) content from the Web - obtaining images when required through Flickr, getting documents via Scribd, etc. This is still a good approach for certain accessions. However, looking at my file list I quickly realised I wasn't just dealing with nice, obvious "documents". The accession contained a working copy of Windows 95 for example, jammed full of DLLs and EXEs. It also contained files pulled from old PCW disks by the owner, with no extension, applications from older systems, and all manner of oddities - "~$oto ", "~~S", "!.bk!" are just some examples.

It occured to me that I needed a more diverse source of files - most likely a real live system that could meet my request for a DLL while not revealing much about the original file. Where would I find this source? My own PC of course!

In theory my PC is dual-boot, running Ubuntu and Windows XP. The Windows XP partition is rarely used (I've nothing against XP, it just isn't so good a software development environment as Linux), but it struck me it'd make an excellent source of files, even if it was a version of Windows some way down the tracks from 95. By pulling files from my Windows disk (mounted by Ubuntu) I could, hopefully, create a more representative accession with a few more problems to solve than just "document" content.

(I also thought I could try creating a file system with a representative set of files to choose from - dlls from Windows 95 disks, etc. - but that would mean some manual collation of said files. This may be where I go next!).

So, 1 and 2 covered, what I needed next was a way to tie the file list to the data. I decided to use the file extension for this. For example, if the file list contains:

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ABC.DLL

I wanted to grab any file with a ".DLL" extension from my data source (the XP disk). Any random file, rather than one that matched the accession, because the random here is likely to cause problems when it comes to processing this artificial accession and problems is what we really need to test something.

This suggested I needed a way to ask my file system "What do you have that has '.dll' at the end of the path?". There were lots of ways to do this - and here is where Linux shines. We have 'find', 'locate', 'which', etc. on the command line to discover files. There is also 'tracker' that I could have set indexing the XP filesystem. In the end I opted for Solr.

Solr provides a very quick and easy way to build an index of just about anything - it uses Lucene behind the scenes. (I like the way that almost rhymes!) If you're unfamiliar with either, then find out all about them quickly! In short, you tell it which fields you want to index (and how you want them indexed) and create XML documents that contain those fields. POST these to the Solr update service and it indexes them there and then.

I installed the Solr Web app., tweaked the configuration (including setting the data directory because no matter what I did with the environment and JNDI variables, it kept writing data to the directory from which Tomcat was started!), and then started posting documents for indexing to it. The document creation and POSTs were done with a simple Java "program" (really a script, and I could've just just about any language, but we're mostly using Java and I'm trying to de-rust my Java skills, I figured why not do this with Java too). The index of around 140,000 files took about 15 minutes (I've no idea if that is good or not).

(Renhart suggested an offshoot of this indexing too - namely the creation of a set of OS profiles, so that we can have a service that can be asked things like "What OS(es) does a file with SHA-1 hash XYZ belong to?" - enabling us to profile OSes and remove duplicates from our accessions).

The final step was to use another Java "program" to cludge the list of files in the accession with a lookup on the Solr index and some file copying. Then it is done - one accession that mirrors a real live file structure, contains real live files, but none of those files are "private" or a problem if they're lost. Even better, because we used more recent files, the accession is now 8GB rather than 2GB, aligning more with what we'd expect to get in the future.

Hooray! Now gotta pack it into disk images and start exploring processing!

Should anyone be interested, the source code is available for download.

Friday Post

Couple of weeks ago now, in a developer meeting, Neil (Jefferies) mentioned the "Island of Unscalable Complexity". Even if I could remember the context, I probably wouldn't tell, but it seemed such a cool place to go visit I tried to make it real... Look close and you'll see our boat, on the way, grappling hooks at hand...

Never say "unscalable" and expect no one to try! :-)

CAIRO Content Model: A noob's overview (Part 2) Accessions

I-E-O-2. It is a curious one and no mistake. The idea of an accession wasn't something I'd come across before (though alien concepts are no surprise to me now having worked in libraries for some time) - and if you really want to confuse yourself about what it is, try this Wikipedia article on 'accession'.

All clear now? Didn't think so! (Though the bit about the museum is probably closest). For the purpose of ingest, I'm not too worried about legal ownership (this must be assumed) so my working definition - and I make no claims that it is a good or accurate - is:

"an accession is a unit of stuff that arrives at a given time, at a given archive, and needs to be added to that archive"

An accession then is defined by its origin, date of arrival and the collection to which it belongs.

Like IE01, IE02 uses the METS header element to record agent data - who did what and when to this record. This will usually "created by ingest process", "updated by CAIRO tool by user X", etc.

In IE02, the descriptive metadata is kept deliberately Spartan. This is because the concept of the accession remains largely transparent to researchers. While it is important to the archivist to know the source of the collection's parts, the researcher really just needs the collection and the items. So, dmdSec gives us space for an accession identifier (unitId) and title (unitTitle) (using controlled formats - which may or may not be specified yet - I'll find out as I move through the model!) and then a minimal EAD/DC/MODS description. Since we're an archive, I focussed on the EAD, but cross-walking to the others would be possible.

The dmdSec EAD description is quite minimal, listing just origination information (pricipal creator), a physical description (extent, in MBs), a description of the formats and a description of the software/hardware environment used. All these are given as free-text, manual fields, but I wonder how far we can get offering automated "tips" for these elements.

There is also room for a pointer to some rights statement (amdSec) (as with IE01) and also a pointer to a log file that records activity over this accession (fileSec). The format of that log file remains undefined, but it'll record things like "checked all files for viruses", "identified 15 obsolete files", "transformed obsolete formats to ODT", etc. We'll have to think about how we implement this linkage. The model says use a URN to point at the log file, but I wonder if we use a URI that points to a canned search of a generally logging service - something along the lines of beam.ouls.ox.ac.uk/audit?accessionID=12345. That way we can dynamically generate log reports for each accession. Needs thinking about anyways.

Finally there is, in the structMap, a map to the other "main divisions" of the accession and the model suggests that these are either folders or files (different types are given - like subject folder or email directory) and so it is apparent that the accession structMap could be used to reflect the entire accession structure or just the top level directories. Which is better is unclear, but I suspect we will be adding a manifest to the accession that does list all the files (so the structure can be browsed without getting near the real data objects and, if we do it that way, without having to parse the IE02 too much).

