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Category: digital preservation

Chapter 10: Open Source, Version Control and Software Sustainability by Ildikó Vancsa


Chapter 10 of Partners for Preservation is ‘Open Source, Version Control and Software Sustainability’ by Ildikó Vancsa. The third chapter of Part III:  Data and Programming, and the final of the book, this chapter shifts the lens on programming to talk about the elements of communication and coordination that are required to sustain open source software projects.

When the Pacific Telegraph Route (shown above) was finished in 1861, it connected the new state of California to the East Coast. It put the Pony Express out of business. The first week it was in operation, it cost a dollar a word. Almost 110 years later, in 1969, saw the first digital transmission over ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet).

Vancsa explains early in the chapter:

We cannot really discuss open source without mentioning the effort that people need to put into communicationg with each other. Members of a community must be able to follow and track back the information that has been exchanged, no matter what avenue of communication is used.

I love envisioning the long evolution from the telegraph crossing the continent to the Internet stretching around the world. With each leap forward in technology and communication, we have made it easier to collaborate across space and time. Archives, at their heart, are dedicated to this kind of collaboration. Our two fields can learn from and support one another in so many ways.

Bio:

Ildikó Vancsa started her journey with virtualization during her university years and has been in connection with this technology in different ways since then. She started her career at a small research and development company in Budapest, where she focused on areas like system management, business process modeling and optimization. Ildikó got involved with OpenStack when she started to work on the cloud project at Ericsson in 2013. She was a member of the Ceilometer and Aodh project core teams. She is now working for the OpenStack Foundation and she drives network functions virtualization (NFV) related feature development activities in projects like Nova and Cinder. Beyond code and documentation contributions, she is also very passionate about on-boarding and training activities.

Image source: Route of the first transcontinental telegraph, 1862.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pacific_Telegraph_Route_-_map,_1862.jpg

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Chapter 9: Sharing Research Data, Data Standards and Improving Opportunities for Creating Visualisations by Dr. Vetria Byrd

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xkcd webcomic #1410: California

Chapter 9 of Partners for Preservation is ‘Sharing Research Data, Data Standards and Improving Opportunities for Creating Visualisations’ by Dr. Vetria Byrd. This is the second chapter of Part III:  Data and Programming. I originally had envisioned a chapter focused on the ways that standardization, controlled vocabularies, and consistent documentation could increase the re-use of data. All these things help people, separated by either space or time, to understand and leverage the work of others. Scientific communities around the world have led a lot of this work. The work of archivists to preserve data in a meaningful way is made easier by it.

Luckily for all of us, my hunt for contributing authors brought Dr. Vetria Byrd to this project. Her professional focus on visualization led me to approach the topic of sharing data and data standards from a different direction.

I am a very visual thinker. I truly believe that with a large enough whiteboard, you could plan (or explain) anything. Those who are familiar with my research back in graduate school may recall my visualization project, ArchivesZ, focused on visualizing archival descriptive information. So, when I realized that this chapter could talk about both data standards and visualization, I was sold.

The introduction to the chapter explains:

“This chapter looks at the collaborative nature of sharing the underlying data that propels the system, rather than focusing on systems and services. It provides an overview of the visualisation process, and discusses the challenge of sharing research data and ways data standards can increase opportunities for creating and sharing visualisations, while also increasing visualisation capacity building among researchers and scientists.”

A single visualization is often reliant on multiple sets of data that have been analyzed, linked, and summarized over multiple iterations to generate the final product. Take the xkcd webcomic featured at the top of this post. The citation within the webcomic itself reads “based on map data from US Drought Monitor/NOAA/Richard Tinker”. Digging a bit deeper, I found my way to the US Drought Monitor website which provides easy access to data and maps. You can learn more about the data included on the site and read the details about how they calculate the drought classifications.

I was able to quickly generate this chart, showing California Drought data over time. While it certainly makes it clear that there has been a dramatic increase of drought over time, it does not communicate the same information as the maps in the webcomic above.

I think this is a great example of how different ways of visualizing information can fundamentally change our understanding of something. Documentation of and transparency in sharing data is key. It gives the tools to a broader audience of creative individuals who can then increase the visibility of the original work and build upon it.

