Transferring Old Home Movies To Digital Media

Information obtained from http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2006/12/transferring_ol.html

If you grew up in the 70s or earlier, you've probably got a box of home movies sitting around somewhere, probably in 8 mm or Super 8 format. It's just sitting there, gathering dust and fading into worthlessness. That's some precious family memories and history there, slowly being destroyed by time and changing data formats.

Jim Carroll solved that problem, building his own tools for automatically converting movies to digital media. Other solutions already exist for this problem, but they involve gadgets that project the movie into mirrors that reflect it into a digital camera lens. Carroll tried a different approach -- laying the movie itself, 14 frames at a time, on a flatbed scanner, scanning in the images, and then running the images through open source software that he wrote himself, to stitch the frames back together into a movie.

But that's not the coolest part. The coolest part is where he built himself a mechanical gadget to automatically advance the film through a flatbed scanner. He built the tool with structural plastic from a hobby shop, Lego parts, a DC motor from an old VCR, sprockets from old movie projectors, and (of course) duct tape. The set-up scans a 50-foot roll of film in about 10 hours.

Carroll's Web page has a detailed discussion of the issues he faced building the set-up, along with photos of the apparatus and embedded video of the results -- a cute home movie that appears to be from the 1960s, of a very small child exerting himself to push a baby in a stroller. It's an impressive result -- looks exactly like the Super 8 movies I remember watching as a kid.

The New York Times's David Pogue discusses some other options for transferring old movies to modern formats.. One big problem: Correcting for the chemical deterioration of the film, which lead to gross color distortions. The simplest solution is just to take your movies to a professional transfer house -- but those cost a lot of money, $700 for an hour of video.

Another problem: Once you've got the home movie transferred to the latest, greatest digital format -- well, time doesn't stand still, and modern formats deteriorate and become obsolete too. A recordable DVD, for example, has an estimated lifespan of about 10 years. Paul Kobulnicky says, "Welcome to the world of preservation librarians and archivists." He writes:

The points that are made in the article are why we (1) choose microfilm negatives stored in salt mines as the preferred alternative mode for text preservation (2) why, for digital preservation, we are investing in digital repository software where we can continually update and refresh the application software and the associated data bitstreams to avoid data loss and (3)why were are focused on converting data files into open source formats (such as XML for text) that don’t require proprietary software to open them since proprietary software usually has a finite operational lifetime.

And James Thoroman recommends archiving to mini DVD format.

I've got a box of Super 8 movies sitting here in my home office; I inherited them when my father passed away. I don't know where the Super 8 movie projector went, and I haven't had an opportunity to transfer the movies to DVD. I'd better act fast, though, because those movies are deteriorating, and I know my wife will not want to miss a single episode of the Wagner Family Chronicles, starring me, the Most Awkward Fat Kid Of The 20th Century.

Publish And Perish

Information obtained from http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/books-information-preservation-tech-media_cx_ee_books06_1201acid_print.html


Nothing is safe. Not your e-mails, digital photos or Word files. Not old newspapers or books. When it comes to storing information, everything will disappear into digital obsolescence or crumble to dust.

Even White House e-mails, important blueprints and influential works of 20th-century literature--the very artifacts that you’d expect would be carefully preserved--are at risk of being lost forever.

The National Archives and Records Administration, the agency responsible for preserving the federal government’s documents, realized in the 1990s that it couldn’t cope with the digital era using its old electronic storage system of magnetic tapes. The White House under the Bush Administration alone will generate as many as 100 million e-mails. Copying them would take years. NARA has contracted Lockheed Martin to build a federal digital archive, but the system won’t be ready until at least September of 2007.
The Library of Congress, meanwhile, ditched most of its original newspaper collection after transferring the content to microform, which uses a machine to read film. But Nicholson Baker, in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, says the medium is at least as iffy as paper: Some early acetate films “shrink, buckle, bubble or stick together in a solid illegible lump,” he writes. In the '80s libraries switched to polyester-based films. But some types of polyester films are prone to spots, others attract fungus and another suffered “complete image loss” when exposed to the high heat of common microform readers.

Books aren’t safe either. Librarians say that most works published between the mid-1800s and the mid-1980s are disintegrating thanks to the high acid content in their paper. A rescue treatment known as mass deacidification is commercially available, mainly from Pennsylvania-based Preservation Technologies. But it’s expensive, says Thomas Teper, head of preservation at the University of Illinois library. As a result, he says, “no U.S. library has been deacified completely.” By the 1980s most publishers had started using acid-free paper, at least for hardcover editions. But Dianne van der Reyden, head of preservation at the Library of Congress, has a new worry over the rising use of recycled paper. “Every time it’s recycled, it becomes weaker,” she says.

The dream of preserving all human knowledge is an ancient one, dating back at least to the Library of Alexandria, which began assembling papyrus scrolls circa 300 BC. But Alexandria burned down, and as knowledge grew exponentially, the possibility of uniting it once again grew more distant--until the advent of computers, when our capacity to store words and images suddenly became vast.

While digital technology promised huge amounts of virtual warehouse space, though, our data are not all safe and accessible. Some computer scientists have dubbed this era a “digital dark age” because we may end up with no record of it. Part of the problem is the breakneck pace of technological change, which results in alarming cases of obsolescence. Several years ago, U.S. Navy engineers noticed that diagrams of the USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, had been subtly transformed by new software. Over at NASA, early spaceflight data stored on digital tape had deteriorated irreversibly by the 1990s. Of course, untold numbers of people have experienced the personal calamity of losing the contents of their home computers, thanks to hard-drive crashes.

Alexander Rose, the executive director of the futurist Long Now Foundation, worries about the impermanence of digital information. “If you save that computer for 100 years, will the electrical plugs look the same?” he asks. “The Mac or the PC--will they be around? If they are, what about the software? “ So far there’s no business case for digital preservation--in fact, for software makers like Microsoft, planned obsolescence is the plan.

“The reality is that it’s in companies’ interest that software should become obsolete and that you should have to buy every upgrade,” Rose says. We could be on the cusp of a turning point, though, in the way businesses and their customers think about digital preservation. “Things will start to change when people start losing all of their personal photos,” Rose said.

So what, if anything, can be done? In the short term, at least, open-source software and nonproprietary file formats--like .txt, .xml and .html--give you the greatest chance of migrating your documents forward as technology changes. As for the historical record, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that collaborates with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, is going some of the distance to save us from a dark age. It captures Web pages before they disappear and stores them in its searchable Wayback Machine. Co-founder Brewster Kahle says that if no one recorded all the material originating online, “we’d live in the perpetual present, in which any organization could change history by taking down the Web page.”

