LoomWare

A Global University-Cached Archive?

I just read the Jan/Feb issue of MITs Technology Review which features a piece called Fire in the Library. It made me mostly sad. It's about a group called the Archive Team and their efforts to scrape and archive what I would all "failed internet nation states" like poetry.com and geocities. The depressing part was the fact that this group is doing the job of libraries with a minute fraction of the resources. The bright sparks are that they are doing it, as well as Brewster Kahle's involvement and the loose affiliation of the project with the Internet Archive. The mostly sad part went away quickly (as it always does for me) and was replaced with the "how could we participate" part. Libraries are doing some of these things, but in a very piecemeal and exclusive fashion. Academic libraries are focusing on the scholarly record, preserving the record of promotion and tenure and so students in the future can largely not read it either. It occurred to me that the space needed for what the Archive Team is salvaging is a tiny fraction of the space the global university community stewards for our own communities, and we should step up and offer resources. Who knows, maybe the next e.e. cummings is sill hovering in the now mostly lost poetry.com archive? I'm not sure the Archive Team would want our help, and the uncertainties around the copyright of what they are scrapping would cause risk embolisms for must institutions, but I can dream ;-)

AIMS White Paper Available

The AIMS project has released their white paper, which has some great reading on the issues and challenges facing institutions as they embrace the avalanch of born digital content. From the e-mail release:

AIMS (Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship) was a two year grant generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It ran from October 2009-September 2011. An international collaboration of partners from the University of Hull (UK), Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of Virginia as lead, AIMS had several main goals, among them:

1. Develop a methodology for the support and stewardship of born-digital materials 

2. Foster and enhance the digital archivist community

3. Process over a dozen collections that had born digital content.

4. Create and disseminate a white paper that outlines our findings and work

To that end, I am pleased to announce the successful conclusion of both the grant and the white paper. The white paper is an expression of our methodology for supporting and stewarding born digital materials. The participants used their experience in processing collections with born digital content as the groundwork for our shared (rather than singular) approach.  As such, it highlights decision points and practice. It is meant to introduce and expose readers to the issues of born digital stewardship, not necessarily solve every possible contingency since this is an evolving challenge for us all. We have articulated practices that are informed by archival principles that we hope will have a broad reach to our readers.

This document should be considered as a framework to guide good practice in terms of archival tasks and objectives necessary for success. 

The AIMS white paper can be found here:

http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/

 

Access 2010 Conference - Don't Miss It!

A quick promo for the upcoming Access 2010 Conference, which is looking to be a typical stimulating Access conference, with lots of time to spend with your Library colleagues.

Conference Site

How Much Does Your Data Cost

Keeping Research Data Safe : JISC

A new report from JISC looks at the costs of preserving research data:

This study has investigated the medium to long term costs to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of the preservation of research data and developed guidance to HEFCE and institutions on these issues. It has provided an essential methodological foundation on research data costs for the forthcoming HEFCE-sponsored feasibility study for a UK Research Data Service. It will also assist HEIs and funding bodies wishing to establish strategies and TRAC costings for longterm data management and archiving.

Access Day 1 - Afternoon Sessions #1

Dan Chudnov, Donald Moses, Paul Pound and Stevan Harnad do the early afternoon at Access 2009

I unfortunately missed a lot of Dan's talk getting another speaker setup. I came in when Dan was talking about the LOCs new linked data initiative with LC Subject Headings, which are accessible in a smart and flexible framework. The library community should be eating this up - LC Subject Headings available as linked data, and free. LC is also making their newspaper data available as linked data, which is very exciting for us at UPEI with the work we are doing on newspapers. Very exciting stuff - thanks for going to Library of Congress Dan!

Donald and Paul gave an overview of the IslandLives project at UPEI, including a summary of the the new Islandora software and the basic architecture. IslandLives is UPEIs project to digitize the Island's local histories and provide a reach discovery and collaborative layer around these resources. Some of the innovative features of the project include the use of Islandora (a Drupal-Fedora collaborative repository system), automated workflows, Drupal-based TEI editor and more.