Bio:
Dr. Vetria Byrd is an Assistant Professor of Computer Graphics Technology and Director of the Byrd Data Visualization Lab in the Polytechnic Institute at Purdue University’s main campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. Dr. Byrd is introducing and integrating visualization capacity building into the undergraduate data visualization curriculum. She is the founder of the Broadening Participation in Visualization (BPViz) Workshop. She served as a steering committee member on the Midwest Big Data Hub (2016-2018). She has taught data visualization courses on national and international platforms as an invited lecturer of the International High Performance Computing Summer School (IHPCSS). Her visualization webinars on Blue Waters, a petascale supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, introduce data visualization to audiences around the world. As described in her invited plenary talk featured on HPC Wire Dr. Byrd utilizes data visualization as a catalyst for communication, a conduit collaboration and as a platform to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in data visualization. Dr. Byrd’s research interests include data visualization, data analytics, data integration, visualizing heterogeneous data and the science of learning and incorporating data visualization at the curriculum level and everyday practice.

Image source: xkcd comic: California. https://www.xkcd.com/1410/

PS: If you haven’t yet discovered xkcd (self-described as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”) – you are in for a treat!

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Chapter 7: Historical Building Information Model (BIM)+: Sharing, Preserving and Reusing Architectural Design Data by Dr. JuHyun Lee and Dr. Ning Gu

Chapter 7 of Partners for Preservation is ‘Historical Building Information Model (BIM)+: Sharing, Preserving and Reusing Architectural Design Data’ by Dr. JuHyun Lee and Dr. Ning Gu. The final chapter in Part II: The physical world: objects, art, and architecture, this chapter addresses the challenges of digital records created to represent physical structures. I picked the image above because I love the contrast between the type of house plans you could order from a catalog a century ago and the way design plans exist today.

This chapter was another of my “must haves” from my initial brainstorm of ideas for the book. I attended a session on ‘Preserving Born-Digital Records Of The Design Community’ at the 2007 annual SAA meeting. It was a compelling discussion, with representatives from multiple fields. Archivists working to preserve born-digital designs. People working on building tools and setting standards. There were lots of questions from the audience – many of which I managed to capture in my notes that became a detailed blog post on the session itself. It was exciting to be in the room with so many enthusiastic experts in overlapping fields. They were there to talk about what might work long term.

This chapter takes you forward to see how BIM has evolved – and how historical BIM+ might serve multiple communities. This passage gives a good overview of the chapter:

“…the chapter first briefly introduces the challenges the design and building industry have faced in sharing, preserving and reusing architectural design data before the emergence and adoption of BIM, and discusses BIM as a solution for these challenges. It then reviews the current state of BIM technologies and subsequently presents the concept of historical BIM+ (HBIM+), which aims to share, preserve and reuse historical building information. HBIM+ is based on a new framework that combines the theoretical foundation of HBIM with emerging ontologies and technologies in the field including geographic information systems (GIS), mobile computing and cloud computing to create, manage and exchange historical building data and their associated values more effectively.”

I hope you find the ideas shared in this chapter as intriguing as I do. I see lots of opportunities for archivists to collaborate with those focused on architecture and design, especially in the case of historical buildings and the proposed vision for HBIM+.

Bios:

Ning Gu is Professor of Architecture in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia. Having an academic background from both Australia and China, Professor Ning Gu’s most significant contributions have been made towards research in design computing and cognition, including topics such as computational design analysis, design cognition, design com­munication and collaboration, generative design systems, and Building Information Modelling. The outcomes of his research have been documented in over 170 peer-reviewed publications. Professor Gu’s research has been supported by prestigious Australian research funding schemes from Australian Research Council, Office for Learning and Teaching, and Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation. He has guest edited/chaired major international journals/conferences in the field. He was Visiting Scholar at MIT, Columbia University and Technische Universiteit Eindhoven.

JuHyun Lee is an adjunct senior lecturer, at the University of Newcastle (UoN). Dr. Lee has made a significant contribution towards architectural and design research in three main areas: design cognition (design and language), planning and design analysis, and design computing. As an expert in the field of architectural and design computing, Dr. Lee was invited to become a visiting academic at the UoN in 2011. Dr. Lee has developed innovative computational applications for pervasive computing and context awareness in the building environments. The research has been published in Computers in Industry, Advanced Engineering Informatics, Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems. His international contribution has been recognised as: Associate editor for a special edition of Architectural Science Review; Reviewer for many international journals and conferences; International reviewer for national grants.