Gathering information is one thing, saving it another. To keep its digital files accessible, the Internet Archive has to move them to a new system every three years, Kahle says, and the organization is beginning large-scale data swaps with foreign libraries. “The real answer for digital preservation is diligence and don’t just have one copy,” he says. “You can be faced with institutional instability, government instability, geographic instability.”

Massive book-scanning projects like the one launched by Google may help preserve literature by making it more accessible. “The broader the access to any resource, the more likely it is to survive,” says Rose. That’s because someone is more likely to notice, and raise the alarm, when a format stops working. On the other hand, “as the digitization projects proceed, the desire for universities to hold onto their physical books may decrease,” says Kahle. Space-strapped libraries could decide to send old books to the dump, just as they have done with hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers. And scanned books are as vulnerable to technological change and obsolescence as other digital formats.

Can anything last forever? The Long Now Foundation is micro-etching its 15,000-page Rosetta Project, an archive of data on human languages, onto a 3-inch metal disk it hopes will last at least 10,000 years. But we still may not have improved on 4,000-year-old technology. Asked what the most permanent medium is, Kahle doesn’t miss a beat: “The clay tablets of the Babylonians. Their libraries are readable to us today.”

Lançamento da obra: "Introdução à Preservação Digital - Conceitos, estratégias e actuais consensos"

A Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho promove o lançamento do livro "Introdução à Preservação Digital – Conceitos, estratégias e actuais consensos", da autoria de Miguel Ferreira, investigador no Departamento de Sistemas de Informação da Universidade do Minho.

A obra será apresentada pelo Dr. Eloy Rodrigues, no próximo dia 28 de Novembro (terça-feira), no âmbito da "2ª Conferência sobre o Acesso Livre ao Conhecimento". Este evento realizar-se-á no Anfiteatro B1 do Complexo Pedagógico II, da Universidade do Minho em Gualtar, Braga.

Esta publicação tem como objectivo descrever e contextualizar as principais iniciativas que visam solucionar o problema da obsolescência tecnológica que ameaça o acesso continuado ao património intelectual, científico, histórico e artístico actualmente produzido em formatos digitais. O seu público-alvo são profissionais ou estudantes da área das ciências da informação e preservação do património, como arquivistas, bibliotecários e informáticos.

Esta obra será publicada em “Acesso Livre” o que significa que será disponibilizada de forma livre e gratuita na Internet permitindo a qualquer utilizador ler, descarregar, copiar, distribuir, imprimir, pesquisar ou referenciar o texto integral documento. O livro poderá ser descarregado na sua totalidade a partir do repositório da Universidade do Minho.

The Digital Ice Age

Information obtained from http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4201645.html


The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of future readability. As technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Will an entire era of human history be lost?

BY Brad Reagan
Published in the December, 2006 issue.
ACCESS DENIED: Users are discovering that records, photos and other documents recorded on yesterday's computer systems are rapidly becoming inaccessible as those formats evolve. (Photograph by Tom Schierlitz)

When the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz takes to sea, it carries more than a half-million files with diagrams of the propulsion, electrical and other systems critical to operation. Because this is the 21st century, these are not unwieldy paper scrolls of engineering drawings, but digital files on the ship's computers. The shift to digital technology, which enables Navy engineers anywhere in the world to access the diagrams, makes maintenance and repair more efficient. In theory. Several years ago, the Navy noticed a problem when older files were opened on newer versions of computer-aided design (CAD) software.

"We would open up these drawings and be like, 'Wow, this doesn't look exactly like the drawing did before,'" says Brad Cumming, head of the aircraft carrier planning yard division at Norfolk Navy Shipyard.

The changes were subtle — a dotted line instead of dashes or minor dimension changes — but significant enough to worry the Navy's engineers. Even the tiniest discrepancy might be mission critical on a ship powered by two nuclear reactors and carrying up to 85 aircraft.

The challenge of retrieving digital files isn't an issue just for the U.S. Navy. In fact, the threat of lost or corrupted data faces anyone who relies on digital media to store documents — and these days, that's practically everyone. Digital information is so simple to create and store, we naturally think it will be easily and accurately preserved for the future. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, our digital information — everything from photos of loved ones to diagrams of Navy ships — is at risk of degrading, becoming unreadable or disappearing altogether.

The problem is both immediately apparent and invisible to the average citizen. It crops up when our hard drive crashes, or our new computer lacks a floppy disk drive, or our online e-mail service goes out of business and takes our correspondence with it. We consider these types of data loss scenarios as personal catastrophes. Writ large, they are symptomatic of a growing crisis. If the software and hardware we use to create and store information are not inherently trustworthy over time, then everything we build using that information is at risk.

Large government and academic institutions began grappling with the problem of data loss years ago, with little substantive progress to date. Experts in the field agree that if a solution isn't worked out soon, we could end up leaving behind a blank spot in history. "Quite a bit of this period could conceivably be lost," says Jeff Rothenberg, a computer scientist with the Rand Corp. who has studied digital preservation.

Throughout most of our past, preserving information for posterity was mostly a matter of stashing photographs, letters and other documents in a safe place. Personal accounts from the Civil War can still be read today because people took pains to save letters, but how many of the millions of e-mails sent home by U.S. servicemen and servicewomen from the front lines in Iraq will be accessible a century from now?

One irony of the Digital Age is that archiving has become a more complex process than it was in the past. You not only have to save the physical discs, tapes and drives that hold your data, but you also need to make sure those media are compatible with the hardware and software of the future. "Most people haven't recognized that digital stuff is encoded in some format that requires software to render it in a form that humans can perceive," Rothenberg says. "Software that knows how to render those bits becomes obsolete. And it runs on computers that become obsolete."

In 1986, for example, the British Broadcasting Corp. compiled a modern, interactive version of William the Conqueror's Domesday Book, a survey of life in medieval England. More than a million people submitted photographs, written descriptions and video clips for this new "book." It was stored on laser discs — considered indestructible at the time — so future generations of students and scholars could learn about life in the 20th century.

But 15 years later, British officials found the information on the discs was practically inaccessible — not because the discs were corrupted, but because they were no longer compatible with modern computer systems. By contrast, the original Domesday Book, written on parchment in 1086, is still in readable condition in England's National Archives in Kew. (The multimedia version was ultimately salvaged.)

Changing computer standards aren't the only threat to digital data. In 2004, Miami-Dade County announced it had lost almost all the electronic voting records from a 2002 election because of a series of computer crashes — reminding us that many of the failures of digital records — keeping are attributable to everyday equipment failure (see "Preserving Your Data" at right). Additionally, software companies can go out of business, taking their proprietary codes with them. In 2001, the online photo storage site PhotoPoint shut down and hundreds of people lost the digital photos they stored on the site.