We could put a pointer to the manifest alongside the log file pointer in fileSec.

I guess that is probably no clearer than the aforementioned wikipedia page but at least I never used the word "Inaedificatio"!

Our Cunning Plan

We've had lots of long discussion here about what BEAM will look like and I back in April (I think) we drew our first thoughts onto our newly arrived whiteboard. The diagram remains to remind us of where we are going, though I've already got some refinements to make. However, if you've ever doubted our sanity, here is some proof that you were right! :-)

Presenting email archives

Just a quick thought. Am wondering whether some of the tools for presenting mailing list archives might be adapted to present personal or organisational mailboxes. Maybe something like MHonArc?

CAIRO Content Model: A noob's overview (Part 1)

I have started to take a look at the CAIRO content model to see how this will be used for futureArch and, later, BEAM. Creation of the model predates me joining the team here at Oxford so it is possible I'll entirely misrepresent the work, so feel free to ask questions or shout! :-)

As there is quite a lot to the content model, I'll cover it in parts as I read them. This is to allow my brain to digest each bit rather than try to cram the entire thing in one go. Hopefully the same idea will help anyone trying to read about it here.

So without further ado, I present Intellectual Entity 01: Collection.

Affectionately known as "I-E-O-1" (the O is really a 0 but we don't say zero), this is described in the documentation as the "descriptive overview of the collection". The metadata here is designed to enable a curator to respond to researcher enquiries and freedom of information requests and also to provide the foundation for the rest of the collection's metadata (which is broken down - as we'll see in future posts - into accessions and items).

IE01 relates to both digital and physical (really need a better word - analogue?) components of the collection, but it is important to note that it does not replace the EAD record created by the archivist - though it links to it. This begs the question: are we currentlly able to link to our EAD records? (I'll need to find out the answer).

Like all of our entities, the object is specified using METS. From my perspective of creating digital object ingest tools, the fields I'm worrying about are (in no particular order):

• A list of agents, found in the metsHdr element, and recording who did what with this record.
• An embedded EAD and/or DC and/or MODS record used to describe the collection. Nb. this is NOT the archival EAD, but rather a subset of the given schema (EAD/DC/MODS) to record a minimal amount of metadata about this aspect of the entire collection - archive identifier, country code, dates, formats, scope and access.
• A link to a further entity (PR01) describing preservation rights of the collection.

There is also room to record a bit of structural information about the collection - the accessions that make it up for example - in the structmap.

That is a fairly sketchy outline of IE01 and there is a lot more to it than that of course, but that is my first impression. I hope it is useful to someone, and useful to me when I've recycled my paper notes! :-)

Geocities being rescued by Archive Team

Yahoo's decision to pull the plug on geocities sites shows how ephemeral web content can be. There should be a means for individual users to obtain their geocities stuff first, so long as they get the message to do something in time. In a more comprehensive approach, the Archive Team are busy downloading all the geocities websites they can find, though what happens after that is unclear. The Archive Team have a page with more info. and there's a nice article in The Register, complete with geocities styling.

Whitepaper from MITH/HRC/Emory born-digital literary mss. project

I mentioned a white paper coming out of the 'Approaches to managing & collecting born-digital literary materials for scholarly use' (phew, long title!) grant in this post a while back. The paper is available here and definitely worth a read.

Digital Repository Workshop at Oxford

I attended a University of Oxford Digital Repositories Steering Group Workshop a couple of weeks ago (I've been on honeymoon so I'm only just now getting around to posting it!). The internal workshop was subtitled "Tools and Infrastructure" and provided an opportunity for the various repository projects around the University to present what they were doing and then some discussion on how repositories might go forward. All good and interesting stuff!

Details on the day are available and I've also put my talk on slideshare.

Standing on the shoulders of Giants?

Just attended the Repositories and Preservation Programme meeting in Aston Birmingham I would really recommend the talk The Institutional Perspective - How can institutions most effectively exploit work in the Repositories and Preservation field? given by Jeff Haywood- University of Edinburgh.

I would like to think this may kickstart a process to find methods by which current projects could more easily use and build on the outputs of previous projects and create a framework to more easily exchange code and ideas.

Jeff's talk was given even more currency as in the afternoon session Rachel Heery give a presentation (its on slideshare) in Repositories Roadmap Session launching her just published Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: towards a vision for research and learning in 2013

The question however remains: by then will Standing on the shoulders of Giants still be a distant concept?

What is this thing anyway?

The first step in doing anything useful with a digital accession is to answer just that question. The next is generally "now that I know, what 'stuff' do I need to recover the data and how might I do that?". With some items, it's easy enough. With others it can be rather more challenging. Alex Eveleigh just pointed me at Mediapedia - a database being developed at The National Library of Australia to help folk identify media. Best of all, it sounds like it's been designed to help people find things by easily determined characteristics (e.g. physical measurements) rather than relying on the user to know, more or less, what they are looking for. Super idea.

The best introduction to digital preservation ever?

Recently I've been involved in organising a series of 'digital preservation roadshows' for archivists in the UK. The series is aimed at archivists who have had little chance to look at digital preservation issues; the idea is to provide an introduction and some practical, inexpensive, tips and tools that will help people make a start. We've had a lot of positive feedback from the first roadshow (Gloucester, April 29th), though there were calls for a little more easing into the topic and its terminology that we'll need to take on board for the next event (York, June 26th). I wonder whether our delegates might have appreciated this video, produced by the Digital Preservation Europe project. If it's not the *best* introduction to digital preservation I've seen, it's most definitely the funniest. It made me laugh anyway :-) .

Wahcade Emulator Front-End

Now, you might think I've gone mad putting a link here to Wahcade. Either that or you'll think I've too much time on my hands and spend all my time digging out old games to play on this arcade machine manager. While making an arcade machine, case and all, sounds like a lot of fun (and one day when life is less busy I might just give it a go), I'm really making a note here to flag it as an interesting example of what we might do in reading rooms. I guess it is a bit like those media centre PCs (Mythbuntu for example) or the BL's "Turning the Pages" only this is a front-end for emulators.

