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Tag Archives: preservation

Long-term Preservation Storage: OCLC Digital Archive versus Amazon S3

Last month OCLC announced a new service offering for long-term storage of libraries’ digital collections. Called Digital Archive™, it provides “a secure storage environment for you to easily manage and monitor the health of your master files and digital originals.” Barbara Quint has an article in Information Today called “OCLC Introduces High-Priced Digital Archive Service” in which she makes a comparison to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (or “S3″) from primarily a cost perspective: “The price for S3 storage at Amazon Web Services is 15 cents a gigabyte a month or $1.80 a year, in comparison to OCLC’s $7.50 a gig.” Barbara also goes into some of the technical differences, but I think it might be worthwhile to go a little more into depth on them.

This is a preview of Long-term Preservation Storage: OCLC Digital Archive versus Amazon S3. Read the full post (2282 words, estimated 9:08 mins reading time)
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2008 05 16 Comments (8)

Preserving Digital Video

My place of work is looking to acquire educational videos in a digital form with an eye towards long-term preservation. At this point we receive a physical form (preferably DVD, but sometimes VHS) and digitize it to a very lossy access format (RealMedia, in this case). With this change, we would get a preservation-worthy digital copy from the producer/distributor and forego the physical version.

There is quite a lot written on preserving video, but I wanted to distill the requirements down into statements that vendors could reasonably provide today. I think these are pretty sound requirements, but I’m looking for feedback. In particular, I’m not quite sure how to handle the transfer of closed caption text from the publisher/distributor; suggestions are welcome.

This is a preview of Preserving Digital Video. Read the full post (763 words, estimated 3:03 mins reading time)
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2008 04 08 Comments (0)

Is JPEG Good Enough for Archival Masters?

On the ImageLib mailing list, Rob Lancefield (Manager of Museum Information Services for Wesleyan University) posted a link to the Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines (UPDIG) for image creators. The introduction says: “These 12 guidelines — provided as a Quick Guide plus an in-depth Complete Guide — aim to clarify the issues affecting accurate reproduction and management of digital image files. Although they largely reflect a photographer’s perspective, anyone working with digital images should find them useful…. This document, prepared by the UPDIG working group, represents the industry consensus as of September 2007.” The listed members of UPDIG leads one to believe that this is a professional photography group. One thing in the introduction to the guidelines caught my eye, though:

The chapter on archiving now has a discussion of JPEG as an archival format.

This is a preview of Is JPEG Good Enough for Archival Masters?. Read the full post (817 words, estimated 3:16 mins reading time)
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2008 02 05 Comments (11)

Soundprint’s ‘Who Needs Libraries?’

OhioLINK’s Meg Spernoga pointed our staff to a 30 minute audio documentary called Who Needs Libraries? from Soundprint.org:

As more and more information is available on-line, as Amazon rolls out new software that allows anyone to find any passage in any book, an important question becomes: Who needs libraries anymore? Why does anyone need four walls filled with paper between covers? Surprisingly, they still do and in this program Producer Richard Paul explores why; looking at how university libraries, school libraries and public libraries have adapted to the new information world. This program airs as part of our ongoing series on education and technology, and is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education.

This is a preview of Soundprint’s ‘Who Needs Libraries?’. Read the full post (187 words, estimated 45 secs reading time)
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2008 02 01 Comments (0)

Google and DataNet: Two Ships Passing in the Night, or Maybe Something More?

Wired Magazine’s blog network says “Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data” while the National Science Foundation (NSF) is reviewing submissions to the DataNet solicitation “to catalyze the development of a system of science and engineering data collections that is open, extensible and evolvable.” On the surface, you might think they are working on the same project, but there is more here than meets the eye (or, rather, the ear listening to these two sound-bites).

Disclosure: OhioLINK is a named party in a submission by The Ohio State University to the NSF DataNet solicitation. We’re looking forward to a positive reception to our proposal in the first round of DataNet reviews.

This is a preview of Google and DataNet: Two Ships Passing in the Night, or Maybe Something More?. Read the full post (522 words, estimated 2:05 mins reading time)
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2008 01 24 Comments (4)

Xerox and Library of Congress Collaborate on JPEG2000 for Image Preservation

Xerox and the Library of Congress announced a joint effort last week to study the use of JPEG 2000. This is welcome news! The project is “designed to help develop guidelines and best practices for digital content,” a result that will be most welcome for those of us that want to do the right thing but lack the time and/or technical expertise to pin down exactly what the right thing is. I think it is safe to say that inertia has taken us this far with our collective TIFF-based practice, and even the most conservative preservationist would probably acknowledge that the state of the art has moved in the past quarter century to a point where there might be a better way.

This is a preview of Xerox and Library of Congress Collaborate on JPEG2000 for Image Preservation. Read the full post (162 words, estimated 39 secs reading time)
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2007 10 31 Comments (1)

Digital Preservation Activities: NSF’s “DataNet” and the NSF/Mellon Blue Ribbon Task Force

The past few weeks have seen announcements of large digital preservation programs. I find it interesting that the National Science Foundation is involved in both of them.

Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners

The NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure has announced a request for proposals with the name Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet). The lead paragraph of its synopsis is:

This is a preview of Digital Preservation Activities: NSF’s “DataNet” and the NSF/Mellon Blue Ribbon Task Force. Read the full post (832 words, estimated 3:20 mins reading time)
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2007 10 03 Comments (2)

HTML Template of a TRAC:CC Report

Just in case this might be useful to others, I’ve created a report template based on the “Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification: Criteria Checklist” report. It has the section, subsection, criteria and evidence from the original report marked up in an HTML document — ready for you to add the narrative on how your repository meets the criteria. The original report included a table-style layout as an appendix; personally, I like this more free-form narrative approach.

I need to set work on this aside for a moment — if anyone gets to filling out appropriate portions based on the Fedora digital object repository, please let me know.

Permanent link to this post (109 words, estimated 26 secs reading time)
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2007 08 27 Comments (1)

JPEG XR Could Be Neat, but JPEG2000 is Still Neater

On Tuesday, the Joint Photographic Expert’s Group (a.k.a. “JPEG”) announced a new work item for the standardization of Microsoft’s HD Photo as JPEG XR (XR is short for “extended range” — a reference to its improvement over the original JPEG standard). You can read the publicity details in the Microsoft press release and the JPEG press release, but beyond the public relations pieces I wonder if you are thinking about HD-Photo/JPEG-XR for digital archiving. And if you’re thinking that I’ll bet your wondering about how HD Photo compares with JPEG 2000. As with many things, the devil is in the details, so here is a first, gut-reaction pass at the details.

This is a preview of JPEG XR Could Be Neat, but JPEG2000 is Still Neater. Read the full post (1009 words, estimated 4:02 mins reading time)
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2007 08 04 Comments (7)

OAI-ORE Thoughts on Compound Documents

The Technical Committee and Liaison Group of the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange effort met last week in New York City to hammer out face-to-face some of the last remaining issues before work could begin on a draft specifications document. In preparation for that meeting, we worked on a white paper that is officially called “Compound Information Objects: The OAI-ORE Perspective” — but it might more accurately be called “Thoughts on Compound Documents”. The outline of the white paper looks like this:

  1. Introduction and Motivation
  2. An OAI-ORE Interoperability Layer for Compound Objects
  3. Exposing Logical Boundaries in the Web Graph
This is a preview of OAI-ORE Thoughts on Compound Documents. Read the full post (333 words, estimated 1:20 mins reading time)
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2007 06 04 Comments (2)
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Saturday the 30th of August 2008 at 3:41:36 AM EDT (-0400). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/tag/preservation/

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