Speaking

The best practices for representing analog audio with digital bitstreams are relatively clear. Sample the signal with 24 bits of resolution at 96KHz. The standards for storing the data are less clear, especially for media with complex configurations of faces, regions, and streams. Whether accomplished through metadata and/or file format, the strategy chosen to represent the complexity of the original media has long-term preservation implications. Best practice guides rarely document these edge cases and informal discussions with practitioners have revealed a wide range of practices. This paper aims to outline the specific challenges of representing complex audio objects after digitization and approaches that have been implemented but not widely adopted.

Digital preservation is easier to accomplish when it is considered at the beginning of a project. Working with vendors to receive fixity information, employ lossless compression, and use quality control software prepares a digitization project for long-term collection management success.

This workshop will focus on the development and implementation of workflows for digital curation, focusing specifically on those that incorporate open-source software. The facilitators are part of the Open Source Software Archival Workflow (OSSArcFlow) project, which brings together researchers, developers of three major OSS digital stewardship systems, and digital stewards at twelve partner institutions including government archives, research institutes, and academic and public libraries.

Based on a series of online workshops presented by the Open Preservation Foundation in 2017, this workshop that will equip participants with the tools required to submit new entries to PRONOM. Participants will learn the theory behind format signatures, how signatures are created, and how they are shared and used. Each of the workshop’s topics is explained through both lecture and demonstration. Participants engage directly in the signature development process through a series of hands-on activities, using a set of sample files provided by the workshop. Participants will examine these files with hex editors, compare their contents to existing specifications, create draft signatures in XML, and test them using format identification tools such as FIDO and Siegfried. Workshop leaders will also share strategies and resources on how to engage the wider community for assistance. The workshop will help participants gain practical skills in appraisal and analysis of digital files. This relevant real-world experience will help to foster a more knowledgeable user base and improve the the PRONOM registry. To close the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to practice their skills using files from their own collections that are not identified in PRONOM tools. Instructors will be available to answer questions as participants explore their files.

A format is created, becomes widely used, and eventually fades away. File format obsolescence lies at the core of many digital preservation narratives, but does the field know what obsolescence looks like. This demonstration explores the issue of obsolescence with tools that can be used to see the rise and fall of formats in an institution’s collection and potentially distinguish a local extirpation from a mass extinction. By demonstrating the information about format endangerment that can be derived and the tools used to derived it, this demonstration aims to encourage a practice of sharing file format profiles of collections that can be used to better understand the lifecycles of file formats and inform better format management practices.

There are a number of resources such as PBCore and AE-57 for defining metadata specifications for a digitization project, but there are very few resources on how to ensure that the metadata you receive meets your specifications. This presentation outlines an approach taken using JSON Schema to validate the metadata produced by in-house and external labs across multiple projects while digitizing a quarter-million audio, video, and film media. After discussing our initial use of spreadsheets, the problems they solved, and the problems they caused, we will introduce our metadata schema and demonstrate how we use it for validation. Particularly important, we will discuss how we maintain and update the schema over time, and how its use has strengthened our preservation workflows.

The New York Public Library has created over 1.5 PB of files from digitizing over 50,000 audio and video items for the long-term preservation of their content. This paper details the Library’s usage of the BagIt File Packaging Format during Quality Assurance and Audit Submissions functions as defined by OAIS. It also discusses extensions of the bagit-python library in order repair bags that do not pass those functions. Working with thousands of terabytes stored in hundreds of thousands of bags requires that our approaches to ingest scale appropriately. Common changes to bags such as the accidental creation of system files in bags or purposeful edits of metadata files will invalidate the entire bag. Noting and responding to these errors is critical for improving workflows, but manual response is impossible. Using the bagit-python library, NYPL has created tools to selectively clean system files from bag directories and manifests, update or add checksums, and create event logs of repairs.

A lightning talk about using BagIt completeness checks to quickly identify file losses in an unmanaged staging area.

This poster will present the headline results from the Open Preservation Community Survey 2015, which surveyed over 130 institutions around the world to establish the current state of the art in digital preservation practice. The survey focused on technology adoption and real-world infrastructure and architectures, including demographics about the type and size of the responding institution. The responses include: staff roles and allocations; core digital preservation activities; content types accepted for long-term management; storage capacity and models; use of the cloud and consortial solutions; use of open source; repository and workflow systems; and tool adoption. The survey did not ask about policies or costs. In addition, comparisons are drawn with the PLANETS survey [1] from 2009 to show changes in requirements and practice over time. The published analysis and raw data will be forthcoming by the end of 2015.

The adoption of Electronic Thesis & Dissertations (ETD) programs in colleges and universities has moved the ETD copy of record from analog to digital. In many cases, it has also offered the opportunity for students to move from text to a format that better represented their work. Previously these other representations were shoehorned into text or physical forms, for example, printing a dataset as an appendix, describing a music recital, or taping a CD to the back cover. With ETD’s, students can submit the original supplementary materials alongside the text, but doing so increases the complexity of the workflow for both the student and the school.

This workshop provides an overview of lifecycle management as it applies to ETD program planning & implementation. It incorporates a series of models, documents, and curation tools with input from attendees to better understand the relationship of curation activities and stakeholders in an overall ETD program. Attendees will gain a clear understanding of the ETD lifecycle and how to use the deliverables produced by the IMLS-funded Lifecycle Management of ETDs project. It will also introduce concepts regarding the management of supplementary files that are being explored as part of the follow-up ETDplus project.