Imagine that a collection is a "rom" (the rom being the image of a chip containing, in Wahcade's case, a game but for us could be a disk image from a donor's PC). The user picks from a list of roms and then the reading room "arcade" starts an emulator and away you go. Before you know it the dumb terminal is a replica Mac System 6 desktop complete with donor file system, etc.

Be neat wouldn't it?

Terrabyte Terror

I knew I'd come to the right place for work one morning when I was talking with Renhart and Susan and mentioned that I was very excited at having discovered a Maplin just minutes walk from the office. Instead making a hasty retreat from the conversation, both of them gave me knowing smiles and agreed that Maplin was wonderful!

From my early days watching my Dad teach electronics I've loved the smell of soldering, the look of components and the idea that you can make your own set of LEDs flash just for the fun of it. Thumbing through the Maplin catalogue with a cup of tea was once one of my favourite past times. But these days, more and more, I get a sense of dread as I check out the special offers.

Why?

Let me give you an example: 1TB External Drive, £99.
Here is another: 1TB Internal Drive, £89.

You read that right - 1 TerraByte of storage for under £100! Doesn't that make you quake? Probably not, but I can't help but wonder how long it will be before we have to accession a 1TB drive. What do we do with it? Do we even know what that amount of detritus accumlated over, well how long? a lifetime? a couple of evenings with iTunes? We don't know how long it'll take the average person to fill up a 1TB drive. Do we have the capacity to store 1TB of data and even if we do, how sustainable is that?

You could argue that since storage like this is so cheap, we can rest assured that our own storage costs will be less, so we always keep up with the growth of consumer storage. It is a fair point, but how many preservation-grade storage devices can manage 10p a GB? None I imagine, and for good reason. There is a whole lot more to a preservation system than a disk and a plastic case - it takes more than 1TB to keep 1TB safe for a start! (Mind you, I couldn't help but smile at Maplin's promise of "Peace of mind with 5 year limited warranty").

If we cannot keep up with the storage then, what do we do? A brute force method would be to compress the data, but then bit rot becomes a much more worrying issue (and it is pretty worrying already). We could look for duplicates - how many MP3 collections will include the same songs for instance and should we keep them all (if any)? What if it is the same song, with a different encoding/bitrate/whatever? What about copies of OSs - all those i386 directories? (Though arguably an external drive will not contain an OS, so we wont save space there).

We probably don't need or want to keep all of those 1000GBs, but how will we identify what to preserve? Susan and Renhart came up with some answers to this with their brilliant Paradigm project - which I'll paraphrase as "encourage the creators to curate their own data" - and I'm hopeful that will happen, but what if it doesn't? Will we see "personal data curation" and "managing information overload" added to the National Curriculum anytime soon? I hope so!

All of which finally gives me reason to stop worrying about cheap terrabytes! Data is going to keep growing and someone is going to have to help manage all that stuff. I guess that is where we fit in.

Validating normalised dates in XML

I had some fun (hmm..., maybe that's not the right word) a year or two ago with regular expressions, trying to come up with something that could validate the kinds of 'normalised' dates that archivists use. You know the ones. The fuzzy dates, the approximates, the uncertains, the 'it was in this decade, but I can't be more precise than that' date, the 'I can tell you the start-date, but not the end-date' (and vice-versa) date. To add to this, we now have the very precise dates associated with born-digital materials - down to the second complete with timezone. In the event, my problem was dispatched by the folks working on PREMIS, who created a union type that brings together some regular expressions to provide a fix (not perfect, but that's regular expressions for you). Just recently the Library of Congress have mounted some pages in the Standards section of their website, where they have put together a nice statement of the problem, as well as pubishing the union type and an XML document with some test dates. See their Extended Date Time Format page.

Draft data dictionary and schema for document significant properties

A data dictionary and related schema has been drafted for those documents that are largely text, but where creators can specify formatting, such as fonts, colours, text size and page layout; where they can embed images and other items; and where there might take advantage of application features, such as the ability to create annotations or page thumbnails. Specifically targetted formats are: OpenDocument Text, PDF, Staroffice, MS Works, MS Word and Wordperfect. Significant properties relating to appearance, behaviour, content and structure are recorded, and it's anticipated that this metadata could be plugged into PREMIS 2.0's objectCharacteristicsExtension.

The designers, from the California Digital Library and Harvard's University Library, are seeking comments from the digital preservation community. Semantic units are: PageCount, WordCount, CharacterCount, ParagraphCount, Line Count, TableCount, GraphicsCount, Language, Fonts, FontName, IsEmbedded, Features. You can see the current schema in full at http://www.fcla.edu/dls/md/docmd.xsd

This looks like a useful addition to preservation metadata, provided tool support for extracting the information and populating metadata records follows. I think the list of values for 'Features' - isTagged, hasLayers, hasTransparancy, hasOutline, hasThumbnails, hasAttachments, hasForms, hasAnnotations - may need extending (hasFootnotes, hasEndnotes?), and it would be good to see some definitions and examples of the existing values.

I wonder if we need a different data dictionary and schema for slideshows? This one might be adequate with some additions to cover things like animations, timings, etc. Seeing this data dictionary also reminds me that we need to look at where the Planets folk are up to on their significant properties work (XCDL/XCEL).

Digital preservation for individuals and small organisations

Hoppla is a prototype archiving toolkit, with in-built digital preservation capacity; it's not yet available to test, but it sounds very promising. It's being designed specifically for home and small office users by developers at the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at Vienna University of Technology. It supports preservation at the bit-stream level and includes functions for managing format obsolescence through migration pathways (don't know which objects/pathways). The system also records metadata about preservation actions and object characteristics. If this is reliable, unobtrusive and low maintenance, perhaps we could roll it out to some of the creators the Library works with. It's possible that the acquisition modules could be useful to accessioning archivists too.

Shared marginalia for any webpage

Just stumbled on a tool called reframe it. It's available as a Firefox extension, and allows you to add marginalia to any website, whether it has a comments feature of not. Looks like you can share your comments with specific groups, or more widely. Reviews suggest it may need a little fine-tuning, but it could be a useful tool for researchers.

Shoot those files!