Image Source: Image from page 717 of ‘Easy steps in architecture and architectural drawing’ by Hodgson, Frederick Thomas, 1915. https://archive.org/details/easystepsinarch00hodg/page/n717

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Chapter 5: The Internet of Things: the risks and impacts of ubiquitous computing by Éireann Leverett

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Chapter 5 of Partners for Preservation is ‘The Internet of Things: the risks and impacts of ubiquitous computing’ by Éireann Leverett. This is one of the chapters that evolved a bit from my original idea – shifting from being primarily about proprietary hardware to focusing on the Internet of Things (IoT) and the cascade of social and technical fallout that needs to be considered.

Leverett gives this most basic definition of IoT in his chapter:

At its core, the Internet of Things is ‘ubiquitous computing’, tiny computers everywhere – outdoors, at work in the countryside, at use in the city, floating on the sea, or in the sky – for all kinds of real world purposes.

In 2013, I attended a session at The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation conference on the preservation of scientific data. I was particularly taken with The Global Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS) — almost 300 tide gauge stations around the world making up a web of sea level observation sensors. The UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) established this network, but cannot add to or maintain it themselves. The success of GLOSS “depends on the voluntary participation of countries and national bodies”. It is a great example of what a network of sensors deployed en masse by multiple parties can do – especially when trying to achieve more than a single individual or organization can on its own.

Much of IoT is not implemented for the greater good, but rather to further commercial aims.  This chapter gives a good overview of the basics of IoT and considers a broad array of issues related to it including privacy, proprietary technology, and big data. It is also the perfect chapter to begin Part II: The physical world: objects, art, and architecture – shifting to a topic in which the physical world outside of the computer demands consideration.

Bio:

Éireann Leverett

Éireann Leverett once found 10,000 vulnerable industrial systems on the internet.

He then worked with Computer Emergency Response Teams around the world for cyber risk reduction.

He likes teaching the basics and learning the obscure.

He continually studies computer science, cryptography, networks, information theory, economics, and magic history.

He is a regular speaker at computer security conferences such as FIRST, BlackHat, Defcon, Brucon, Hack.lu, RSA, and CCC; and also at insurance and risk conferences such as Society of Information Risk Analysts, Onshore Energy Conference, International Association of Engineering Insurers, International Risk Governance Council, and the Reinsurance Association of America. He has been featured by the BBC, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Register, The Christian Science Monitor, Popular Mechanics, and Wired magazine.

He is a former penetration tester from IOActive, and was part of a multidisciplinary team that built the first cyber risk models for insurance with Cambridge University Centre for Risk Studies and RMS.

Image credit: Zan Zig performing with rabbit and roses, including hat trick and levitation, Strobridge Litho. Co., c1899.

NOTE: I chose the magician in the image above for two reasons:

  1. because IoT can seem like magic
  2. because the author of this chapter is a fan of magic and magic history
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Chapter 4: Link Rot, Reference Rot and the Thorny Problems of Legal Citation by Ellie Margolis

The fourth chapter in Partners for Preservation is ‘Link Rot, Reference Rot and the Thorny Problems of Legal Citation’ by Ellie Margolis. Links that no longer work and pages that have been updated since they were referenced are an issue that everyone online has struggled with. In this chapter, Margolis gives us insight into why these challenges are particularly pernicious for those working in the legal sphere.

This passage touches on the heart of the problem.

Fundamentally, link and reference rot call into question the very foundation on which legal analysis is built. The problem is particularly acute in judicial opinions because the common law concept of stare decisis means that subsequent readers must be able to trace how the law develops from one case to the next. When a source becomes unavailable due to link rot, it is as though a part of the opinion disappears. Without the ability to locate and assess the sources the court relied on, the very validity of the court’s decision could be called into question. If precedent is not built on a foundation of permanently accessible sources, it loses
its authority.

While working on this blog post, I found a WordPress Plugin called Broken Link Checker. It does exactly what you expect – scans through all your blog posts to check for broken URLs. In my 201 published blog posts (consisting of just shy of 150,000 words), I have 3002 unique URLs. The plugin checked them all and found 766 broken links! Interestingly, the plugin updates the styling of all broken links to show them with strikethroughs – see the strikethrough in the link text of the last link in the image below:

For each of the broken URLs it finds, you can click on “Edit Link”. You then have the option of updating it manually or using a suggested link to a Wayback Machine archived page – assuming it can find one.