Access Day 1 - 2nd Session Set

Mark Jordan and Brian Owen from Simon Fraser University

Mark provided an update on the COPPUL (Council of Pacfiic and Prairie University Libraries) effort to create a LOCKSS server, which went from Pilot to production 2 weeks ago.

Brian Owen gave an update on the various SFU open source projects, especially the reSearcher and the PKP suites. CUFTS has a lot of development effort behind it and as the community grows. The SFU team will be working in the next 6-12 months on to clean-up the existing CUFTS product, provide better admin interface, etc. OJS is also a mature project, with well over 3,000 journal titles published with it. The PKP team will be providing a stable 2.2.3 release (the stable release) and the 2.3 line, which will be the developer version. They are also re-writing all the code for OJS to consolidate and modularize it - the PKP Web Application Library. The Open Monograph Press will be the first new feature to use it and will be doing a major interface upgrade. These guys are doing amazing work - support them with code, money and praise!

Data Deluge Swamps Science Historians

30 TB Per Day in Data

Nice piece about the emerging (sorry, here now) issues related to stewarding large amounts of digital data. It made me realize that in the year that will be 2009 UPEI's own Virtual Research Environment and Digital Library projects will have generated in the order of 30 TB of data that will need to be stewarded in the long term. And this will likely increase 10-fold in the following year.

Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability

Sustaining Digital Projects

Another quality report from Ithaka:

Tens of millions of dollars, pounds, and euros are invested each year by government agencies and private foundations to develop and support digital resources in the not-for-profit sector. As budgets tighten, will these digital resources be able to survive and thrive? This question is at the heart of the Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability project, a multi-year, international exploration of the strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term. Twelve detailed case studies present the steps project leaders have taken to achieve this, with special attention paid to their strategies for cost management and revenue generation. These studies include financial data, and explore the decision-making process that project leaders undertake when experimenting with different strategies to find the best fit for their organization.

One Key Reason to Digitize

German History Buried Under Rubble

I tend to cringe and hold my tongue when I hear people say that digitization is bad for preservation because it makes people think we don't have to preserve the paper or microfilm, which is the only way to keep these cultural artifacts around for the long term. Bollocks. The only way to preserve ALL of our cultural heritage is to digitize it. When I think of the wealth of manuscript and print material that has been lost over the ages, whether like this most recent example in Cologne from disaster, or from war, religious or political book burning, it is clear that the only way to preserve everything, regardless of stripe, is to digitize. And not just digitize, but make freely available so it can be copied and preserved in multiple online libraries and never lost again. One need only think back to the selective "preservation" of the Bush regime when it came to information to also realize that allowing corporate or political interests to steward and preserve is a bad idea as well. Libraries have a critical role to play not just in digitization, but also in ensuring that all information is preserved for future generations.

Google & the Future of Books

To The Public Good?

Thanks to Lynne Murphy for this article from the NYR, which places the Google Books project in the context of libraries, copyright and the public information commons. Highly recommended! A few excerpts...

But we, too, cannot sit on the sidelines, as if the market forces can be trusted to operate for the public good. We need to get engaged, to mix it up, and to win back the public's rightful domain. When I say "we," I mean we the people, we who created the Constitution and who should make the Enlightenment principles behind it inform the everyday realities of the information society. Yes, we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize. We must open access to our cultural heritage. How? By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.

No one can predict what will happen. We can only read the terms of the settlement and guess about the future. If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud? Would we not prefer a world in which this immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Perhaps, but the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company. Apart from Wikipedia, Google already controls the means of access to information online for most Americans, whether they want to find out about people, goods, places, or almost anything. In addition to the original "Big Google," we have Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Images, Google Labs, Google Finance, Google Arts, Google Food, Google Sports, Google Health, Google Checkout, Google Alerts, and many more Google enterprises on the way. Now Google Book Search promises to create the largest library and the largest book business that have ever existed.

At this point, neither Google, nor the authors, nor the publishers, nor the district court is likely to modify the settlement substantially. Yet this is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever.