Digasma

From the New York Times: Digital Archivists, Now in Demand

admin — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:47:46 +0000

A little outdated but a nice article from the NYT from 7 February 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/jobs/08starts.html

Digital Preservation Coalition: Getting Started in Digital Preservation – 4 February, 2011

Matthew Brack — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 17:55:31 +0000

This event was hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition and British Library Preservation Advisory Centre (all the presentations I mention are available on the DPC website here). Its purpose was to provide an introduction to the main issues of digital preservation. Part-way through our course in Digital Asset Management, this workshop provided another angle on a challenging subject. The rest of the audience was composed of information professionals trained in traditional library and archive environments, their common link being that they had found themselves responsible for digital collections, but lacked the digital preservation literacy to tackle that challenge.

The workshop also addressed another problem: how do you break down something as complex as digital preservation for an institution with no in-house expertise or funding to buy it in? Before solutions were presented, the point was made several times that traditional collections management can deal with most of the conceptual hurdles brought up by digital preservation. There was a sense here that many of the delegates would not be engaging with digital material if they had the choice.

William Kilbride, Executive Director at the Digital Preservation, therefore began by making three key points on digital preservation that probably cannot be overstated:

1. It won’t go away.
2. It won’t do itself.
3. You already have many of the skills you need.

He then pointed out that digital data have value and create opportunities. This seems obvious, particularly as a student of DAM, but it’s frequently surprising to hear proclamations from relatively senior members of the cultural sector who seem unaware of modern research methods and user behaviour. Of course, the real value is based on access, or, as William put it, “It’s not about the data.” Coming from an ‘analogue’ background (in my case, conservation), it’s a new mindset that shifts primacy from the physical object to the information that it carries.

Patricia Sleeman, from the University of London Computer Centre, did an excellent job of introducing the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) in a genuinely engaging way. Because digital problems are larger than any one institution (or sector), OAIS was presented as a common shared vocabulary to support collaborative solutions. This is never more pertinent than for those institutions which lack digital resources and OAIS carries the potential to provide community support and direction. The flip side of OAIS, judging from the room’s response to a visual representation of the model, is the barrier of its apparent complexity. It does take some dedicated time and effort to appreciate its usefulness, and unfortunately this is only one of several tools, models and standards for digital preservation which share that characteristic.

Following on from useful models, Bram Van Der Werf of the Open Planets Foundation presented their preservation planning tool, Plato. Open, non-proprietary tools like Plato provide access to digital preservation planning for anyone with a sincere interest and Bram emphasised the need to serve diversity in the community, speaking out against standardisation as a solution for long-term access challenges. His reasoning was that digital preservation was pushed along by technical innovation and development, and therefore beyond such controls, adding that ‘best practice’ was fine if you could trust the group providing it, but if we all follow, then we all make the same mistakes. There is probably a middle ground here, but Bram’s team do seem to be making a particular effort to accommodate a diverse group, including those with the least available resources to carry out digital preservation.

Ed Fay of LSE Library concluded the day with a candid discussion surrounding his institution’s efforts to audit and preserve their digital content. As he put it: “Digital preservation is hard!” Indeed, this is one of my personal lessons from the day: the sheer complexity of variables involved in any digital preservation plan, and the time and effort involved in learning how to deal with them. Ed’s closing advice was to learn by doing. Digital preservation is intimidating, but the level of support is also high and the communication channels are open. Without previous experience, Ed managed to come up with a stripped-down model of OAIS to suit his institution, while also employing DRAMBORA for risk management and Archivematica to characterise their collections; he’s now starting to use Plato for long-term planning with a Fedora repository. In other words, Ed provided an inspiring example of what’s possible.

Video of Dan Cohen’s Keynote at December 2010 CNI Meeting

annaa — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 15:19:22 +0000

Video of Professor Dan Cohen’s closing session “The Ivory Tower and the Open Web” is now available on both Youtube (at http://www.youtube.com/cnivideo ) and Vimeo (at http://vimeo.com/channels/cni ).

You can also find a copy of his presentation at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2010b.fall/cni_ivory_cohen.pdf

Value of the Times

romneyw — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 12:15:59 +0000

Thats the newspaper I’m referring to…

Post our discussion regarding the Times newspaper, and if paywalls do work, you might find this article interesting http://whatsnewinpublishing.co.uk/content/times-uk-lost-4-million-readers-its-paywall-experiment

I guess it poses the question, will people pay for information they can get elsewhere for free, and does the Times have strong enough material with enough value to make this model sustainable? It’s early days yet, and other such models in the USA are working, but they seem to be areas where the audience is more specifically targeted.

With the voice of doom sounding over the newspaper and magazine industry regarding massive loss of ad revenue and the creation of digital platforms that allow more user friendly experiences when it comes to reading your daily news, are the Times actually leading the way, and anticipating the future when digital is all you can get? No longer will papers be feeding out to digital editions, but the creation of unique digital content with no hard copy companions could be upon us quicker than expected. Check out the acceleration into that areas by publishers such as Hearst and Condenast. When commenting on their drive to put digital at the centre of their business Chuck Townsend, the CEO of Conde recently stated “This is not driven by the economy. It’s not driven by expense management. It’s not driven by cost management. This is driven by the market. It’s about making a move at the right point in time to consolidate digital seamlessly into our businesses, whether it be approaching the consumer, approaching clients and advertisers or approaching the way we operate our business with technology as an underpinning. This is acknowledging that digital technology is front and center in our business, part of everything we do—not off to the side.”