It is no secret that link rot is a widespread issue. Back in 2013, the Internet Archive announced an initiative to fix broken links on the Internet – including the creation of the Broken Link Checker plugin I found. Three years later, on the Wikipedia blog, they announced that over a million broken outbound links on English Wikipedia had been fixed. Fast forward to October of 2018 and an Internet Archive blog post announced that More than 9 million broken links on Wikipedia are now rescued.

I particularly love this example because it combines proactive work and repair work. This quote from the 2018 blog post explains the approach:

For more than 5 years, the Internet Archive has been archiving nearly every URL referenced in close to 300 wikipedia sites as soon as those links are added or changed at the rate of about 20 million URLs/week.

And for the past 3 years, we have been running a software robot called IABot on 22 Wikipedia language editions looking for broken links (URLs that return a ‘404’, or ‘Page Not Found’). When broken links are discovered, IABot searches for archives in the Wayback Machine and other web archives to replace them with.

There are no silver bullets here – just the need for consistent attention to the problem. The examples of issues being faced by the law community, and their various approaches to prevent or work around them, can only help us all move forward toward a more stable web of internet links.

Ellie Margolis

Bio:
Ellie Margolis is a Professor of Law at Temple University, Beasley School of law, where she teaches Legal Research and Writing, Appellate Advocacy, and other litigation skills courses. Her work focuses on the effect of technology on legal research and legal writing. She has written numerous law review articles, essays and textbook contributions. Her scholarship is widely cited in legal writing textbooks, law review articles, and appellate briefs.

Image credit: Image from page 235 of “American spiders and their spinningwork. A natural history of the orbweaving spiders of the United States, with special regard to their industry and habits” (1889)

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Chapter 3: The Rise of Computer-Assisted Reporting by Brant Houston

Embed from Getty Images
The third chapter in Partners for Preservation is ‘The Rise of Computer-Assisted Reporting: Challenges and Successes’ by Brant Houston. A chapter on this topic has been at the top of my list of chapter ideas from the very start of this project. Back in February of 2007, Professor Ira Chinoy from the University of Maryland, College Park’s Journalism Department spoke to my graduate school Archival Access class. His presentation and the related class discussion led to my blog post Understanding Born-Digital Records: Journalists And Archivists With Parallel Challenges. Elements of this blog post even inspired a portion of the book’s introduction.

The photo above is from the 1967 Detroit race riots. 50 years ago, the first article recognized to have used computer-assisted reporting was awarded the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Local General or Spot News Reporting “For its coverage of the Detroit riots of 1967, recognizing both the brilliance of its detailed spot news staff work and its swift and accurate investigation into the underlying causes of the tragedy.” In his chapter, Brant starts here and takes us through the evolution of computer-assisted reporting spanning from 1968 to the current day, and looking forward to the future.

As the third chapter in Part 1: Memory, Privacy, and Transparency, it continues to weave these three topics together. Balancing privacy and the goal of creating documentation to preserve memories of all that is going on around us is not easy. Transparency and a strong commitment to ethical choices underpin the work of both journalists and archivists.

This is one of my favorite passages:

“As computer-assisted repoting has become more widespread and routine, it has given rise to discussion and debate over the issues regarding the ethical responsibilitys of journalists. There have been criticisms over the publishing of data that was seen as intrusive and violating the privacy of individuals.”

I learned so much in this chapter about the long road journalists had to travel as they sought to use computers to support their reporting. It never occurred to me, as someone who has always had the access to the computing power I needed through school or work, that getting the tools journalists needed to do their computational analysis often required negotiation for time on newspaper mainframes or seeking partners outside of the newsroom. It took tenacity and the advent of personal computers to make computer-assisted reporting feasible for the broader community of journalists around the world.

Journalists have sought the help of archivists on projects for many years – seeking archival records as part of the research for their reporting. Now journalists are also taking steps to preserve their field’s born-digital content. Given the high percentage of news articles that exist exclusively online – projects like the Journalism Digital News Archive are crucial to the survival of these articles. I look forward to all the ways that our fields can learn from each other and work together to tackle the challenges of digital preservation.

