Digital Preservation: Lessons learned through national action Digital Preservation Interoperability Framework Workshop April 2010

2 Chartered by the US Congress in 2000, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) began with a strategy of collaboration and iteration.

Mission To ensure access over time to a rich body of digital content through the establishment of a national network of partners committed to selecting, collecting and preserving at-risk digital information

The Program is engaged in forming a network of people and an architecture for preservation.

The NDIIPP motto is “Learn by doing” Some of the lessons we have learned thus far are….

We can think of digital preservation as being like a race with relay teams proceeding in parallel lanes at different speeds towards the finish line. Enabling access across time and organizational and technical change is the equivalent of a finish line.

Relay as metaphor for digital preservation We take on preservation a generation at a time preparing to do the best we can in order to hand it off to the next generation. Throughout the lifecycle of a digital object, there are numerous hand-offs across organizations and technical environments. It is at the handoffs that the community needs to pay attention to standards and best practices.

Environment Organization Content Community Consider these aspects to digital preservation—the content, the organizations taking responsibility, the technical environment, and the community.

Content

The NDIIPP partner projects have been working with these categories of digital content. The work has been driven primarily by content type. Images and Text Audio VisualGeospatialWeb Sites Content

This is a map of the diverse content domains represented by NDIIPP work.

What we learned about content standards Format standards are key to understanding how to manage digital content through changes in software and environments. Packaging standards are essential to moving content reliably between creator and stewardship entities. We learned this during our first project, Archive Ingest and Handling Test, and through transferring over 100 Tb of content across partner organizations. Metadata standards are important to content creators. We learned this from our partnerships with photography associations.

Organization

NDIIPP Partner Organization Types 2010

What we learned about organizations Business processes are not interoperable. Sometimes it took as much work to get the agreement and funding in place as to do the project. Organizations need a local benefit to engage in larger collaborations. Organizations have interests beyond their own domain. Example: Photographers associations are interested in collaborating with museum imaging standards efforts.

Environment

This initial view of architecture reflects the NDIIPP approach to infrastructure from a shared tools and services perspective, acknowledging that local resources would steer adoptions of storage and software at stewardship institutions.

Indiana Digital Preservation Summit 183 rd International Digital Curation Conference 18 Access and Views Understanding, Interpreting, Caring For Storage, Data Assurance Export Ingest, Acquisition Tools and services were developed around the 3 aspects of the architecture.

Indiana Digital Preservation Summit 193 rd International Digital Curation Conference 19 Access and Views Understanding, Interpreting, Caring For Storage, Data Assurance Export Ingest, Acquisition ACE DataVerse FACIT iRODS JHOVE LOCKSS L-Store DuraSpace Conspectus DatabaseDataVerse GIS Archiving ToolHeritrix Hub & SpokeJHOVE LoDNLOCKSS NGDA Tool Suite PAWN SRBWeb Archives Workbench Web Archiving ServiceBagIt MementoUDFR NGDA Tools NutchWAX Wayback LOCKSS Recollection Tools and Services from the NDIIPP projects

What we learned about environment There is a high interest in sharing tools and services for preservation but local repository adoptions depend upon organizational resources and policies. The simplest and most transparent tools are most often adopted. The broad acceptance of LOCKSS attests to this. Hardware vendors need to be engaged to understand preservation requirements. NDIIPP sponsors an annual storage meeting with vendors.

Communities

What we learned about communities Shared expertise can reduce time and effort to establish local preservation environments. Ex. The MetaArchive Cooperative Working together builds trust. Digital preservation is a task too challenging for a single institution. It requires multiple domain expertise, about content and technology. Communities are essential to sustain digital preservation efforts for the long-term. Standards need to be considered in the context of diverse communities.

NDIIPP efforts engaged with standards

Standards and best practices are needed at the intersections of preservation regimes where technology and organizations hand-off content.

For more information: Consult the NDIIPP website: Or Martha Anderson