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Category: at risk records

At Risk Records are archival records that are in danger of being lost forever, usually due to physical damage or (in the case of electronic records) loss of the ability to access the originals.

Digital Preservation via Emulation – Dioscuri and the Prevention of Digital Black Holes

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dioscuri.JPGAvailable Online posted about the open source emulator project Dioscuri back in late September. In the course of researching Thoughts on Digital Preservation, Validation and Community I learned a bit about the Microsoft Virtual PC software. Virtual PC permits users to run multiple operating systems on the same physical computer and can therefore facilitate access to old software that won’t run on your current operating system. That emulator approach pales in comparison with what the folks over at Dioscuri are planning and building.

On the Digital Preservation page of the Dioscuri website I found this paragraph on their goals:

To prevent a digital black hole, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands, and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project to research and develop a solution. Both institutions have a large amount of traditional documents and are very familiar with preservation over the long term. However, the amount of digital material (publications, archival records, etc.) is increasing with a rapid pace. To manage them is already a challenge. But as cultural heritage organisations, more has to be done to keep those documents safe for hundreds of years at least.

They are nothing if not ambitious… they go on to state:

Although many people recognise the importance of having a digital preservation strategy based on emulation, it has never been taken into practice. Of course, many emulators already exist and showed the usefulness and advantages it offer. But none of them have been designed to be digital preservation proof. For this reason the National Library and Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project on emulation.

The aim of the emulation project is to develop a new preservation strategy based on emulation.

Dioscuri is part of Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access via NETworked Services) – run by the Planets consortium and coordinated by the British Library. The Dioscuri team has created an open source emulator that can be ported to any hardware that can run a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Individual hardware components are implemented via separate modules. These modules should make it possible to mimic many different hardware configurations without creating separate programs for every possible combination.

You can get a taste of the big thinking that is going into this work by reviewing the program overview and slide presentations from the first Emulation Expert Meeting (EEM) on digital preservation that took place on October 20th, 2006.

In the presentation given by Geoffrey Brown from Indiana University titled Virtualizing the CIC Floppy Disk Project: An Experiment in Preservation Using Emulation I found the following simple answer to the question ‘Why not just migrate?’:

  • Loss of information — e.g. word edits

  • Loss of fidelity — e.g. WordPerfect to Word isn’t very good

  • Loss of authenticity — users of migrated document need access to original to verify authenticity

  • Not always possible — closed proprietary formats

  • Not always feasible — costs may be too high

  • Emulation may necessary to enable migration

After reading through Emulation at the German National Library, presented by Tobias Steinke, I found my way to the kopal website. With their great tagline ‘Data into the future’, they state their goal is “…to develop a technological and organizational solution to ensure the long-term availability of electronic publications.” The real gem for me on that site is what they call the kopal demonstrator. This is a well thought out Flash application that explains the kopal project’s ‘procedures for archiving and accessing materials’ within the OAIS Reference Model framework. But it is more than that – if you are looking for a great way to get your (or someone else’s) head around digital archiving, software and related processes – definitely take a look. They even include a full Glossary.

I liked what I saw in Defining a preservation policy for a multimedia and software heritage collection, a pragmatic attempt from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a presentation by Grégory Miura, but felt like I was missing some of the guts by just looking at the slides. I was pleased to discover what appears to be a related paper on the same topic presented at IFLA 2006 in Seoul titled: Pushing the boundaries of traditional heritage policy: Maintaining long-term access to multimedia content by introducing emulation and contextualization instead of accepting inevitable loss . Hurrah for NOT ‘accepting inevitable loss’.

Vincent Joguin’s presentation, Emulating emulators for long-term digital objects preservation: the need for a universal machine, discussed a virtual machine project named Olonys. If I understood the slides correctly, the idea behind Olonys is to create a “portable and efficient virtual processor”. This would provide an environment in which to run programs such as emulators, but isolate the programs running within it from the disparities between the original hardware and the actual current hardware. Another benefit to this approach is that only the virtual processor need be ported to new platforms rather than each individual program or emulator.

Hilde van Wijngaarden presented an Introduction to Planets at EEM. I also found another introductory level presentation that was given by Jeffrey van der Hoeven at wePreserve in September of 2007 titled Dioscuri: emulation for digital preservation.

The wePreserve site is a gold mine for presentations on these topics. They bill themselves as “the window on the synergistic activities of DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR), and Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services (PLANETS).” If you have time and curiosity on the subject of digital preservation, take a glance down their home page and click through to view some of the presentations.

On the site of The International Journal of Digital Curation there is a nice ten page paper that explains the most recent results of the Dioscuri project. Emulation for Digital Preservation in Practice: The Results was published in December 2007. I like being able to see slides from presentations (as linked to above), but without the notes or audio to go with them I am often left staring at really nice diagrams wondering what the author’s main point was. The paper is thorough and provides lots of great links to other reading, background and related projects.

There is a lot to dig into here. It is enough to make me wish I had a month (maybe a year?) to spend just following up on this topic alone. I found my struggle to interpret many of the Power Point slide decks that have no notes or audio very ironic. Here I was hunting for information about the preservation of born digital records and I kept finding that the records of the research provided didn’t give me the full picture. With no context beyond the text and images on the slides themselves, I was left to my own interpretation of their intended message. While I know that these presentations are not meant to be the official records of this research, I think that the effort obviously put into collecting and posting them makes it clear that others are as anxious as I to see this information.

The best digital preservation model in the world will only preserve what we choose to save. I know the famous claim on the web is that ‘content is king’ – but I would hazard to suggest that in the cultural heritage community ‘context is king’.

What does this have to do with Dioscuri and emulators? Just that as we solve the technical problems related to preservation and access, I believe that we will circle back around to realize that digital records need the same careful attention to appraisal, selection and preservation of context as ‘traditional’ records. I would like to believe that the huge hurdles we now face on the technical and process side of things will fade over time due to the immense efforts of dedicated and brilliant individuals. The next big hurdle is the same old hurdle – making sure the records we fight to preserve have enough context that they will mean anything to those in the future. We could end up with just as severe a ‘digital black hole’ due to poorly selected or poorly documented records as we could due to records that are trapped in a format we can no longer access. We need both sides of the coin to succeed in digital preservation.

Did I mention the part about ‘Hurray for open source emulator projects with ambitious goals for digital preservation’? Right. I just wanted to be clear about that.

Image Credit: The image included at the top of this post was taken from a screen shot of Dioscuri itself, the original version of which may be seen here.

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Will Crashed Hard Drives Ever Equal Unlabeled Cardboard Boxes?

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Photo of Crashed Hard Drive - wonderferret on FlickrHow many of us have an old hard drive hanging around? I am talking about the one you were told was unfixable. The one that has 3 bad sectors. The one they replaced and handed to you in one of those distinctive anti-static bags. You know the ones I mean – the steely grey translucent plastic ones that look like they should contain space food.

I have more than one ‘dead’ hard drive. I can’t quite bring myself to throw them out – but I have no immediate plans to try and reclaim their files.

I know that there are services and techniques for pulling data off otherwise inaccessible hard drives. You hear about it in court cases and see it on TV shows. A quick Google search on hard drive rescue turns up businesses like Disk Data Recovery

Do archivists already make it a policy to hunt not just for computers, but for discarded and broken hard drives lurking in filing cabinets and desk drawers? Compare this to a carton of documents that needed special treatment to permit access to the records they contained and yet are appraised as valuable. If the treatment required were within budgetary and time constraints – it would be performed. Mold, bugs, rusty staples, photos that are stuck together… archivists generally know where to get the answers they need to tackle these sorts of problems. I suspect that a hard drive advertised or discovered to be broken would be treated more like an empty box than a moldy box.

For now I would stack this challenge near the bottom of the list below archiving digital records that we can access easily but that run on old hardware or software, but I can imagine a time when standard hard drive rescue techniques will need to be a tool for the average archivist.

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SAA2007: Preserving Born Digital Records of the Design Community (Session 106)

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The official title for SAA2007 Session 106 is Constructing Sustainability: Real-World Implementations of Preservation Standards for Born-Digital Design Documentation, but I think it might have been better served to include the word Architecture somewhere in it’s title. Sponsored by the Architectural Records Roundtable, this session considered issues related to preserving born digital records of “the design community”. The design community in question includes both architects and landscape designers.