But data loss is not always as apparent as a fried hard drive or a disc with no machine to play it. A digital file is just a long string of binary code. Unlike a letter or a photograph, its content is not immediately apparent to the end user. In order to see a photograph that has been saved as a JPEG file or to read a letter composed in a word processing program, we need software that can translate that code for us.

Software applications are updated on average every 18 months to two years, according to the Software and Information Industry Association, and newer versions are not always backward compatible with the previous ones. That could be a problem on the USS Nimitz, just as it could make trouble for you if the file in question held your medical records.

Likewise, law firms find that metadata—data about the data, such as the date when a file was created—are often not transferred accurately when files are copied. For example, magnetic storage media, such as hard drives, allow for a three-part date storage system (created/accessed/modified), whereas the file architecture of optical media, such as CD-Rs, allows for only one date. This presents a difficulty in litigation, when attorneys must build chronologies of key events in a case. "I see this in almost every single case," says Craig Ball, a computer forensics expert who advises law firms. "It's a complex problem at so many levels. We are losing so much."

As Richard Pearce-Moses, past president of the Society of American Archivists, puts it, "We can keep the 0s and 1s alive forever, but can we make sense of them?"

I TRAVELED RECENTLY TO Washington, D.C., to meet with Ken Thibodeau, head of the National Archives' Electronic Records Archive (ERA). The National Archives is charged with the daunting task of preserving all historically relevant documents and materials generated by the federal government—everything from White House e-mails to the storage locations of nuclear waste. Ten years ago, Thibodeau's biggest concern was how to handle the 32 million e-mails sent to the archives by the Clinton administration. And that was just the beginning. The Bush White House is expected to produce 100 million e-mails by 2008. Thibodeau long ago realized that simply copying the data to magnetic tapes—the archives' previous means of storing electronic records—was not going to work in the Digital Age. It would take years to copy those e-mails to tape, and that was just a trickle compared to the avalanche of more complex digital files that were coming his way.

"The problem is that everything we build, whether it is a highway, tunnel, ship or airplane, is designed using computers," Thibodeau says. "Electronic records are being sent to the archives at 100 times the rate of paper records. We don't know how to prevent the loss of most digital information that's being created today."

The National Archives must not only sort through the tremendous volume of data, it must also find a way to make sense of it. Thibodeau hopes to develop a system that preserves any type of document—created on any application and any computing platform, and delivered on any digital media—for as long as the United States remains a republic. Complicating matters further, the archive needs to be searchable. When Thibodeau told the head of a government research lab about his mission, the man replied, "Your problem is so big, it's probably stupid to try and solve it."

Last year, the National Archives awarded Lockheed Martin a $308 million contract to develop the system. "We think this is a groundbreaking effort of the Information Age," says Clyde Relick, the project's program director.


—Ken Thibodeau
"Everything we build, whether it is a highway, tunnel, ship or airplane, is designed using computers ... we don't know how to prevent the loss of most digital information that's being created today."
To date, the ERA has identified more than 4500 file types that need to be accounted for. Each file type essentially requires an independent solution. What type of information needs to be preserved? How does that information need to be presented?

As a relatively simple example, let's take an e-mail from the head of a regulatory agency. If the correspondence is pure text, it's a straightforward solution. But what if there is an attachment? What type of file is the attachment? If the attachment is a spreadsheet, does the behavior of the spreadsheet need to be retained? In other words, will it be important for future generations to be able to execute the formulas and play with the data?

"That is unlike a challenge we would have with a paper document," Relick says. More complex file formats, such as NASA virtual reality training programs, require more complex solutions. The ERA is working with a number of research partners, including the San Diego Super-computer Center and the National Science Foundation, on some of those more intricate challenges.

Lockheed is building what is primarily a "migration" system, in which files are translated into flexible formats such as XML (extensible markup language), so the files can be accessed by technologies of the future. The idea is to make copies without losing essential characteristics of the data.

Not everyone agrees with Lockheed's approach. Rothenberg, of the Rand Corp., for example, believes an "emulation" strategy would be more appropriate. Emulation allows a modern computer to mimic an older computer so it can run a certain program. Popular emulation programs in use today are those that allow people to take video games made for Sony PlayStation 2 or Microsoft Xbox and play them on PCs.

"It seems to me that migration throws away the original," Rothenberg says. "It doesn't even try to save the original. What you end up with is somebody's idea about what was important about the original."

Relick says the cost and technical effort involved in emulation are not feasible for a project the size of the ERA. In addition, he notes that the archives in their entirety will need to be accessible to anyone with a browser, and emulation becomes more difficult when you have to account for users with an infinite variety of hardware and software.

The goal for the Lockheed team is to have initial operating capability for the ERA in September 2007, but budget cuts may delay the program's search functionality.

The data crisis is by no means limited to the National Archives, or to branches of the military. The Library of Congress is in the midst of its own preservation project, and many universities are scrambling to build systems that capture and retain valuable academic research.

But the programs in development for government and academia won't help find the lost e-mail of an individual computer user. Some experts believe that this is the result of simple market forces: Consumers have shown little interest in digital preservation, and corporations are in the business of meeting consumer demand. Others say corporations are only concerned with selling more new products.


"Their interest, it seems to me, is creating incompatibilities over time, not compatibilities," Rothenberg says. "Looking at it cynically, they have very little motivation to burden themselves with compatibility because doing so only allows their customers to avoid upgrading."

Nevertheless, there have been encouraging developments. In late 2005, Microsoft announced it was opening the file formats of its Office suite, including Word and Excel, to competitors in order to get Office certified as an international standard. By ceding proprietary control of the formats to third-party developers, Microsoft greatly increases the odds that those formats will be accessible for future generations.

Meanwhile, the International Organization for Standardization recently certified a modified version of Adobe Systems' popular Portable Document Format (PDF) specifically for long-term archiving. It's called PDF/A. In essence, PDF/A preserves everything contained in a document that can be printed while excluding features that may be useful in the short term but problematic in the long term. For example, the new format does not allow embedded links to external applications, which could become obsolete, and it doesn't allow for passwords, which can be lost or forgotten. "It is all about creating a reliable presentation down the road," says Melonie Warfel, director of worldwide standards for Adobe, who worked on the project. Adobe is also working on archiving standards for engineering documents and digital images.

IF HISTORY IS A GUIDE—and that, after all, is the point of preserving history—we know the future will offer the means to manipulate digital information in ways we cannot yet imagine. The trick is to keep moving forward without leaving too much behind.

"It goes beyond this notion of 'important records'—it goes to the things that are important to us," says Warfel, the mother of two children. "My mom had shoeboxes full of photographs, but we don't do that anymore. I have hard drives full of photographs." PM

EU states urged to contribute to European digital library

Information obtained from http://www.angolapress-angop.ao/noticia-e.asp?ID=467241

BRUSSELS, 08/28 - The European Union (EU) urged member states on Friday to step up their efforts to get Europe`s cultural heritage on line via the European digital library.

The EU`s executive European Commission adopted a recommendation Friday on digitization and digital preservation which calls on member countries to set up large-scale digitization facilities.

The commission urged EU states to act in various areas, ranging from copyright questions to the systematic preservation of digital content in order to ensure long term access to the material.

"Our aim is to arrive at a real European digital library, a multilingual access point to Europe`s digital cultural resources," EU Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding said Friday.

"It will allow, for example, Finnish citizens to easily find and use digital books and images from libraries, archives and museums in Spain, or a Dutchman to find historical film material from Hungary online," she said.

At present only a fraction of the cultural collections in EU member states is digitized.

According to the EU`s plan, ultimately the digital library will allow European citizens with access to the Internet to search in their mother tongue all types of cultural material from European countries.

In Friday`s recommendation the commission urges member states to tackle three main areas: the digitization of cultural material, its online accessibility and digital preservation.

EU states should also establish national strategies and plans for the long-term preservation of and access to digital material.

They may adapt laws to allow multiple copying and migration for preservation purposes.

The commission estimates that it will take 200 to 250 million euros spent over four years -- up to 2010 -- in member states to just meet the first targets of the European digital library.

The Conservation Awards 2007: Calls For Entries

Information obtained from http://www.managinginformation.com/news/content_show_full.php?id=5143

The Conservation Awards 2007, sponsored by the MLA, will be launched this Autumn.

The awards recognise excellence in conservation, collections care, conservation research and digital preservation, rewarding and celebrating the skills of those who care for our cultural heritage.

The £15,000 Award for Conservation is for an outstanding project conserving individual items or collections. The entry deadline is 15 December 2006.

The £15,000 Award for Care of Collections is for an initiative leading to significant and sustainable improvements in caring for collections. The deadline for this category is also 15 December 2006.

The £10,000 Student Conservator of the Year Award is for an exceptional project completed during a UK training programme or internship and has an entry deadline of 28 February 2007.

The £5,000 Digital Preservation Award recognises leadership and practical advancement in the digital preservation arena. The deadline for entries is 31 March 2007.

The £2,500 Anna Plowden Trust Award is for a completed programme of research or development advancing the knowledge and practice of conservation. The entry deadline is 31 March 2007.

For details about entry conditions, see The Conservation Awards website – www.conservationawards.org.uk – or contact the awards administrator at admin@conservationawards.org.uk or on 020 7326 0995.

Supercomputer Staff Help Nation's Archivists with Digital-Preservation Expertise

Information obtained from http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_40881.shtml

In the Digital Age, there is an urgent need to preserve vital electronic records to capture our nation's history, which can vanish in an instant with the crash of a hard drive, or more gradually in migration to new and incompatible hardware and software.

Daunting challenges to reliable preservation loom, and digital preservation was a hot topic at the recent annual meeting of the nation's archivists, where researchers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) took center stage in the discussions.

Reagan Moore, Richard Marciano, and Chien-yi Hou, all researchers at the University of California San Diego's SDSC, participated in the unusual joint meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA), and the Council of State Archivists (CoSA).

SDSC has participated in sustained collaborations with the archiving community since the late 1990s, and the maturing of these relationships and growing understanding between the communities was reflected in the meeting, according to archivists in attendance.

Marciano, a computer scientist and director of SDSC's Sustainable Archives and Library Technologies (SALT) lab, was elected to a three-year term on the steering committee of the Electronic Records Section (ERS) of the SAA. This is the first time a computer scientist has served on the ERS, and marks an important step forward in collaboration between archivists and information technologists as they pioneer viable solutions to preserving electronic records.

In another sign of fruitful connections, Marciano introduced Hou, the first person at SDSC to have the title of Digital Preservation Specialist, as representing a new generation of professionals who bridge the computer science and archiving communities.

"These collaborations are a two-way street," said Marciano. "Not only do information technologists provide useful insights for digital preservation, the problems archivists face in preserving digital records are now also enriching computer science research." Hou's thesis topic in computer science was inspired by challenges in how to archive and access multiple versions of an electronic record.

Moore, director of the Data Intensive Computing Environments (DICE) group at SDSC, gave the keynote address to the ERS meeting, speaking on building preservation environments using data-grid technologies. He identified relevant preservation concepts for authentic electronic records, and described how those concepts have been tested in the NARA Transcontinental Research Prototype Persistent Archive. The preservation concepts have been implemented in the Storage Resource Broker data grid, which is being used to preserve records at the institution level (e.g., UCSD Libraries), the project level (e.g., National Science Digital Library), and for state archives (e.g. the Persistent Archives Testbed).

Moore also described the development of a next generation data management technology, called iRODS (for Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System). The new system enables the validation of assessment criteria for trusted digital repositories, a key capability in assuring authenticity in electronic records. Users can express their desired management policies in the form of rules, which are then automatically applied by the data management system.

Archivist Mark Conrad, chair of the NAGARA Committee on Electronic Records and Information Systems, and immediate past chair of the ERS, expressed his appreciation for SDSC's contributions to the archivists' joint conference. "The archival profession is extremely fortunate to have SDSC - a recognized leader in digital preservation - as a collaborator," he said. "Thank you for your support of these important collaborations."

© Copyright 2006 YubaNet.com

British Library concerned about impact of DRMs

Information obtained from http://www.justgo.org/news_story.asp?id=847
--

The British Library's Chief Executive this week warned of some of the unintended consequences of the widespread adoption of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems and urged policymakers to balance the rights of content creators with the need to maintain access in the public good.

Speaking at the launch of the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG) report into Digital Rights Management, Lynne Brindley welcomed current moves to modernise the regulatory framework for Intellectual Property (IP) – particularly the Gowers Review, to which the British Library has made a major submission – but also warned that DRMs are already having an impact on the traditional exceptions to copyright law that have existed for libraries.

"We at the British Library use DRMs to manage our collections and we recognise they can be a valuable tool," said Lynne Brindley.

"However, while protecting rights holders against infringement they can prevent copying of material for fair dealing purposes. Digital material generally comes with a contract, and these contracts are nearly always more restrictive than existing copyright law and frequently prevent copying, archiving and access by the visually impaired."

Taking a small sample of 30 licences offered to the Library from publishers, only two were as generous in terms of access as statutory fair dealing. Other than these only two allowed archiving of the material and not one permitted copying of the whole work by the visually impaired.

"We need clarification that contracts cannot supersede statutory fair dealing rights,” she added. “We are sliding into this situation already which, in my view, is unacceptable."

The UK national library also suggests that IP law should change to clarify that fair dealing rights refer to digital as well as print items, that copying is essential for digital preservation purposes and that the preservation needs of sound recordings from the past – as well as the future – also need to be recognised.

The APIG report – which can be viewed at: www.apig.org.uk/current-activities/apig-inquiry-into-digital-rights-management.html – was launched on Monday alongside an Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) paper on IP and digital preservation, to an audience of IP specialists, technology experts, industry players and journalists at the British Library's conference centre at St Pancras. The IPPR paper, entitled ‘Preservation, access and intellectual property rights challenges for libraries in the digital environment', can be viewed at: www.ippr.org.uk/publicationsandreports/

The APIG enquiry was launched last November and heard evidence from representatives of the music industry, publishers, technology experts, libraries and disability groups about the implications of the increasing use of DRMs to restrict the use of digital content such as e-books, e-journals, digital music files and software packages.

Along with recommendations for clearer labelling and separate investigations into the disability access and single market issues surrounding use of DRMs, the APIG report also recommends that the British Library should chair a ‘UK stakeholders group' to advise the government on IP issues and ensure that a wide range of perspectives are represented in a debate that is often as polarised as it is complex.

Lynne Brindley concluded: "A healthy creative economy needs an IP framework which rewards creativity and innovation while being balanced with protecting the legitimate public interest of supporting an informed citizenry and a healthy research base for the long-term economic and social good of the country. Digital developments mean that such a framework cannot simply be national. It has to be developed in an international context and within a global economy.

"The British Library seeks to support government to ensure that a balanced legislative and regulatory framework is developed and are particularly keen to be involved in developing an appropriate public interest test to guide us all in assessing future developments."

Catch a .wav

Information obtained from http://www.gcn.com/print/25_10/40581-1.html

Inside a digitization project at the Library of Congress

If you’re on your third copy of the White Album or you can’t find a phonograph needle to play your Elmore James 78s, you can understand the plight of the Library of Congress: A collection of nearly 3 million recordings in every format from wax cylinders, to disks and tapes, to CDs, most of them playable only on obsolete equipment.

Eugene DeAnna, head of the library’s Recorded Sound Section, calls format obsolescence “the plague of audio recording from the beginning.”

Just as troublesome is the deteriorating condition of physical media, which are becoming more difficult to play back safely over time. So archivists want a standard for preserving recorded audio that will ensure recordings remain available for future generations.

“It is alarming to realize that nearly all recorded sound is in peril of disappearing or becoming inaccessible within a few generations,” the LOC’s National Recording Preservation Board warned in a recent report on best practices for capturing analog sound.

The task faced by the library continues to grow. Michael Taft, archivist for the National Folklife Center, announced recently the acquisition of a collection of 186 one-sided 78-rpm test pressings from artists including Sonny Boy Williams, Lil Johnson and two Blind Willies—Johnson and McTell. Perhaps most significant are 25 sides by seminal blues singer Robert Johnson. Johnson recorded only 29 songs in his brief career but was a major influence in blues and on British and American rock music. “You can’t hear him any clearer than you can on these recordings,” Taft said.

DeAnna also announced the discovery in the archives of unsuspected recordings of a jam session with jazz great Lester Young.

“No one was looking for it,” DeAnna said. “No one knew it existed.” (For the latest additions to the National Recording Registry, go to GCN.com, Quickfind 561.)

Now, these treasures have to be preserved.

Seeking standards

The board, which was created by the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, convened a panel of experts in March to establish digital file standards and metadata schema for preserving old recordings.

Although digital formats seems like a logical choice for preservation, archivists are a cautious lot and did not adopt digital technology until it was forced upon them.

“We were fairly late in coming to digital,” DeAnna said. “As late as 1999 the standard archival approach was that it is better to stick to tape. Two years later, nobody was making tape.”

Now the writing is on the wall, and the Library of Congress is moving to digitize its valuable archives.

The move to digital preservation comes as the library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division is moving its collections from the LOC’s Madison Building in Washington to new storage facilities near Culpeper, Va. “We ran out of storage space 15 years ago,” DeAnna said.

They found a new home in a Cold War bunker complex under Virginia’s Mount Pony, where bank vaults were built to hold enough cash to jump-start the U.S. economy after a nuclear war. The vaults have been gutted and climate-controlled to provide subfreezing temperatures needed to store color motion picture film. The facility has 57 miles of shelving on three floors with 20 years of growth space. About 1 million items have been moved to their new home.

“There’s a lot more to go,” DeAnna said, including some of the most fragile items, a collection of 16-inch lacquer-coated glass disks that contain NBC Radio broadcasts from World War II.

“The coating peels and the glass is incredibly thin,” DeAnna said. “Those we’re moving last and we’re trying to come up with a process to do it safely. They have been preserved to tape, but with the state of digital processing we can do much better.”

How much better? That depends on the standards used. The accepted format for audio archiving today is an uncompressed WAVE File. “There is not much debate about that, since it is an uncompressed format,” DeAnna said.

But there is no standard for the sampling rate used in recording analog sound digitally. The International Association for Sound and Video Archives, a European organization, recommends capturing a 96-KHz frequency range with a 24-bit rate.

This means the digital recording has 24 bits to describe each sound, which provides 16.8 million possible levels of audio. A standard CD today has a rate of 44 KHz with a 16-bit rate. Some engineers believe the sampling rate for archiving should be even higher than the current 96-24 recommendation.

Why the high sampling rate? “You already are exceeding what the human ear can hear,” DeAnna said. “But by capturing at a wider bandwidth you are making more data available for re-storation.”

The library does not do restoration when it makes archive copies of recordings. It copies with all of the clicks, pops, cracks and other artifacts included. But if the recording is restored later, the additional data makes it possible to clean it up without making it sterile.

“The danger in digitization is that you can clean it up too much,” DeAnna said, losing some frequencies.

Audio experts convened in March to come up with a recommendation for digital audio archiving standards. With recent advances in digital storage, there is no practical reason not to increase sampling rates to include more data, DeAnna said.

“The argument against it used to be the files were too big,” he said. “That’s a joke, now. Nobody discusses it.”

Whatever the sampling rate used for archiving, another format will have to be used for listening.

“A WAVE file at that resolution is not a consumer format,” DeAnna said. Digital files probably will be converted to MP3 format for listening. MP3 has become the commercial standard for digital music even though “it’s not nearly as good as a CD.”

Currently, the library plays original recordings for listeners. Once the archive standard has moved to digital files, MP3 copies could be created from archival files and made available from the Culpeper facility to the reading room in Washington.

“Our plan to is to have a derivative server to deliver MP3 files to the local server on the Hill,” DeAnna said.

