1. Preserving Digital Collections
Andrea Goethals
Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA)

2. Outline FCLA? The Motivation to Preserve Preservation Key
FCLA Digital Archive
Digital Preservation Infrastructure

3. The FCLA … Has 46 full-time staff
Provides centralized automation support for over 50 libraries at Florida’s 10 public universities
Is attached to UF only administratively
Runs the largest central ILS in US

4. Motivation to Preserve
Are we living in the “Digital Dark Age”?
BBC’s 1986 Domesday Book vs. original 1086 Domesday Book
Amount of digital information
93% of world info produced in 1999 (UC Berkeley 2000 study: “How Much Information”)
Rate of technological
change
‘Antique’ if 15+ years old
Source: oldcomputers.net

5. Preservation Key: Fault-tolerance through Redundancy
Centralized
(A)
Decentralized
(B)
Distributed
(C)
Source: Dodge, 2003

6. FCLA Digital Archive (FDA) Operational Fall 2003 - ?
Funding help from IMLS
Goals:
Establish a working digital preservation archive for the use of the libraries of FL’s public universities
Identify costs involved with sufficient granularity to support reasonable cost-recovery pricing
To disseminate tools, procedures and results for the widest national impact

7. FDA Preservation Approach
Still in flux (!)
Dark archive
Automated – DAITSS (Dark Archive In The Sunshine State)
2 levels of preservation (bit-level, full)
Always keep the originals
Plan for migrations from the very beginning
Combination of ‘traditional’ format migration, migration on request, and normalization (archival data formats, converting to standards, canonicalization)

8. FDA Business Plan Free! All data contributions through libraries
(Until the end of the grant period, then cost-recovery)
All data contributions through libraries
Libraries are our customers, we are building in customer options

9. FDA Ingest Example
CIP
XML
PDF
AVI

10. FDA Ingest Example
SIP
XML
XML
CIP
XML
XML
PDF
AVI
XML

11. FDA Ingest Example AIP SIP CIP XML XML XML XML XML XML XML TIFF TIFF
PDF
AVI
TIFF
XML
TIFF
TIFF
Database
Records
XML

12. Digital Preservation Infrastructure
Commonly-accepted terminology
OAIS Model (Partially helpful to us)
Good Typology of Preservation Strategies
Thibodeau’s matrix
Preservation Metadata
METS (LOC) - Technical metadata still developing
NISO Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images (MIX schema)
LOC A/V prototyping project
PREMIS (OCLC, RLG)

13. Source: Thibodeau, 2002. APPLICABILITY OBJECTIVE General Specific
Persistent
Archives
Universal
Virtual
Computer
General
Object
Interchange
Format
Typed Object
Conversion
Virtual
Machine
Rosetta Stone
Translation
APPLICABILITY
Format
Standardization
Emulation
Re-engineer
Software
Programmable
Chips
Version
Migration
Viewer
Maintain
original
technology
Specific
Preserve Technology
Preserve Objects
OBJECTIVE
Source: Thibodeau, 2002.

14. Digital Preservation Infrastructure
File Format Knowledge-base
Format info (Global Format Registry, PRONOM, FCLA)
Archived specifications
Recommended submitted formats and why?
Recommended migrations and normalizations (FCLA, Nat’l Archives of Australia)
Migration Experiments (Harvard)
Economic information for preservation
‘Fair’ billing models (effect of formats, preservation strategies)

15. Digital Preservation Infrastructure
Digital Archive Software
Open-source archive software
Fedora, DAITSS, DSpace
Software for automatic format recognition, technical metadata extraction
What can read this format? (PRONOM, Global Format Registry?)
File format converters
Open source software (Ghostscript, etc.)

16. Dodge, Martin. An Atlas of Cyberspaces, 2003. http://www
DSpace
FCLA Digital Archive / DAITSS
Fedora Project
Global Registry for Digital Format Representation Information
Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS)
Library of Congress A/V Prototyping Project
METS
MIX
National Archives of Australia
PREMIS
PRONOM
Thibodeau, Kenneth. “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years”, The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective, Conference Proceedings, July 2002.