Just wanted to record a pointer to Manfred Thaller's 'shoot' tool, which I saw demonstrated at a Planets preservation planning event sometime last year (see the posting). It's a handy way to get a feel for which formats suffer most loss of functionality when damaged.

Odds and ends from day one of the digital lives conference

The digital lives conference provided a space to digest some of the findings of the AHRC-funded digital lives project, and also to bring together other perspectives on the topic of personal digital archives. At the proposal stage, the conference was scheduled to last just a day; in the event one day came to be three, which demonstrates how much there is to say on the subject.

Day one was titled 'Digital Lifelines: Practicalities, Professionalities and Potentialities'. This day was intended mostly for institutions that might archive digital lives for research purposes. Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research gave the opening talk, which explored some personal digital archiving myths on the basis of her experiences interviewing real-life users about their management of personal digital information.

Next came a series of four short talks on 'aspects of digital curation'.

• Cal Lee, of UNC Chapel Hill, emphasised the need for combining professional skills in order to undertake digital curation successfully. Archives and libraries need to have the right combination of skills to be trusted to do this work.
• Naomi Nelson of MARBL, Emory University, told a tale of two donors. The first donor being the entity that gives/sells an archive to a library and the second being the academic researcher. Libraries need to have a dialogue with donors of the first type about what a digital archive might contain; this goes beyond the 'files' that they readily conceive as components of the archive, and includes several kinds of 'hidden' data that may be unknown to them. The second donor, 'the researcher', becomes a donor by virtue of the information that the research library can collect about their use of an archive. Naomi raised interesting questions about how we might be able to collect this kind of data and make it available to other researchers, perhaps at a time of the original researcher's choosing.
• Michael Olson of Stanford University Libraries spoke of their digital collections and programmes of work. Some mention of work on the fundamentals - the digital library architecture (equivalent to our developing Digital Asset Management System - DAMS - which will provide us with resilient storage, object management and tools and services that can be shared with other library applications). Their digital collections include a software collection of some 5000 titles, containing games and other software. I think that sparked some interest from many in the audience!
  
• Ludmilla Pollock, Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, told us about an extensive oral history programme giving rise to much digital data requiring preservation. The collection contains videos of the scientists talking about their memories and has a dedicated interface.
  

After, we heard from a panel of dealers in archival materials: Gabriel Heaton of Sotheby's, Julian Rota of Bertram Rota and Joan Winterkorn of Bernard Quaritch. I was curious to hear if the dealers had needed to appraise archives conatining obsolete digital media. Digital material is still only a tiny proportion of collections being appraised by dealers, and it seems that what little digital material they do encounter may not be appraised as such (disk labels are viewed rather than their contents). While paper archives are plentiful, perhaps there's not much incentive to develop what's needed to cater for the digital (many archivists may well feel this way too!). What's certain is that the dealer has to be quite sure that any investment in facilitating the appraisal of digital materials pays dividends come sale time.

Inevitably, questions of value were a feature of the session. The dealers suggest that archives and libraries are not willing to pay for born-digital archives yet; perhaps this stems from concerns about uniqueness and authenticity, and the lack of facilities to preserve, curate and provide access. It's not like there's actually much on the market at the moment, so perhaps it's a matter of supply as much as demand? Comparisons with 'traditional' materials were also made using Larkin's magic/meaningful values:

"All literary manuscripts have two kinds of value: what might be called the magical value and the meaningful value. The magical value is the older and more universal: this is the paper [the writer] wrote on, these are the words as he wrote them, emerging for the first time in this particular magical combination. We may feel inclined to be patronising about this Shelley-plain, Thomas-coloured factor, but it is a potent element in all collecting, and I doubt if any librarian can be a successful manuscript collector unless he responds to it to some extent. The meaningful value is of much more recent origin, and is the degree to which a manuscript helps to enlarge our knowledge and understanding of a writer’s life and work. A manuscript can show the cancellations, the substitutions, the shifting towards the ultimate form and the final meaning. A notebook, simply by being a fixed sequence of pages, can supply evidence of chronology. Unpublished work, unfinished work, even notes towards unwritten work all contribute to our knowledge of a writer’s intentions; his letters and diaries add to what we know of his life and the circumstances in which he wrote.”

Philip Larkin 'A Neglected Responsibility: Contemporary Literary Manuscripts', Encounter, July 1979, pp. 33-41.

The 'meaningful' aspects of digital archives are apparent enough, but what of the 'magical'? Most, if not all, contributors to the discussion saw 'artifactual' value in digital media that had an obvious personal connection, whether Barack Obama's Blackberry or J.K. Rowling's laptop. What wasn't discussed so much was the potential magical value of seeing a digital manuscript being rendered in its original environment. I find that quite magical, myself. I think more people will come to see it this way in time.

Delegates were then able to visit to digital scriptorium and audiovisual studio at the British Library.

After lunch, we resumed with a view of the 'Digital Economy and Philosophy' from Annamaria Carusi of the Oxford e-Research Centre. Some interesting thoughts about trust and technology, referring back to Plato's Phaedrus and the misgivings that an oral culture had about writing. New technologies can be disruptive and it takes time for them to be generally accepted and trusted.

Next, four talks under the theme of digital preservation.

• First an overview of the history of personal films from Luke McKernan, a curator at the British Library. This included changes in use and physical format, up to the current rise of online video populating YouTube, and its even more prolific Chinese equivalents. Luke also talked about 'lifecasting', pointing to JenniCam (now a thing of the past, apparently), and also to folk who go so far as to install movement sensors and videos throughout their homes. Yikes!
  
• We also heard from the British Library's digital preservation team, about their work on risk assessment for the Library's digital collections (if memory serves, about 3% of the CDs they sampled in a recent survey had problems). Their current focus is getting material off vulnerable media and into the Library's preservation system; this is also a key aim in our first phase of futureArch. Also mention of the Planets and LIFE projects. Between project and permanent posts, the BL have some 14 people working on digital preservation. If you count those working on webarchiving, audiovisual colections, digitisation, born-digital manuscripts, digital legal deposit, etc., areas, who also have a knowledge of this area, it's probably rather more.
  
