Perseus’ Archiving Needs And What They Mean For Librarians

Preserving Perseus

Data and Behaviors What does Perseus have to lose? Data –If lost, we cannot do anything. –The primary text is primary. Behavior –We lose the ability to make associations

Structure of the Talk Perseus’ current and future options for archiving/preserving its data and behaviors Use this to motivate new skills required by and emerging new roles for librarians

Perseus’ Preservation Options… Be Open –Hard to maintain a black box Distribute for Redundancy –Library of Alexandria: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Use Institutions for Reliability/Quality –Library of Alexandria: Lots of quality content

Be Open

Be Open: Data Data formats –Non-binary for text Images are different –Application-independent –Easily transformable when possible XML Licensing –Can other people use this data? –Are other people able to create derivative works?

Be Open: Behaviors Protocol Specifications –What does Perseus mean? (semantics) –Defining behaviors Browsing by logical citation scheme: CTS protocol Perseus’ APIs –Open source implementations –Let people download these implementations

Distribute For Redundancy

Distributing Data Leveraging Geographic Distribution –SRB/iRods Desktop/Web-based GUI The more copies, the safer our data will be –Perseus lets people download raw data Creative commons

Distribute Your Behaviors Mirror sites –Enables distribution of behaviors Distributed computing power –Performance gain For Perseus’ mission: the more copies, the better! –Let people download your specs and implementations. GPL license

Use Institutions For Reliability & Quality

Give Institutions Your Data Quality –Policies for ingest ensure a standard for the data and metadata Leverage Expertise –Their job is to archive and preserve data

Give Institutions Your Behaviors Institutional repositories can preserve behaviors –Fedora Forces documentation –Specification –Implementation If using a different implementation –Is the specification really implementation- independent?

Skills Perseus Needs from Future Librarians Data formats: –XML Manipulating the data –XSLT –Basic Scripting: Perl, Python, Groovy Licensing agreements –Creative Commons –GPL Grid/Distributed Computing Investigate Institutional Repositories –Fedora