Bio

Brant Houston

Brant Houston is the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he works on projects and research involving the use of data analysis in journalism. He is co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the Institute for Nonprofit News. He is author of Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide, co-author of The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook. He is a contributor to books on freedom of information acts and open government. Before joining the University of Illinois, he was executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors at the University of Missouri after being an award-winning investigative journalist for 17 years.  

 

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Overview of Partners for Preservation

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This friendly llama (spotted in the Flickr Commons) is here to give you a quick high-level tour of Partners for Preservation.

The book’s ten chapters have been organized into three sections:

Part 1: Memory, Privacy, and Transparency

Part 2: The Physical World: Objects, Art, and Architecture

 Part 3: Data and Programming

As I recruited authors to write a chapter, the vision for each individual chapter evolved. Each author contributed their own spin on the topic I originally proposed. There were two things I had hoped for and was particularly pleased to have come to pass. First was that I learned new things about each of the fields addressed in the book. The second was discovering threads that wove through multiple chapters. While the chapters are each freestanding and you may read the book’s chapters in any order you like, the section groupings were designed to help highlight common threads of interest to archivists focused on digital preservation.

The book also includes a foreword by Nancy McGovern, and my own introductory and final thoughts.

I will be writing a blog post about each chapter’s author(s) and sharing some favorite tidbits along the way. Thanks for your interest in Partners for Preservation. [Updated 1/29/2018 to add links above to the chapter spotlight posts]

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Countdown to Partners for Preservation

Yes. I know. My last blog post was way back in May of 2014. I suspect some of you have assumed this blog was defunct.

When I first launched Spellbound Blog as a graduate student in July of 2006, I needed an outlet and a way to connect to like-minded people pondering the intersection of archives and technology. Since July 2011, I have been doing archival work full time. I work with amazing archivists. I think about archival puzzles all day long. Unsurprisingly, this reduced my drive to also research and write about archival topics in the evenings and on weekends.

Looking at the dates, I also see that after I took an amazing short story writing class, taught by Mary Robinette Kowal in May of 2013, I only wrote one more blog post before setting Spellbound Blog aside for a while in favor of fiction and other creative side-projects in my time outside of work.

Since mid-2014, I have been busy with many things – including (but certainly not limited to):

I’m back to tell you all about the book.

In mid-April of 2016, I received an email from a commissioning editor in the employ of UK-based Facet Publishing (initially described to me as the publishing arm of CILIP, the UK’s equivalent to ALA). That email was the beginning of a great adventure, which will soon culminate in the publication of Partners for Preservation by Facet (and its distribution in the US by ALA). The book, edited by me and including an introduction by Nancy McGovern, features ten chapters by representatives of non-archives professions. Each chapter discusses challenges with and victories over digital problems that share common threads with issues facing those working to preserve digital records.

Over the next few weeks, I will introduce you to each of the book’s contributing authors and highlight a few of my favorite tidbits from the book. This process was very different from writing blog posts and being able to share them immediately. After working for so long in isolation it is exciting to finally be able to share the results with everyone.

PS: I also suspect, that finally posting again may throw open the floodgates to some longer essays on topics that I’ve been thinking about over the past years.

PPS: If you are interested in following my more creative pursuits, I also have a separate mailing list for that.

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The CODATA Mission: Preserving Scientific Data for the Future

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The North Jetty near the Mouth of the Columbia River 05/1973This session was part of The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation conference and aimed to describe the initiatives of the Data at Risk Task Group (DARTG), part of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), a body of the International Council for Science.

The goal is to preserve scientific data that is in danger of loss because they are not in modern electronic formats, or have particularly short shelf-life. DARTG is seeking out sources of such data worldwide, knowing that many are irreplaceable for research into the long-term trends that occur in the natural world.

Organizing Data Rescue

The first speaker was Elizabeth Griffin from Canada’s Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. She spoke of two forms of knowledge that we are concerned with here: the memory of the world and the forgettery of the world. (PDF of session slides)

The “memory of the world” is vast and extends back for aeons of time, but only the digital, or recently digitized, data can be recalled readily and made immediately accessible for research in the digital formats that research needs. The “forgettery of the world” is the analog records, ones that have been set aside for whatever reason, or put away for a long time and have become almost forgotten.  It the analog data which are considered to be “at risk” and which are the task group’s immediate concern.

Many pre-digital records have never made it into a digital form.  Even some of the early digital data are insufficiently described, or the format is out of date and unreadable, or the records cannot be located at all easily.

How can such “data at risk” be recovered and made useable?  The design of an efficient rescue package needs to be based upon the big picture, so a website has been set up to create an inventory where anyone can report data-at-risk. The Data-at-Risk Inventory (built on Omeka) is front-ended by a simple form that asks for specific but fairly obvious information about the datasets, such as field (context), type, amount or volume, age, condition, and ownership. After a few years DARTG should have some better idea as to the actual amounts and distribution of different types of historic analog data.

Help and support are needed to advertise the Inventory.  A proposal is being made to link data-rescue teams from many scientific fields into an international federation, which would be launched at a major international workshop.  This would give a permanent and visible platform to the rescue of valuable and irreplaceable data.

The overarching goal is to build a research knowledge base that offers a complimentary combination of past, present and future records.  There will be many benefits, often cross-disciplinary, sometimes unexpected, and perhaps surprising.  Some will have economic pay-offs, as in the case of some uncovered pre-digital records concerning the mountain streams that feed the reservoirs of Cape Town, South Africa.  The mountain slopes had been deforested a number of years ago and replanted with “economically more appealing” species of tree.  In their basement hydrologists found stacks of papers containing 73 years of stream-flow measurements.  They digitized all the measurements, analyzed the statistics, and discovered that the new but non-native trees used more water.  The finding clearly held significant importance for the management of Cape Town’s reservoirs.  For further information about the stream-flow project see Jonkershoek – preserving 73 years of catchment monitoring data by Victoria Goodall & Nicky Allsopp.

DARTG is building a bibliography of research papers which, like the Jonkershoek one, describe projects that have depended partly or completely on the ability to access data that were not born-digital.  Any assistance in extending that bibliography would be greatly appreciated.

Several members of DARTG are themselves engaged in scientific pursuits that seek long-term data.  The following talks describe three such projects.

Data Rescue to Increase Length of the Record

The second speaker, Patrick Caldwell from the US National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC), spoke on rescue of tide gauge data. (PDF of full paper)

He started with an overview of water level measurement, explaining how an analog trace (a line on a paper style record generated by a float w/a timer) is generated. Tide gauges include geodetic survey benchmark to make sure that the land isn’t moving. The University of Hawaii maintains a network of gauges internationally. Back in the 1800s, they were keeping track of the tides and sea level for shipping. You  never know what the application may turn into – they collected for tides, but in the 1980s they started to see patterns. They used tide gauge measurements to discover El Niño!

As you increase the length of the record, the trustworthiness of the data improves. Within sea level variations, there are some changes that are on the level of decades. To take that shift out, they need 60 years to track sea level trends. They are working to extend the length of the record.

The UNESCO Joint Technical Commission for Oceanography & Marine Meteorology has  Global Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS)

GLOSS has a series of Data Centers:

  • Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (monthly)
  • Joint archive for sea level (hourly)
  • British Oceanographic Data center (high frequency)

The biggest holding starts at 1940s. They want to increase the number of longer records. A student in France documented where he found records as he hunted for the data he needed. Oregon students documented records available at NARA.

Global Oceanographic Data Archaeology and Rescue (GODAR) and the World Ocean Database Project

The Historic Data Rescue Questionnaire created in November 2011 resulted in 18 replies from 14 countries documenting tide gauge sites with non-digital data that could be rescued. They are particularly interested in the records that are 60 years or more in length.

Future Plans: Move away from identifying what is out there to tackling the rescue aspect. This needs funding. They will continue to search repositories for data-at-risk and continue collaboration with GLOSS/DARTG to freshen on-line inventory. Collaborate with other programs (Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) meeting 11-2012). Eventually move to Phase II = recovery!