Security of the network will be a primary concern because copyright laws prohibit any copying of the files. In fact, “just by preserving sound digitally, we’re on the edge of the law,” DeAnna said.

Copyright laws permit playing an original recording for listeners, and making a limited number of copies for archival purposes. But copying a file for listeners, as the library envisions, requires the copyright holder’s consent. The Library of Congress is not exempt from these rules (see sidebar).

“Who knows what we’ll find out in the future?” he said. “We’re only a few years away from ‘born digital.’ ”

Music releases now submitted to the LOC must be the “best copy,” which today means a CD, even if it also is available as an MP3 download. But DeAnna sees the imminent demise of the CD as a commercial medium.

“Clearly, that’s what is coming; iTunes has made that perfectly clear. Nobody is making money on a CD anymore.”

Guess we’ll have to buy the White Album again.

Libraries fear digital lockdown

Information obtained from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/4675280.stm

Libraries have warned that the rise of digital publishing may make it harder or even impossible to access items in their collections in the future.

Many publishers put restrictions on how digital books and journals can be used.

Such digital rights management (DRM) controls may block some legitimate uses, the British Library has said.

And there are fears that restricted works may not be safe for future generations if people can no longer unlock them when technology evolves.

The British Library spends £2m of its £16m annual acquisitions budget on digital material, mainly reference books and journals.

This is going to be one of the significant challenges for us over the next few years
Dr Clive Field
British Library
But by 2020, 90% of newly published work will be available digitally - twice the amount that is printed - according to British Library predictions published last year.

Libraries are allowed to give access to, copy and distribute items through "fair dealing" and "library privilege" clauses in copyright law.

But as publishers attempt to stop the public illegally sharing books and articles, the DRM they employ may not cater for libraries' legal uses.

"We have genuinely tried to maintain that balance between the public interest and respecting rights holders," Dr Clive Field, the British Library's director of scholarships and collections told the BBC News website.

"We are genuinely concerned that technology inadvertently may be disturbing that balance, and that would be unhelpful ultimately to the national interest."

We have grave concerns about the potential use of DRMs by rightholders to override existing copyright exceptions
Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance
The All Party Parliamentary Internet Group is conducting an inquiry into DRM.

In written evidence, the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance (Laca) said there were "widespread concerns in the library, archive and information community" about the potentially harmful effects of DRMs.

"We have grave concerns about the potential use of DRMs by rightholders to override existing copyright exceptions," its statement said.

In the long term, the restrictions would not expire when a work went out of copyright, it said, and it may be impossible to trace the rights holders by that time.

"It is probable that no key would still exist to unlock the DRMs," Laca said. "For libraries this is serious.

'Threaten'

"As custodians of human memory, a number would keep digital works in perpetuity and may need to be able to transfer them to other formats in order to preserve them and make the content fully accessible and usable once out of copyright."

In its written submission to the group, the British Library said DRM must not "exert excessive control on access to information".

"This will fundamentally threaten the longstanding and accepted concepts of fair dealing and library privilege and undermine, or even prevent, legitimate public good access."

Fair dealing and library privilege must be "re-interpreted and sustained for the digital age", it added.

Dr Field said: "This is going to be one of the significant challenges for us over the next few years."

HUL receives Mellon grant for development of Global Digital Format Registry

Information obtained from PADI-Preservation mailing list

members of the list will be interested to hear that Harvard University Library has been awarded a Mellon grant to develop the Global Digital Format Registry. The grant is for a two year project commencing February 2006.

Further information on the registry is available at http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr/about.html

A copy of the project proposal to the Mellon foundation can be downloaded from http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr/documents/Proposal-2005-09-29.doc


With thanks to Andreas Aschenbrenner for drawing this development to the attention of the list.

Industry observers have expressed concern about Microsoft's decision to submit the file formats for its new Office 12 applications to ECMA Internation

Information obtained from PADI-Forum-I mailing list.

The software giant said on Monday that the creation of a fully documented standard submission derived from the formats, called Microsoft Office Open XML, is likely to take about a year.

But Gary Barnett, a research director at analyst firm Ovum, said on Tuesday that he doubted that the move would result in the format becoming "truly open."

"It's a tactical move by Microsoft to give its proprietary document formats a glimmer of openness," Barnett said. He added that Microsoft is entitled to describe its file formats as open only if it "gives up control of its formats to a standards body that is accessible."

If Microsoft maintains control over its XML-based file format, it will be able to arbitrarily change the standard when it wants, enabling it to keep ahead of any competitors that wish to implement the standard, according to Barnett. ...... http://news.com.com/Microsofts+standardization+move+divides+experts/2100-7344_3-5967431.html?tag=html.alert

Microsoft to Offer Office Document Format as an International Std

Information obtained from IT News Online.

Microsoft Corp. has announced it will take steps to will offer its document file format technology to customers and the industry as an international standard. Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corp., Microsoft, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba will co-sponsor a submission to Ecma International, the standards organization, of the Microsoft Office Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) document format technology.

Microsoft will also make available tools to enable old documents to capitalize on the open standard format. The company said that with Office document formats available as an open standard, customers would have even more confidence in their ability to store and manage data for the long term, with many more vendors and tools from which they can choose.
The move will benefit the broader software ecosystem because software and services vendors worldwide will be able to more easily build compelling solutions that interoperate across a broad spectrum of technologies.

The companies have agreed to work together as part of an open technical committee that Ecma members can join to standardize and fully document the Open XML formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the next generation of Office technologies, code-named Office "12", as an Ecma standard, and to help maintain the evolution of the formats. The group will ask Ecma to submit the results of their collaboration to the International Organization for Standardization for approval.

Microsoft said that documents using the XML file format would be able to take advantage of the benefits of the new open standard, enabling document contents to be accessed, searched, used, integrated and developed in new, innovative ways. Customers, technology providers and developers will be able to work with the Open XML file formats without barriers, creating a broad ecosystem of products, applications and services that can work with the formats, with or without Microsoft software. As a result, documents and public records can be archived, maintained in perpetuity with long-term, widespread industry support.

"We are committed to open standards such as XML to provide the highest levels of interoperability between legacy and next-generation software," said Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International. "The creation of an XML file format standard is a major industry milestone. We hope this will provide both users and organizations with the peace of mind that they will be able to access their past and future documents for generations to come."

"We are pleased that Microsoft and its partners are making this submission to Ecma International," said Jan van den Beld, secretary general of Ecma International. "Our members around the globe pride themselves in their ability to drive progress and consensus on important technologies."

"Apple is pleased to support an Ecma standard for Microsoft Office Open XML document formats, which will make them more open and widely available to all," said Philip Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple. "Apple and Microsoft will continue to work closely together to deliver great products to Mac users and application developers for many years to come."

"We view Microsoft's move to offer its widely deployed XML file formats for Ecma standardization as a very important and positive step forward for the industry," said Renee James, vice president and general manager of the Software and Solutions Group at Intel. "We are pleased to participate in the Ecma submission and documentation process, and believe our customers will benefit from better interoperability and systems integration."

"Just as our predecessors stewarded the development of the national published archive over the past 250 years, the British Library is committed to preserving and providing access to the U.K.'s digital heritage," said Adam Farquhar, head of e-Architecture at the British Library. "We expect that establishing Microsoft Office Open XML as an open standard will substantially enhance our ability to achieve this. It's an important step forward for digital preservation and will help us fulfill the British Library's core responsibility of making our digital collections accessible for generations to come."

International team wins the 2005 Digital Preservation Award

Information obtained from the PADI-Forum mailing list.

The PREMIS Working Group – a team of 30 experts from five countries – was awarded the prestigious Digital Preservation Award for 2005 tonight by Loyd Grossman OBE FSA at the annual Conservation Awards ceremony held at the British Library.

This is the tenth anniversary of the Conservation Awards, which this year has a new sponsor - Sir Paul McCartney. This is the second year to include the DPC-sponsored £5,000 Digital Preservation Award, which was awarded to the PREMIS Working Group for “leadership and advancement in digital preservation which will benefit the UK”.

The winning team’s work is to do with “preservation metadata”, which is essential to ensure that digital objects remain accessible over time. . The work of the PREMIS Working Group goes a long way towards establishing an international open-source standard for handling metadata, which will help libraries and institutions around the world to archive digital content – the volume of which is doubling every year.

The PREMIS team were chosen ahead of four other shortlisted projects, including overseas entries from the Vienna University of Technology and the National Archive of the Netherlands. Two UK entries also made the shortlist: a team from the BBC for their work rescuing and restoring early colour programming (including unseen episodes of Dr WHO); and the UK Web Archiving Consortium, a group lead by the British Library, which is creating a searchable archive of selected UK websites.

The judges were impressed by the work PREMIS has done in compiling a “data dictionary” identifying core digital preservation metadata, which they have supported with practical examples and a software protocol. A key factor in the decision was the international scope of PREMIS, and the consensus building and collaboration that is so crucial in so many digital preservation issues.

Richard Boulderstone, Chair of the Judging Panel, said: "The DPC is delighted to again have had a very strong shortlist for their annual Award, with entries from both the UK and overseas. This demonstrates an increasing awareness of digital preservation and the need to find workable solutions."

In his original presentation to the judging panel, Brian Lavoie of the PREMIS Working group said: "This work illustrates a gradual shift from articulating the problem to solving it ... it's not so much 'Why is digital preservation important?' anymore; rather, 'What must be done to achieve preservation objectives?'.”

Preservation metadata was crucial to implementing reliable, sustainable digital preservation programs, he said. “The issues of long term storage of digital resources are unique to the digital space. A digital object needs to be supported, wrapped in this metadata so it can be kept.”

TV presenter and culinary entrepreneur Loyd Grossman, who helped to launch the DPC in 2002, presented the award. “It’s reassuring to see how much things have progressed since we started, but it is still daunting to realise how much still needs to be done,” he said. “History will judge us very harshly if we are unable to overcome the obstacles to preserving access to our burgeoning digital cultural heritage so we need to encourage and reward those who are working to secure it. “

Release of PRONOM4 File Format Registry and DROID Digital Record Object Identification

Information obtained from PADIFORUM-I Mailing list

National Archives of the UK is pleased to announce the release of PRONOM 4, the latest version of its web-based technical registry to support long-term preservation. PRONOM 4 (which is available at ( http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/) incorporates a number of significant enhancements. It now holds detailed technical information about individual file formats, including links to the full format specifications where available. PRONOM now also supports the use of unique identifiers, in anticipation of the launch of the PRONOM Unique Identifier scheme later this year. The PUID scheme will provide persistent unique identifiers for file formats recorded in PRONOM, and has already been adopted as the preferred encoding scheme for describing formats within the e-Government Metadata Standard in the UK. Further details of the PUID scheme will be released shortly.
PRONOM 4 also sees the release of the first in a planned series of tools, which use the content of the registry to provide specialised preservation services. DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) is an automatic file format identification tool, which uses byte signatures stored in PRONOM to identify and report the specific file format versions of digital files. DROID detects the addition of new signatures to the PRONOM database and automatically downloads updates via the Web, ensuring that it is always up-to-date. DROID can currently identify c. 150 formats using internal signatures, and a further 400 using external signatures, and new signatures are regularly added. It is designed for batch processing, and can be used via a GUI or a command line interface, to support integration with other systems. DROID is a standalone, platform-independent Java tool, and is freely available to download from the PRONOM website at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/aboutapps/pronom/droid.htm.

There is an ongoing programme of development for PRONOM, and we very much welcome all feedback, including ideas for future enhancements. We are also always interested to hear from anyone who is either using, or would like to use, PRONOM content or services. Please send all enquiries and feeback to pronom@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

Adrian Brown
Head of Digital Preservation, The National Archives
T: +44 (0) 20 8392 5330 x2189
F: +44 (0) 20 8487 9206
M: +44 (0) 7968 269 350

Web: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/

Windows Vista Metro Docs

Knowledge workers can securely collaborate by using a new, easy-to-create, XML-based, fixed-format document, code-named "Metro." This format can be created directly from any application, and is simply a page-by-page view of content as it would have been rendered by a printer. Metro documents retain all of the fidelity of the original source material and all the necessary resources such as fonts and images for rendering. In Windows Vista Beta 1, Metro documents do not require you to have the original authoring application to be viewed, but are instead viewable within the included Metro Viewer, which is hosted by Internet Explorer 7 on any Windows Vista computer with the WinFX runtime APIs installed. The Metro viewer can also be hosted by Windows XP computers with Internet Explorer 6, but likewise, WinFX must be installed. While the Metro document format is ideal for sharing content in an application-independent way, it is also an ideal archival format as well. Microsoft is freely licensing Metro, which means that the format can be created and consumed on many different platforms and classes of devices, ensuring that Metro documents will integrate well.

