Digital Collections Forum Doug Moncur AIATSIS September 2004

Background AIATSIS – the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies – has a large collection of material going back to Material includes 28k hrs Audio tape records of spoken language 15k hrs Video and film doco’s and features 650,000 Slides and photographs 80,000 Books and paper records 6,000 pcs Artwork and other cultural artifacts

Directions The world is going digital: =>Major conservation challenge for conservation of the content of analogue media eg ¼ inch tape is now a dead format as are U-Matic and other video formats even 35mm Kodachrome is end of life

Directions 2 Our major requirement is to preserve the information and to make it available to the originating communities for cultural renewal Equally we need to hold the information as a cultural resource and to make it available to researchers worldwide

Operational Currently major impact on audio visual section – skill sets enhanced and moving towards greater information technology component Inevitably circle will widen to impact library staff and researchers. Information Science skills, computing skills will become even more central

Technical To conserve our data we need the following: Repository solution to store documents and associated metadata Suitable mass storage system with enough redundancy to guarantee preservation of data

Repository Call it archive management, asset management or content management we need to hold documents in variety of formats (audio, video, text, image and digital-originated) Also we need to be able to retrieve the documents, and display them. Issues include format longevity, richness of metadata held on object

Repository 2 Software choice: Open source: low acquisition cost – needs wide ranging in house support skills, but potentially offers greater customisation Proprietary: costs more to acquire – vendor support known cost, but longevity and customisation a problem

Mass storage Easy part of problem – just add $$$! Currently 2.3Tb and growing. Need to consider resilience and repeatibility We will hold the only copies of the material in many cases. Need to ensure that we can read the copies and what comes out is the same as went in

Other Issues Copyright – material is often deposited with us but still belongs to the community Access – some material is secret or sacred Do we need to build in some form of DRM solution?

Conclusion This is the start of a major project At the moment we have more questions than we do answers