• William Prentice offered an enjoyable presentation on audio archiving, which had some similar features to Luke's talk on film. It always strikes me that audiovisual archiving is very similar to digital archiving in many respects, especially when there's a need to do digital archaeology that involves older hardware and software that itself requires management.
• Juan-José Boté of the University of Barcelona spoke to us about a number of projects he had been working on. These were very definitely hybrid archives and interesting for that reason.

Next, I chaired a panel of 'Practical Experiences'. Being naturally oriented toward the practical, there was lots for me here.

• John Blythe, University of North Carolina, spoke about the Southern Historical Collection at the Wilson Library, including the processes they are using for digital collections. Interestingly, they have use of a digital accessioning tool created by their neighbours at Duke University.
• Erika Farr, Emory University, talked about the digital element of Salman Rushdie's papers. Interesting to note that there was overlap of data between PCs, where the creator has migrated material from one device to another; this is something we've found in digital materials we've processed too. I also found Rushdie's filenaming and foldering conventions curious. When working with personal archives, you come to know the ways people have of doing things. This applies equally to the digital domain - you come to learn the creator's style of working with the technology.
• Gabby Redwine of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin gave a good talk about the HRC's experiences so far. HRC have made some of their collections accessible in the reading room and in exhibition spaces, and are doing some creative things to learn what they can from the process. Like us, they are opting for the locked down laptop approach as an interim means of researcher access to born-digital material.
  
• William Snow of Stanford University Libraries spoke to us about SALT, or the Self Archiving Legacy Toolkit. This does some very cool things using semantic technologies, though we would need to look at technologies that can be implemented locally (much of SALT functionality is currently achieved using third-party web services). Stanford are looking to harness creators' knowledge of their own lives, relationships, and stuff, to add value to their personal archives using SALT. I think we might use it slightly differently, with curators (perhaps mediating creator use, or just processing?) and researchers being the most likely users. I really like the richness in the faceted browser (they are currently using flamenco) - some possibilities for interfaces here. Their use of Freebase for authority control was also interesting; at the Bod, we use The National Register of Archives (NRA) for this and would be reluctant to change all our legacy finding aids and place our trust in such a new service! If the NRA could add some freebase-like functionality, that would be nice. Some other clever stuff too, like term extraction and relationship graphs.
  

The day concluded with a little discussion, mainly about where digital forensics and legal discovery tools fit into digital archiving. My feeling is that they are useful for capture and exploration. Less so for the work needed around long-term preservation and access.

MinivMac

Seems that one of the things we wrestle with when preserving old stuff for use in the future is the question of what I guess is called "transforming content" - the process by which a thing made usable to a reader by (literally) transforming it into a different format (Word 5.5 for DOS (download direct from Microsoft) to Word 2007 for example) - and "preserving environments" - which is where you make DOS and Word 5.5 for DOS and the document available to the reader and let them go back in time.

There are pros and cons to both and the best thing will be to do both. Some readers will want, for example, to experience the pain of using Word for DOS, others will care only for the content of the document and want to read it with their new personal computer (we have to spell it out now since the great PC/Mac debate - folks, a Mac IS a PC!).

Why am I saying all this? Mostly because I sit opposite a wall of shelves that will one day form a museum of old kit and those old machines have kept the subject on my mind for a bit. I have also been experimenting with virtual machines (for reasons beyond emulation) and emulators. Finally, I'm saying all this because Susan tells me this blog is the place to keep and share things that might be useful and so I wanted to log that Apple make their old software available including the OSes and that MinivMac and this Mac-On-A-Stick project looks like they may one day be useful to us. (And if you're a Mac user, check out System 7 via Mac-On-A-Stick - it really isn't much different! :-))

Behold yesterday's snow family

The abundance of snow got me snapping yesterday. Everybody else too from what I saw. Afterwards, many headed home and started downloading, editing and uploading (well, maybe they skipped the editing part). The web is laden with snow-related images, moving and still, from affected parts of the UK. Perhaps we'll be acquiring some of them in personal archives in a few years time. Just for fun, here's one more. I'm particularly proud of the snow dog.

Academic Earth

Academic Earth presents 'thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars'. So far, contributors are from top U.S. universities: Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale. There is scope for expansion and the Academic Earth team are inviting new partners to contribute.

This is a great idea, but my main reason for linking to Academic Earth is that I rather like the interface. It feels very clean and it's easy to navigate.

KEEP project (FP7)

The latest round of FP7 projects in cultural heritage, digital libraries and preservation have started. The Bibliothèque National de France's KEEP project may be interesting - "KEEP addresses the problems of transferring digital objects stored on outdated computer media onto current devices through portable emulators for accurate rendering of both static and dynamic digital objects".

Imaging alien and ancient floppies on a contemporary Windows PC

This Omniflop software was designed as a tool for archiving data residing on older floppy formats. It understands a number of older floppy disk formats and can read/write disk images that can be passed to an appropriate emulator. It also claims to be able to work out disk formats it has not previously encountered. Could be worth a closer look.

Library of Congress 'Bagit' transfer tools on Sourceforge

The Library of Congress has released some open source tools for transferring archives at (see Library of Congress Transfer Tools at Sourceforge). The tools support the Bagit specification, and can check for missing, extra and duplicate files as part of the process. Transfers can be made using rsync, http and ftp. The verify script also checks hash values of files against those listed in the Bagit manifest.

Metrics toolkit for assessing usability of archival websites

There was some discussion yesterday on the EAD list about evaluating the effectiveness of online finding aids. Wendy Duff drew attention to a project she is involved in, called 'Archival Metrics', which has put a toolkit together for undertaking user evaluation of online finding aids. There are also other archival metrics toolkits available for download. Am wondering whether this will be useful to us as interface developments become a larger part of our work.

A copyright agenda for C21?

Tim Padfield signaled yesterday (nra posting) that the Intellectual Property Office are undertaking a new review of copyright legislation in the UK. An issues paper, designed to start a debate, was published on the IPO's website in December. This new review is intended to build on the work of the 2006 Gowers Review; the paper says that work arising from the Gowers Review continues to be taken forward (format shifting is specifically mentioned, I'm pleased to say), but that there has been change enough in the 'technological and commercial landscape of the creative industries' to merit new consideration.