Each panelist gave a 5 minute brief about the way in which they are working toward preserving these design community records – and the rest of the session was opened up to Q&A. David Read, the session chair, mentioned how they used a wiki to collect questions and ideas for the session, gave an introduction to each of the panelists and helped guide the Question and Answer portion of the session.

Who was on the panel?

What is being done?

Phil Bernstein kicked off the 5 minute summaries with a quick history of design technology. He explained how currently there is a shift in progress. Hundreds of years of paper drawings were followed by ten to fifteen years of electronic drawings. The latest development is use of Building Information Modelling (BIM). BIM relies on a database that generates ‘reports’ that are in fact ‘drawings’. These are sometimes referred to as Building Development Information Models. Digital printers can produce physical models directly from the stored BIM data with no need to step through generation of an actual drawing outside the computer.

Phil showed Yale School of Architecture design examples from the BIM world. These were fantastical organically shaped creations that looked more like strange undiscovered plants from under the sea than traditional buildings!

The good news is that the data in the BIM databases are all just text. The bad news is that the generated ‘design artifacts’ are based on the text data and can lead to digitally printed artifacts. There has been an explosion in the various means of representation. The architecture world is catching up to the to other industries (such as the auto industry) that have been doing this for 25+ years.

Current architects are application agnostic – they don’t care what they use to create their outputs. All the paths and platforms will only grow – what is driving the design process will be increasing in complexity. The building industry is making a fundamental shift from electronic drawing to the Building Information Modeling approach – but there is an unlimited environment for representation. He hoped to discuss the intersection between the archival/record keeping issues and the problems facing the architecture world.

Carissa Kowalski Dougherty’s overview covered the Digital Archive for Architecture (DAArch) project out of the Art Institute of Chicago . The project was based on the 2004 study Collecting, Archiving, and Exhibiting Digital Design Data. They considered how Architecture and Design firms are using software tools to produce and design – but examined these questions from a museum and curatorial perspective.

The recommendation is a two-tiered collection approach.

  • First tier: Native files – like autocad files – these are going to be preserved at the bit level – but there is no commitment to ensuring access to these files
  • Second tier : Output formats – only pdf and tif files
    PDF: line drawings, vector-based graphic files, text documents power points
    TIF: renderings, digital photographs

The second tier outputs are what they are committing to “functionally preserve”.

Carissa presented an example of what they accessioned from the Garofalo Architects‘ Manilow Residence (2001-2003) project. A lot of what they got were files that no-one (including the small architectural firm itself) could still open.. the software is gone. Another major challenge was poor naming conventions for the files themselves. The final project archive included over 200 native vector 2D files (.dxf, .dgn, .dwg), 145 pdfs.. and more.

From the UrbanLab they sought to preserve their Visitor Information Center Competition Entry from 2001. This was a project that was never built and therefore has little physical output. They mostly used autoCAD (2D), Maya (3D), FormZ (3D) and Adobe Illustrator (layout).

The DAArch Software highlights:

  • browser based
  • DSpace as back end
  • Dublin Core augmented with CDWA and custom metadata to support architecture data and digital materials
  • authority records
  • group and item level cataloging
  • will be available open source with BSD license via SourceForge (this was a requirement of the funder – that it be open source)

Final lessons and challenges from the DAArch project:

  • file naming and organization – the biggest challenges at the smaller firms – need outreach to these firms
  • metadata for digital objects – there is not a lot out there for 3D digital images
  • software and migration tools – can we/should we preserve the software dependent first tier files? or just the PDF/TIF outputs?
  • three-dimensional objects, BIM, animations, etc

Annemarie van Roessel discussed Columbia’s major Manhattanville project. Their goal is to make digital records last as long as steel and glass. The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library is feeling the pressure to be a leader, so how does Avery document this project? Manhattanville is a 30 year planning, design and build project targeted to be completed in 2030. It will cover 17 acres northwest of the main Columbia campus.