This is not a unique view, the speed with which this path is being travelled down is accelerating, which means for us digital asset managers even more digital assets to manage. So the second, and most important question I ask myself is, if people are paying for the content, does it increase that contents value in the eyes of the publisher, and does the publisher then channel that money into managing that content more effectively, ie bigger better DAM systems and people? I know I have my own opinion on that, but that’s another story.

Meantime lets watch this space….

Dictionary asset management, or ‘make it up as you go’.

romneyw — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:59:25 +0000

(the post below comes from my own blog so references to FHM will only make sense if you’ve read it damitall.wordpress.com)

So, just to prove that I am very serious about my studies to become a MADAM, I put down my riveting copy of fluffy handcuff monthly, (yes, I am still keeping the contingency plan active), and I picked up my required reading for that week and dear Mr Upwards paper. When I put it down, (two days later, with a headache and the need to lie down), I couldn’t settle. I reached for FHM ( that’s Fluffy Handcuff Monthly, and not that popular mens title), for a little light relief, I couldn’t concentrate. And then I realised that it was because I had actually learnt something from my reading of Upward. Unfortunately I don’t think it was what he intended me to learn about life cycles and space time continuums, but instead how it is right and proper, in fact dammed essential in our day to day lives in the world of DAM to create our own language.

In my day job myself and a couple of like minded individuals do spend our time in meetings trying to introduce new and exciting words into the discussion. The fact that these words may not exist in the real world we do not feel is an obstacle, rather it enhances the challenge and can decide who is buying the first round of drinks at the next visit to the pub.

In light of my above revelation I felt it only right and proper to try and make a starting point on the creation of a new language for us MADAMs, and even those digital asset managers out there that I know from our years of moving in similar circles. At least then we can talk in public and sound even more like we make the world of assets move using smoke and mirrors. Anyone out there who wants to input go for it. In another installment I shall publish the best, (or all of them if I get less than 10 responses)

I’ve given it a go, here’s a few I came up with

Assetini – a very small asset management system, or one that holds only thumbnails.

Interassetability – assets that can talk to each other.

Groperdata – something which can covertly insert itself into every line of every metadata schema, you only realize when you look at your database and get a clammy feeling at the back of your neck.

Obliterdata- accidental deletion of an asset.

Obliteruser- deliberate deletion of a particularly annoying user by a digital asset manager.

Invisasset – something that once loaded onto the system will never ever be found again.

[insert deity here]damkvetch- traditional name used by digital asset managers to describe a user who complains a lot.

So there’s a little starting point. Knock yourselves out!

Something Amusing from the Times Higher Education

bekkyr — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:47:16 +0000

This is something we are probably all too familiar with!

Creating a National Digital Library

Matthew Brack — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:35:41 +0000

This is something that I’ve written about on my own blog, but seems perinent to discussions we’ve been having recently surrounding the role of digital within the library community:

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books there’s an article by Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard University Library, from a recent talk that opened a conference on the possibility of creating a National Digital Library for the US. His ideas on the library in the ‘new age’ are fleshed out rather more extensively in an earlier article from 2008, featured in the same publication.

In Darnton’s writings he gives a laudible defense of the traditional book and library institution. This perhaps appeals more to a minority (even a small minority) in the current research climate, but it’s an important argument that often gets drowned out. While agreeing entirely with the ideas of access and traditional preservation that he describes, it’s a little concerning to see what has been left out of this discussion surrounding a National Digital Library.

To begin, it isn’t just the ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ student who performs most of their research digitally – all the signs show that, within the sciences in particular, we are being inundated with born-digital material. We will find that even the most bookish scholar – should we decide to value his output sufficiently to archive it – will at least have left behind an email correspondence. Indeed, the first hits for ‘born-digital data’ via Google find an explanation of why the Crafts Study Centre at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design chose born-digital storage for the ‘reusability of the resource’, and an article in the New York Times praising Emory University’s acquisition of Salmon Rushdie’s digital files. It should go without saying that, meanwhile, the scientific community have long since entered the age of the petabyte.

While many books have indeed lasted many hundreds of years, they, like digital data, also get lost and destroyed – any advantage they have displayed in longevity doesn’t seem to compensate for their limitations in time and space as research tools. With a focus on the printed book, dismissing born-digital as an ‘endangered species’, we are throwing out the majority of modern scholarship. It therefore seems that this approach will create exactly what Darnton claims to want to avoid: the library as museum. It’s a museum of past research at the expense of the future, dictating the centrality of the traditional library when in fact the modern researcher expects resources to come to them, and not vice-versa.

Just digitising books is really only a part of the digital puzzle when it comes to libraries and, for the reasons mentioned above, doesn’t reflect the current and future trends in scholarship. Nor is it a progressive response to the question of a National Digital Library: the first digital library started in 1971 with Project Gutenburg; the first ISBN issued to an e-book was in 1998; Google Books was launched in 2004. The push for digitization presented here sticks to a rigid hierarchy surrounding the supremacy of the book and simply doesn’t accommodate born-digital (or even archival) content. Copying every book around is not going to address the most pressing concerns for a National Digital Library and will never further the scope of scholarship.

In a recent survey of 275 US insitutions (with a 70% return), the OCLC identified that special collections in the US were primarily concerned with issues of space, followed by born-digital content, and then digitisation. Only 50% of insitutions had assigned responsibility to born-digital collections. Ignoring born-digital collections and focusing on books does not take care of the problem, and while we’ll probably have our Folger First Folios to consult for years to come, much of modern research will be left uncollected and unpreserved, and the real potential for new avenues in digital scholarship lost. It may well be that the scale of the problem does necessitate the creation of a new, exclusively digital insitution, but the realities of digital scholarship are far more dynamic than they’re given credit for here.