The issues paper is succinct and there are a few interesting ideas in it, such as:

• to what degree should creators be able to control the way in which their work is re-used?
• how can exceptions to copyright remain effective while contractual and technical measures override them?
  
• does a personal blog deserve the same copyright protection as the work of a best-selling author?

The paper solicits responses to the following four questions:

1. Does the current system provide the right balance between commercial certainty and the rights of creators and creative artist? Are creative artists sufficiently rewarded/protected through their existing rights?

2. Is our current system too complex, in particular in relation to the licensing of rights, rights clearance and copyright exceptions? Does the legal enforcement framework work in the digital age?

3. Does the current copyright system provide the right incentives to sustain investment and support creativity? Is this true for both creative artists and commercial rights holders? Is this true for physical and online exploitation? Are those who gain value from content paying for it (on fair and reasonable terms)?

4. What action, if any, is needed to address issues related to authentication? In considering the rights of creative artists and other rights holders is there a case for differentiation? If so, how might we avoid introducing a further complication in an already complicated world?

Chris Rusbridge's '12 Files of Christmas'

Just before the Christmas break, Chris Rusbridge of the DCC offered to recover obsolete files. Today is the 'closing date' for submissions. I hope Chris gets some interesting submissions that we can hear about in due course. See Chris' blog entry for more info.

Hypertext and self-destructing poems

A few of us attended the Flair Symposium at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin in November. It was an opportunity to hear about literary archives from the perspective of the writers that create them and the archivists that curate them.

While at the HRC, I also found some time to take in their (now just closed) exhibition - The Mystique of the Archive. The exhibition described the contents of a literary archive, exploring its journey from creator to archival repository to scholar. Two items in particular stuck with me. First, the plot chart for Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, and second the display of Michael Joyce's Afternoon. The first has all the magical qualities of a traditional manuscript - it's a window on the composition process. The second is one of few exhibits of born-digital archive material that I have seen. Afternoon is a work of hypertext fiction created using software called Storyspace. You can buy both the current versions of the work and the software used to create it from Eastgate. I have never read a work of hypertext fiction, but I understand that the format presents the reader with a variety of paths through the work. Matthew Kirschenbaum of MITH is working with the archive of Deena Larsen, a hypertext author who encourages the extension of her works; this introduces all sorts of interesting questions about the (potential) scope of the archive.

Matt was also the first user of the Joyce archive at the HRC and he writes about this in his book Mechanisms. He writes too of the importance of the physical medium on which data is inscribed and the use of data forensic techniques to recover and examine data. There's much in Mechanisms that chimes with issues and approaches we have encountered, though the terminology is very different to that used by archivists. At the FLAIR Symposium, Matt spoke about the Agrippa Files (also the subject of a chapter in Mechanisms) and there's a website dedicated to this. The work that's been done on Agrippa is an interesting example of data recovery and emulation. The poem was a digital work designed to scroll on the screen, accompanied by the odd sound effect. It was also crafted to self-destruct by encrypting itself after a single reading. The poem has been recovered, using dd, from a 3.5" disk used with an early 90s Mac. On the website, you can now view a video of the poem running in the mini vMac emulator booted with a System 7 boot disk.

The NEH has funded a collaboration between MITH, HRC and Emory on digital literary manuscripts. The grant supports a series of site visits, which will enable the partners to share experiences and to develop a fuller proposal for the curation of contemporary literary archives. We were lucky enough to meet with the good folk of this collaboration at Texas. As well as hearing about MITH's work with the Larsen archive, we learned of their work on the Jonathan Larson archive and a project which investigates the preservation of virtual worlds (see Kari Kraus speak on this at the Metaverse conference). We also heard from Erika Farr and Naomi Nelson about Emory's experiences with the digital elements of the Rushdie archive, and from Gabriela Redwine about the Ransom Center's work on the digital materials in its collections (including the Joyce and Mailer archives). The stories from all three institutions stem from hands-on engagement with born-digital archives, which makes their telling all the more valuable; others will be able to read about this work when a paper is published toward the end of the NEH grant.

Digital Preservation Policies Study published

JISC appointed Charles Beagrie to develop this Digital Preservation Policies Study back in March with a pretty small timeframe to deliver the goods. It's well worth a look if you're putting your own digital preservation policy together, especially if you're operating in the HE sector. The study provides a handy template of policy clauses that can be adapted for local needs. That should help people get started.

If I'm honest, it's the emphasis on context and mappings that I like best about the work (as an archivist I'm bound to like that ;-), right?). By examining policy documents in the areas of research, teaching and learning, information, library and records management, the study has identified how digital preservation supports the work of universities. This alignment of digital preservation policy to the business of the University is critical to answering questions about why digital preservation matters. Anyone needing to make the case for digital preservation should take a look at the detailed mappings to these wider university policies in the appendices.

Slides from Digital Archives meeting

These are some slides from a talk given at a meeting on Digital Archives hosted by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation back in September. They give an overview of what the futureArch project is about.
20080903arsenalsofnemesis 04

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: digital archives)

iPres presentations now online

This year iPres was hosted by the British Library. Much food for thought, so much so that choosing between parallel sessions was something of a challenge. Good news then that the presentations and full papers are now available online.

Fun with tag clouds

Not the traditional form of indexing an archive, I know, but it seems to me that automagically extracted metadata formed into tag clouds would be a marvelous way of navigating through some digital archives.

We could present clouds at different levels of granularity - at the collection level, in series and lower levels all the way down to the item. We could even present clouds across multiple aggregations, be they of series, collections or items. This could be fun.

For some digital archives, I think tag clouds are probably a 'must'. Poorly structured and overly large email archives are a good candidate.

One of the downsides of the 'hybrid archive' is that we can't necessarily generate tag clouds that draw on all the contents of the archive. All 'physical' material and non-textual digital formats are excluded unless these things are already tagged by creators. They can, of course, be tagged later by cataloguers and/or users. I guess that we need to recognise that imbalance in our user interface, to help our users get to grips with the nature of research in a hybrid archive.

I know that automatic metadata extraction may have shortcomings, but I'd really like to see a fusing of standardised subject headings with tag clouds. We can have the best of both worlds, surely?

There have been lots of examples of tag clouds about recently, including TagCrowd and Wordle.

This is a Tag Crowd entry for this blog...

archives available comments digital document email evaluate experiments file format futurearch ipaper library material planets plato policy present preservation project software strategy systems tools useful users work

created at TagCrowd.com

XML Schema for archiving email accounts

I attended several great sessions at the Society of American Archivists conference last month. There is a wiki for the conference, but very few of the presentations have been posted so far...

One session I particularly enjoyed addressed the archiving of email - 'Capturing the E-Tiger: New Tools for Email Preservation'. Archiving email is challenging for many reasons, which were very well put by the session speakers.

Both the EMCAP and CERP projects were introduced in the session.

EMCAP is a collaboration between state archives in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania to develop means to archive email. In the past, the archives have typically received email on CDs from a variety of systems, including MS Exchange, Novell Groupwise and Lotus Notes. One of the interesting outcomes of this work is software (an extension of the hmail software - see sourceforge) that enables ongoing capture of email, selected for archiving by users, from user systems. Email identified for archiving is normalised in an XML format and can be transformed to html for access. The software supports open email standards (POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4) as well as MySQL and MS SQL Server. The effort has been underway for five years and the software continues to be tested and refined.

CERP is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution Archives and Rockefeller Center Archives. This context has more in common with archiving email in the Bodleian context, where an email account is more likely to be accessioned from its owner in bulk than cumulatively. Ricc Ferrante gave an overview of the issues encountered, which were similar to our experiences on the Paradigm project and in working with creators more generally.

CERP has worked with EMCAP to publish an XML schema for preserving email accounts. Email is first normalised to mbox format and then converted to this XML standard using a prototype parser built in squeak smalltalk, which also has a web interface (seaside/comanche). The result of the transformation is a single XML file that represents an entire email account as per its original arrangement. Attachements can be embedded in the XML file, or externally referenced if on the larger side (over 25kb). If I remember rightly, the largest email account that has been processed so far is c. 1.5GB; we have one at the Library that's significantly larger and I'd like to see how the parser handles this. It will be interesting to compare the schema/parser with The National Archives of Australia's Xena. The developers are keen to receive comments on the schema, which is available here.

Keeping the user experience in the browser

A few days back, news that Barrack Obama is using Scribd prompted me to take another look at this document sharing site. I'm interested in user interfaces at the moment because developing interfaces for curators and researchers wanting to use hybrid archives will be an important part of futureArch's work.

iPaper
I'm quite taken with iPaper's features. I should explain that iPaper is the flash technology developed by Scribd to display documents published to the sites by its users. Documents load quickly within the browser and the functionality is similar to that of Adobe Acrobat. You can search text, there's a thumbnail view, you can zoom, launch the document to display at full screen, turn the pages, etc. It also has some 'social' features (which may or may not be useful in this context), and it claims to be a more secure document format than PDF.

iPaper can display files encoded in a number of formats, a feature that may well prove useful for developing a browser-based interface to your typical born-digital archive. Imagine wanting to view a handful of items in a collection, each of which is in a different format. Rather than launching a different application to render each format (even if these are available as browser plug-ins), the user could access all the items using a single lightweight viewer that can be embedded in the web page itself. This normalisation for presentation simplifies access for repositories and users, and for those users interested primarily in content, a single viewer would provide a convenient and predictable experience that requires no software installations.

So far iPaper supports these formats:

* Adobe PDF (.pdf)
* Adobe PostScript (.ps)
* Microsoft Word (.doc/ .docx)
* Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt/.pps/.pptx)
* Microsoft Excel (.xls/.xlsx)
* OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
* OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
* OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
* All OpenDocument formats
* Plain text (.txt)
* Rich text format (.rtf)

For users interested in qualities beyond content, technologies such as iPaper may be less useful. On example is users who require an experience that reflects the context of creation; use of the iPaper format and viewer requires the transformation of the original item into iPaper format and its rendering in an environment quite different to that of its creation. Another example is users wishing to use specialist analytical tools, which might be domain- or format-specific.

Scribd
There are some aspects of Scribd itself that appeal to me too. A collection overview pane sits next to a list of child items in the collection, each of which have a thumbnail, page-count, format indicator and brief abstract. I'm sure we could do something similar in a view for archival collections, though an archive repository would more likely point to series descriptions from the collection level, and to items at lower levels of the archive's hierarchy. Scribd's item-level view works well too: the document is displayed in the page (using the iPaper viewer) and a little metadata is available on the right - some tags, rights information (creative commons), relevant categories, etc., and since this is web 2.0, users are able to add their comments.

Other possibilities?
I've also been investigating another means of enabling browser-based delivery for the kinds of file formats found in a born-digital archive. More and more of us want to create and view data at the network level and we want to be able to do it with a variety of devices. This can only mean that more options are going to be available, but, as ever, the creative direction is unlikely to correlate exactly with our requirements.

One possibility is javascript lightboxes, so long as the usual accessibility issues are addressed. Many of these tools are designed for image galleries, but there are some with other functionality too. Highslide is one I've spent some time looking at, and now version 4 is just out (five days old) it might be time to take another look. Perhaps the subject of a future post.

DPC's preservation planning workshop

Earlier in the week I attended a DPC workshop on preservation planning, which was largely constructed of material coming out of the European project called Planets, which is now half-way through its four-year programme. There were also interesting contributions from Natalie Walters of the Wellcome Library and Matthew Woollard of the UK Data Archive.

A preservation system for the Wellcome Library?
Much of what Natalie had to say about the curation of born-digital archives chimed with our experiences here. Unlike us though, Wellcome are in the process of evaluating 'off the shelf' systems to manage digital preservation. They put out a tender earlier this year and received five responses that seem, in the main, to demonstrate a misunderstanding of archival requirements and the immaturity of the digital curation/preservation marketplace. One criticism was that the responses offered systems for 'access' or 'institutional repositories' (of the kind associated with open access HE content - academic papers and e-theses). This is something we also felt when we evaluated the Fedora and DSpace repositories on the Paradigm project (admittedly, this evaluation becomes a bit more obsolete day by day). Balancing access and preservation requirements has long been an issue for archivists, since we often have to preserve material that is embargoed for a period of time. I still believe that systems providing preservation services and systems providing researcher access are doing different things, but we do of course need some form of access to embargoed material for management and processing purposes. I also find the adoption of new meanings for words, like 'repository' and 'archive', tricky to negotiate at times. These issues aside, one of the systems offered seems to have held Wellcome's interest and I'll be keen to find out which one when this information can be revealed.

Preservation policy at UKDA
Matthew spoke about the evolution of preservation policy at the UKDA, which had no preservation policy until 2003 despite celebrating its 40th anniversary last year. The first two editions of the policy were more or less exclusively concerned with the technical aspects of preserving digital material, specifying such things as acceptable storage conditions and the frequency with which tape should be re-tensioned. The latest (third) edition embraces wider requirements including organisational/business need, user requirements (designated community and others), standards, legislation, technology and security. The new policy increases emphasis on data integrity and archival standards, it defines archival packages more closely to provide for their verification, and it pays attention to the curation of metadata describing the resources to be preserved.

If I understood correctly, the UKDA preserves datasets in their original form (SIP), migrates them to a neutral format (AIP1) and creates usable versions from the neutral format (AIP2). All these versions are preserved and dissemination versions of the dataset are created from AIP2. The degree of processing applied to a dataset is determined by applying a matrix which assigns a value on the basis of likely use and value. These processes feel similar to those evolving here, though we need to do more work to formalise them.

Matthew also showed us a nice little diagram from 1976, which was created to document UKDA workflow from initial acquisition of a dataset to its presentation to the final user. The fundamentals of professional archival, or OAIS-like, practice are evident. The UKDA's analysis of its own conformance with the OAIS model undertaken under the JISC 04/04 Programme is worth a look for those who haven't seen it.

Towards the end of the talk Matthew reminded us that having written a policy, one must implement it. It's not normally possible to implement every new thing in a policy at once, but the policy is valueless without mechanisms in place to audit it. Steps must be taken to progress those aspects of the policy that are new and to audit compliance more generally. The policy must also be available to relevant audiences who can evaluate the degree to which the archive complies with its own policy for themselves. I found this a very useful overview of the key issues involved in developing a preservation policy and the resulting policy itself is very clear and concise.

Planets tools for preservation planning
It's great to see the promise of Planets starting to be realised, especially since we plan to build on the project's work in relation to characterising material, planning and executing preservation strategies. Andreas Rauber kicked things off with an overview of the Planets project, which helped to demonstrated how the various components fit together.What is uncertain at the moment is how the software and services being developed by Planets will be sustained beyond the project's life. Neither is it clear what licensing model/s will be adopted for different components in the project, since there are the needs of commercial partners to consider as well as those of national archives, libraries and universities.

Plato
Christoph Becker gave us an overview of Plato, a tool which allows the user to develop preservation strategies for specific kind of objects. In Plato, users can design experiments to determine the best available preservation strategy for a particular type of material. This involves a formal definition of constraints and objectives, which includes an assessment of the relative importance of each of these factors. Factors might include:

* object migration time - max. 1 second
* object migration cost - max £0.05 per object
* preserve footnotes - 5
* preserve images- 5
* preserve headings - 4
* open format required - 5
* preserve font - 3
* and so on...

These are expressed in an 'objective tree', which can be created directly in Plato or in the Freemind mind mapping tool and uploaded to Plato. Objective tress can be very simple, but the process of creating a good and detailed objective tree is quite demanding (we had a go at doing this ourselves in the afternoon). In future we should be able to build on previous objective trees as these are developed and that will ease the process. For the moment the templates provided are minimal because the Plato team don't want to preempt user requirements!

The user must also supply a sample of material which can be used to assess the effectiveness of different strategies. This should be the bare minimum of objects required to represent the range of factors expressed in the objective tree. The user then selects different strategies to apply to the sample material, sets the experiment in motion, and compares the results against the objective tree. The process of evaluating results is manual at present, but there are plans to begin automating aspects of this too. Once the evaluation is complete, Plato can produce a report of the experiment which should demonstrate why one preservation strategy was chosen over another in respect of a particular class of material.

Plato is available for offline use, which will be necessary for us when processing embargoed material, but it is also offered as an online service where users can perform experiments in one place and benefit from working with the results of experiments performed by others.

Characterisation
The Planets work on characterisation was introduced by Manfred Thaller. This work develops two formal characterisation languages - the extensible characterisation extraction language (XCEL) and the extensible characterisation description language (XCDL). The work should make it possible to perform more automatically determine whether a preservation action, such as migration, has preserved an object's essential characteristics (or significant properties). It is expected that the Microsoft family of formats, PDF formats and common image formats will treated before the end of the project.

One of the interesting aspects of the characterisation work is developing an understanding of what is preserved or not in a particular process and how a file format impacts on this. Thaller demonstrated this (using a little tool for *shooting* files) by deliberately causing a small amount of damage to a png file and a tif file. A small amount of damage to the png file had severe consequences for its rendering, while the tif file could be damaged much more extensively and still retain some of its informational value. Thaller also used the example of migrating a MS Word 2003 document to the Open Document Text format. The migration to ODT seemed to lose a footnote in the document. Thaller then showed the same MS Word 2003 document migrated to PDF, where the footnote appears to be retained. In actual fact the footnote isn't lost in the migration to ODT, it's just not rendered. On the other hand, the footnote is structurally lost in the PDF file, but visually present. Thaller is proposing a solution which allows structure and appearance to be preserved.

Testbed
The final element of planets on show was the testbed developed at HATII, demonstrated by Matthew Barr. The testbed looks very useful and, like Plato, will be available for use online and offline. There did seem to be some overlap in aims and functionality with Plato, but there are differences too. It's essential objectives seem similar - users should be able to perform experiments with select data and tools, evaluate those experiments and draw conclusions to inform their preservation strategy; the testbed will also tools and services to be benchmarked. It struck me is that the process of conducting an experiment was simpler than with Plato, since a granular expression of objectives is not necessary. It's more quick and dirty, which may suit some scenarios better, but will the result be as good? Aspects I found particularly interesting were the development of a corpora and the ability to add new services (tools are deployed and accessed using web services) for testing.