There are many building blocks to the digital design archives: autoCAD, project management records, collaborative environments (sharepoint – Microsoft), images, presentations, websites and movies (ie, more than just “scary CAD drawings”). They are planning staged preservation points. The Avery is committed to developing capacity for digital archiving by 2009. For their metadata they use at minimum the mandatory DACS elements mapped to Dublin Core elements.

Dennis Newman was the final panelist. He has clients who need to preserve/archive finished drawings – such as the documents being sent along to regulatory agencies for final approval. PDF/A-1 was based on ‘electronic paper’ – you loose lots of data when you ‘cut back’ to PDF-A. PDF-E is in it’s first draft/generation being submitted for version 1. PDF-A didn’t address 3D, complex metadata or moving images. PDF-E is based on Acrobat version 7. Adobe has thrown out PDF to the ISO community. Dennis believes that the final ‘as-built’ drawing is what should be the archived version.

He pointed out that Stage I responders need more information than the regulator commissions need. Since 9-11 the state requirements have changed about what need to be in the ‘record’.

As an IT professional he was asked “what can we do” and his answer is “how much do you want to spend?”. IT can do anything – but it takes time and money.

Questions and Answers

Keep in mind throughout this section that I was summarizing the questions and their answers as best I could. Please do not take any statements attributed to the session speakers as full and complete quotes. In cases where I missed too much of the question or answer I generally skipped including it in the list below. If you are anxious to know exactly what someone said, you would need to buy and listen to the conference recordings for this session.

QUESTION : Could a neutral exchange format such as International Alliance for Interoperability‘s (IAI) Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) be the foundation or a piece of the next step in preservation of born digital design documentation? Text + data model that could be read by different software (import/export of data). You can do this now with AutoCAD – you can dump into IFC.

Phil: Is a neutral exchange format the answer to the archiving problems? Software is changing so fast that there is no way that a standard could keep up with it. Also – even if all the data in the world could be put in XML – you still need something to ‘read and do something’ with the data. He put the business process diagram on screen from his talk and pointed out that all the different tools and their outputs exist within the CONTEXT of the business process itself.

Carissa (?): IFC is a recommendation of the Art Institute of Chicago

QUESTION: William Reilly from the FACADE project started to ask about the challenges inherent in the fact that the IFC standard only gives you the geometry. There was some back and forth about this idea with voices noting that IFC can capture more than that.. but not everything.

Kristine Fallon: The idea of doing a neutral format for complex information is a complicated thing. Going back probably 20 years, the people working on data exchange standards for engineering … the different software won’t perfectly talk to each other – but what they can do is exchange ‘model views’. The IFC data model is capable of a fairly comprehensive set of model views.

QUESTION : Who is going to keep it up in 20 years? Are the software producers going to keep it up?

Phil: Autodesk spent 5 million dollars in building the IFCs. If the archivists align their needs with the business needs then the business will pay for it and the archivists will get what they need.

Annemarie: The archivists don’t have the money and resources.. even at Columbia they don’t have the money to buy generation after generation of the software to read all the different file formats. Maybe the MIT approach of emulation is a better approach.

David : Will there ever be a day that I will have an emulator on his desktop? That makes me more curious about exporting pure text.. I can get my head around preservation of that.

Annemarie: The Mannhattenville project is the first step for Columbia in collecting digital data. Archivists need to reach out to organizations now to explain that they want to preserve what they are creating. I am being honest about the chaos coming down the track when we start getting the data from the 90s.

QUESTION (from the audience): The function of IFC is not for archiving.. it is for different software products to communicate with one another. How do you figure out what artifacts of the design process do you keep? How do you extract the ‘important’ parts to keep from what is ‘less’ important?

Phil : What about when there are physical digital models, analytical models and more.. how do you understand all of it?

Carissa: The architectural firms need to be able to get to all of this too. It isn’t just archivists who should be caring about access to all these models. There are legal ramifications and the possibility of renovations later… this needs to come out of the architecture profession.

QUESTION (I asked the following question): Are the problems in preserving the final products so challenging – are there any thoughts to trying to preserve the process. With paper there is an easier preservation of the evolution of design.

Annemarie: In the Manhattanville project one of the big challenges is the architect who does lots of self editing. In many cases they don’t want the word to see their interim choices during the design process.

Phil: Digital tools can encourage you to explore useless ideas. Keep in mind that the journal file for the Building Information Model keeps track of every change. It will tell you that on Tuesday at 4:10 pm someone moved this door 5 inches to the left.

Carissa : At the art institute, architect and archivists need to work together to figure out what is worth capturing.

David: Two different schools of thought. Archiving the final product or archiving the process. File formats are preserving the final product.

QUESTION : There is danger in keeping everything – the goal of archiving is to keep the best final version. The big hulking databases of the world open the door to keeping an overwhelming set of unimportant data.

Annemarie : the needs of all their different consumers are so broad. Perhaps the taking a snapshot should happen more often – thinner slices

Carissa : 2D snapshots are not going to capture the fullness of a 3D object. But it isn’t capturing as much as it might.

Phil : There could be an interactive digital simulation that generates 3D models.. there could be no ‘final’ product. Can we have an impact on how info is kept 4, 10, 30 years from now – for the future? In a world where you can borrow (or pay for) processing time… someone will keep all the versions of autocad.. you will pay for the 15 seconds of rendering time in AutoCAD 14 from some 3rd party.

Kristine Fallon: There is a real business purpose to sorting this out… the IAI work is very real world.. defining model views can help support business.. but they can also support the goals of archivists.

Kristine Fallon‘s Question : Was PDF-E designed to be an archival format?

Dennis: No.. it was designed to be a data interchange format. People who don’t want to give lots of proprietary data to another vendor – they still need to give them a bunch of data to work with them.. that is where PDF-E came out of.

My Thoughts

As seems to be the case with all born digital records, there are no easy answers. While events like 9-11 have had impacts on the types of final products that regulatory agencies and first responders need to evaluate and have easy access to, the speed of innovation and evolution in building design is stunning. It should come as no surprise that architects are more concerned with finding the best tools for their trade than they are with how to preserve the artifacts of their ultimate creations. They will change the tools they use when they find a better tool to manifest their vision.

The most promissing option seems to be having archivists get involved in discussions with the software developers, the architects, the builders and government early in the design process. The traditional model of archivists receiving the final products of business processes years after they were completed does not appear to be an answer on which we can depend. I suspect that proactive efforts to plan for preservation from the start will pay off – both for those trying to use the records 10 years from now and for those who want to preserve some subset of the records of the design community for future generations.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

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Preserving Virtual Worlds – TinyMUD to SecondLife

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A recent press release from the Library of Congress, Digital Preservation Program Makes Awards to Preserve American Creative Works, describes the newly funded project aimed at the preservation of ‘virtual worlds’:

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum. Partners: University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab.

This has gotten a fair amount of coverage from the gaming and humanities sides of the world, but I learned about it via Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum‘s blog post Just Funded: Preserving Virtual Worlds.

The How They Got Game 2 post Library of Congress announces grants for preservation of digital games gives a more in depth summary of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project goals:

The main goal of the project is to help develop generalizable mechanisms and methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction, and to begin to test these mechanism through the archiving of selected test cases. Key deliverables include the development of metadata schema and wrapper recommendations, and the long-term curation of archived cases.

I take this all a bit more personally than most might. I was a frequent denizen of an online virtual world known as TinyMUD (now usually referred to as TinyMUD Classic). TinyMUD was a text based, online, multi-player game that existed for seven months beginning in August of 1989. In practice it was sort of a cross between a chat room and a text based adventure. The players could build new parts of the MUD as they went – in many ways it was an early example of crowdsourcing. There was a passionate core of players who were constantly building new areas for others to explore and experience – not unlike what is currently the case in SecondLife. These types of text based games still exist – see MudMagic for listings.

Apparently August 20, 2007 will be TinyMUD’s 18th Annual Brigadoon Day. It will be celebrated by putting TinyMUD classic online for access. The page includes careful notes about finding and using a MUD Client to access TinyMUD. The existence of an ongoing MUD community of users has kept software like this alive and available almost 20 years later.

With projects like Preserving Virtual Worlds getting grants and gaining momentum it seems more plausible with each passing day that 18 years from now, parts of 2007’s SecondLife will still be available for people to experience. I am thankful to know that a copy of the TinyMUD world I helped build is still out there. I am even more thankful to know that the technology still exists to permit users to access it even if it is only once a year.

