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Tag Archives: preservation

Can We Outsource the Preservation of Digital Bits?

A colleague forwarded an article from The Register with news of a new service from Iron Mountain for Cloud-Based File Archiving. It is billed as a “storage archiving service designed to help companies reduce costs of storing and managing static data files.” My place of work is facing an increasing need large-scale digital preservation storage with the acquisition of a large collection of music and the conversion of our educational videos from physical DVD preservation to digital preservation. We’re talking terabytes of content that is we need to keep in its archival form — uncompressed, high quality media files (not the lower quality, derivatives for day-to-day access). It doesn’t make sense to keep that on expensive SAN storage, of course, so this article struck me at just the right time to consider alternatives.

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2009 03 05 Comments (7)

Survey Responses Sought: JPEG2000 for Still Images

David Lowe, Preservation Librarian at the University of Connecticut, is coordinating a survey of JPEG2000 use for digital imagery. The survey asks questions about the use of the JPEG2000 file format (for archival purposes or for access systems), tools used (both JPEG2000 toolkits and software that embeds JPEG2000 toolkits), and considerations of mathematically lossless versus visually lossless compression settings.

This is his announcement:

I am writing to solicit your help with a survey of library-related digital project staff regarding the implementation of the JPEG 2000 standard for digital images (specifically still images and not motion). We estimate that this task will take approximately 15 minutes of your time. It is available now at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=WXFAJwyRNZZilRWzrnum_2fw_3d_3d

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2008 09 04 Comments (1)

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 (2179 words, 8:43 minutes estimated reading time)
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2008 05 16 Comments (13)

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 (747 words, 2:59 minutes estimated reading time)
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2008 04 08 Comments (2)

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.

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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 (177 words, 42 seconds estimated 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 (517 words, 2:04 minutes estimated 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, 39 seconds estimated 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 (818 words, 3:16 minutes estimated 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.

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2007 08 27 Comments (1)
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Friday the 10th of September 2010 at 6:51:13 AM UTC (+0000). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/tag/preservation/

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