Information obtained from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/sharing.mspx

National Archives Awards Lockheed Martin $308 Million to Build Electronic Archives of the Future

ROCKVILLE, Md., Sept. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today awarded Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) a $308 million contract to build a permanent archives system to preserve and manage electronic records created by the federal government. Today's announcement, by Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein at the National Archives in Washington, DC, initiates a six-year program to develop the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system for NARA. Work will be performed at Lockheed Martin offices in Greenbelt, MD, in coordination with NARA offices in the Washington metropolitan area. A major initiative to help enable the successful move to government-wide electronic records management, the ERA system will capture electronic information -- regardless of its format -- save it permanently, and make it accessible on whatever future hardware or software is currently in use. While the full system is scheduled to be completed by 2011, a functional subset of the system will be operating within two years. "We're extremely pleased our team was selected by the National Archives for a program that will be critical in preserving the acts and facts of our entire federal government," said Don Antonucci, president of Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions. "We are committed to helping the NARA team build a digital archives solution that will set the standard for authenticity, persistence and service." "The Lockheed Martin team was selected for its systems integration expertise, developing innovative technologies for large-scale government IT projects," said Kenneth Thibodeau, NARA's project director. "The team's solution offers a highly flexible, scalable system that will allow NARA to adapt and expand its archiving capabilities as new technologies emerge." As the prime contractor for the ERA project, Lockheed Martin will lead a team of companies with archiving and data management expertise. The team includes BearingPoint Inc., McLean VA; Fenestra Technologies Corp., Germantown, MD; FileTek Inc., Rockville, MD; History Associates Inc., Rockville, MD; EDS Corp., Plano, TX; Image Fortress Corp., Westford, MA; Metier Ltd., Washington, DC; Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), San Diego, CA; and Tessella Inc., Newton, MA. "With the ERA initiative, the National Archives is taking a true leadership position in the digital preservation challenge," said Andy Patrichuk, Lockheed Martin's vice president responsible for the ERA program. "Not only are archives across the globe facing the challenge of maintaining electronic data, this innovation could have countless positive implications for individuals, private businesses, and government organizations alike." "Our Lockheed Martin team stands ready to use our proven systems integration skills to bring a functional electronics records archives online - - one that is ready to serve our nation, citizens and the men and women on the National Archives team," he added. NARA ensures, for the citizen, the President, the Congress and the Courts, ready access to essential evidence that documents the rights of citizens, the actions of federal officials, and the national experience. Headquartered in Bethesda, MD, Lockheed Martin employs about 130,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems, products and services.Go to source =

Checklist for Certifying Digital Repositories released

RLG has just released a draft report for the certification of digital
repositories. The draft, titled "An Audit Checklist for the Certification of
Trusted Digital Repositories," is available at
http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20769.
It is the product of a task force working on a joint project between RLG and
the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The goal of the RLG-NARA Digital Repository Certification project has been
to identify the criteria repositories must meet for reliably storing,
migrating, and providing access to digital collections. The "Audit
Checklist"
identifies procedures for certifying digital repositories.
Leveraging the RLG-NARA checklist, the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)
Audit and Certification of Digital Archives project will test audit the
Koninklijke Bibliotheek National Library of the Netherlands), which
maintains the digital archive for Elsevier Science Direct Journals, the
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and
Portico, an archive for electronic journals incubated within Ithaka Harbors,
Inc.
Stanford's LOCKSS system will also participate in this effort.

Robin Dale, manager of both projects, says: "We look forward to receiving
comments on the draft and to hearing the response from the community."
Comments on the draft are due before mid-January 2006 to Robin.Dale@rlg.org
(+1-650-691-2238).

For more about the RLG-NARA task force, see
http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=5441

[Taken from the PADI FORUM Mailing List]

Massachusetts mandates open-format docs, edges toward Linux

Obtained from http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3926478427.html

Sep. 01, 2005

The state of Massachusetts will revamp its digital output during the next 16 months to create only open-format documents and is increasing its use of Linux and free and open source software (FOSS) among its workers, the state's chief information officer told DesktopLinux.com Thursday in a conference call.

CIO Peter Quinn challenged Microsoft and other companies who sell software that uses proprietary document formats to consider enabling open-format options as soon as possible. Quinn said that "government is creating history at a rapidly increasing rate, and all documents we save must be accessible to everybody, without having to use 'closed' software to open them now and in the future."

The state said Wednesday that starting on Jan. 1, 2007, all electronic documents created by state employees could be saved in only two format types: OpenDocument, which is used in open source applications such as OpenOffice.org, and the Adobe-created Portable Document File (PDF). OpenDocument can be used for saving documents such as letters, spreadsheets, tables, and graphical presentations. It is the default file format for OpenOffice 2.0, currently in Beta 2.

Using OpenOffice.org and Linux "more and more"

Quinn said the state runs a "vast majority" of its office and system computers on Windows and that "only a very small percentage of them run Linux and other open source software at this time. This is in tune with the general market in the US. But we like to 'eat our own cooking,' in that we are using OpenOffice.org and Linux more and more as time goes along, because it produces open format documents."

In contrast, Microsoft's Office creates Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other documents that are accessible only by Microsoft products, making them ineligible for use, the state said.

"Microsoft has remade the desktop world," Quinn said. "But if you've watched history, there's a slag heap of proprietary companies who have fallen by the wayside because they were stuck in their ways. Just look at the minicomputer business, for example. The world is about open standards and open source. I can't understand why anybody would want to continue making closed-format documents anymore."

Microsoft answer to that is simple. MS Office, which is upgraded about every three years and includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, brought in more than $11 billion last year, or about 28 percent of Microsoft's total revenue, according to the company's recently filed annual report.

"We've had an active, ongoing conversation with Microsoft since January about this, and they've been open to hearing our position," Quinn said. "But I don't know one way or the other how they're ultimately going to react to this. Also, this isn't just about Microsoft. We're focusing on the formats here, not necessarily the software. But wouldn't it be nice not to have to remake the systems?"

Quinn said the state is looking at all its options, including using conversion tools to create open documents. "We're cognizant of what happens in a bifurcated world," he said. "If we have to convert everything as we go along, we'll look at the cost [associated] with it and make decisions based on what's best for the taxpayers. We'll also look at other options, like Linux systems, because open source and open standards are where the world is going."

Microsoft's response

Alan Yates, general manager of Information Worker Business Strategy at Microsoft, told DesktopLinux.com: "We do not believe ... that the answer to public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies.

"The proposed policy is inconsistent with ongoing dialogues Microsoft is having with other Massachusetts state agencies about how Microsoft products can best meet their data and records requirements for a variety of data types -- ranging from traditional documents to pictures, audio, video, voice, voice-over-IP, data, database schema, webpages, and XML information.

"As we look to the future, and all of these data types become increasingly intertwined, locked-in formats like OpenDocument are not well suited to address these varying data types -- as the proposed policy itself acknowledges." Yates said. "We would advise the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to do a thorough evaluation of the costs and benefits before making such a major shift."

Feedback requested from companies and individuals

Quinn said that for the next week, the state is requesting feedback from companies and individuals on the issue of open-format electronic documents. The Enterprise Technical Reference Model v.3.5 draft specification is available for review until Sept. 9.