Update: 20th Anniversary of TinyMud Brigadoon day is set for Thursday, August 20, 2009

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International Environmental Data Rescue Organization: Rescuing At Risk Weather Records Around the World

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iedro.jpgIn the middle of my crazy spring semester a few months back, I got a message about volunteer opportunities at the International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO). I get emails from from VolunteerMatch.org every so often because I am always curious about virtual volunteer projects (ie, ways you can volunteer via your computer while in your pajamas). I filed the message away for when I actually had more time to take a closer look and it has finally made it to the top of my list.

A non-profit organization, IEDRO states their vision as being “.. to find, rescue, and digitize all historical environmental data and to make those data available to the world community.” They go on to explain on their website:

Old weather records are indeed worth the paper they are written on…actually tens of thousands times that value. These historic data are of critical importance to the countries within which they were taken, and to the world community as well. Yet, millions of these old records have already perished with the valuable information contained within, lost forever. These unique records, some dating back to the 1500s, now reside on paper at great risk from mold, mildew, fire, vermin, and old age (paper and ink deteriorate) or being tossed away because of lack of storage space. Once these data are lost, they are lost forever. There are no back up sources; nothing in reserve.

Why are these weather records valuable? IEDRO gives lots of great examples. Old weather records can:

  • inform the construction and engineering community about maximum winds recorded, temperature extremes, rainfall and floods
  • let farmers know the true frequency of drought, flood, extreme temperatures and in some areas, the amount of sunshine enabling them to better plan crop varieties and irrigation or drainage systems increasing their food production and helping to alleviate hunger.
  • assist in explaining historical events such as plague and famine, movement of cultures, insect movements (i.e. locusts in Africa), and are used in epidemiological studies.
  • provide our global climate computer models with baseline information enabling them to better predict seasonal extremes. This provides more accurate real-time forecasts and warnings and a better understanding of global change and validation of global warming.

The IEDRO site includes excellent scenarios in which accurate historical weather data can help save lives. You can read about the subsistence farmer who doesn’t understand the frequency of droughts well enough to make good choices about the kind of rice he plants, the way that weather impacts the vectorization models of diseases such as malaria and about the computer programs that need historical weather data to accurately predict floods. I also found this Global Hazards and Extremes page on the NCDC’s site – and I wonder what sorts of maps they could make about the weather one or two hundred years ago if all the historical climate data records were already available.

There was additional information available on IEDRO’s VolunteerMatch page. Another activity they list for their organization is: “Negotiating with foreign national meteorological services for IEDRO access to their original observations or microfilm/microfiche or magnetic copies of those observations and gaining their unrestricted permission to make copies of those data”.

IEDRO is making it their business to coordinate efforts in multiple countries to find and take digital photos of at risk weather records. They include information on their website about their data rescue process. I love their advice about being tenacious and creative when considering where these weather records might be found. Don’t only look at the national meteorological services! Consider airports, military sites, museums, private homes and church archives. The most unusual location logged so far was a monastery in Chile.

Once the records are located, each record is photographed with a digital camera. They have a special page showing examples of bad digital photos to help those taking the digital photos in the field, as well as a guidelines and procedures document available in PDF (and therefore easy to print and use as reference offline).

The digital images of the rescued records are then sent to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina. The NCDC is part of the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) which is in turn under the umbrella of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The NCDC’s website claims they have the “World’s Largest Archive of Climate Data”. The NCDC has people contracted to transcribe the data and ensure the preservation of the digital image copies. Finally, the data will be made available to the world.

IEDRO already lists these ten countries as locations where activities are underway: Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Senegal, Zambia, Chile, Uruguay, Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.

I am fascinated by this organization. On a personal level it brings together a lot of things I am interested in – archives, the environment, GIS data, temporal data and an interesting use of technology. This is such a great example of records that might seem unimportant – but turn out to be crucial to improving lives in the here and now. It shows the need for international cooperation, good technical training and being proactive. I know that a lot of archivists would consider this more of a scientific research mission (the goal here is to get that data for the purposes of research), but no matter what else these are – they are still archival records.

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