The third speaker, Stephen Del Greco from the US NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), spoke about environmental data through time and extending the climate record. (PDF of full paper) The NCDC is a weather archive with headquarters in Asheville, NC. It fulfills much of the nation’s climate data requirements. Their data comes from many different sources. Safe storage of over 5,600 terabytes of climate data (= 6.5 billion kindle books). How will they handle the upcoming explosion of data on the way? Need to both handle new content coming in AND provide increased access to larger amounts of data being downloaded over time. 2011 number = data download of 1,250 terabytes for the year. They expect that download number to increase 10 fold over the next few years.

The climate database modernization program went on over more than a decade rescuing data. It was well funded and millions of records were rescued with a budget of roughly 20 Million a year. The goal is to preserve and make major climate and environmental data available via the World Wide Web. Over 14 terabytes of climate data are now digitized. 54 million weather and environmental images are online. Hundreds of millions of records are digitized and now online. The biggest challenge was getting the surface observation data digitized. NCDC digital data for hourly surface observations generally stretch back to around 1948. Some historical marine observations go back to the spice trade records.

For international efforts they bring their imaging equipment to other countries where records were at risk. 150,000 records imaged under the Climate Database Modernization Program (CDMP).

Now they are moving from public funding to citizen-fueled projects via crowdsourcing such as the Zooniverse Program. Old Weather is a Zooniverse Project which uses crowdsourcing to digitize and analyze climate data. For example, the transcription done by volunteers help scientists model Earth’s climate using wartime ship logs. The site includes methods to validate efforts from citizens.  They have had almost 700,000 volunteers.

Long-term Archive Tasks:

  • Rescuing Satellite Data: raw images in lots of different film formats. All this is at risk. Need to get it all optically imaged. Looking at a ‘citizen alliance’ to do this work.
  • Climate Data Records: Global Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) with Heritage Records. Lots of potential records for rescue.
  • Rescued data helps people building proxy data sets: NOAA Paleoclimatology. ‘Paleoclimate proxies’ – things like boreholes, tree rings, lake levels, pollen, ice cores and more. For example – getting temperate and carbon dioxide from ice cores. These can go back 800,000 years!

We have extended the climate record through international collaboration. For example, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology provided daily temperature records for more than 1,500 additional stations. This meant a more than 10-fold increase in previous historical climate daily data holdings from that country.

Born Digital Maps

The final presentation discussed the map as a fundamental source of memory of the world, delivered by D. R. Fraser Taylor and Tracey Lauriault from Carleton University’s Geomatics and Cartographic Research Center in Canada. The full set of presentation slides are available online on SlideShare. (PDF of full paper)

We are now moving into born digital maps. For example, the Canadian Geographic Information System (CGIS) was created in the 1960s and was the worlds 1st GIS. Maps are ubiquitous in the 21st century. All kinds of organizations are creating their own maps and mash-ups. Community based NGOs, citizen science, academic and private sector are all creating maps.

We are loosing born digital maps almost faster than we are creating them. We have lost 90% of the born digital maps. Above all there is an attitude that preservation is not intrinsically important. No-one thought about the need to preserve the map – everyone thought someone else would do it. There was a complete lack of thought related to the preservation of these maps.

The Canada Land Inventory (CLI) was one of the first and largest born digital map efforts in the world. Mapped 2.6 million square kilometers of Canada. Lost in the 1980s. No-one took responsibility for archiving. Those who thought about it believed backup equaled archiving. A group of volunteers rescued the process over time – salvaged from boxes of tapes and paper in mid-1990s. It was caught just in time and took a huge effort. 80% has been saved and is now it is online. This was rescued because it was high profile. What about the low-profile data sets? Who will rescue them? No-one.

The 1986 BBC Doomsday Book was created in celebration of 900 years after William the Conqueror’s original Domesday Book. It was obsolete by the 1990s. A huge amount of social and economic information was collected for this project. In order to rescue it they needed an acorn computer and needed to be able to read the optical disks. The platform was emulated in 2002-2003. It cost 600,000 british pounds to reverse engineer and put online in 2004. New discs made in 2003 at the UK Archive.

It is easier to get Ptolomy’s maps from 15th century than it is to get a map 10 years old.

The Inuit Siku (sea ice) Atlas, an example of a Cybercartographic atlas, was produced in cooperation with Inuit communities. Arguing that the memory of what is happening in the north lies in the minds of the elders, they are capturing the information and putting it out in multi-media/multi-sensory map form. The process is controlled by the community themselves. They provide the software and hardware. They created a graphic tied to the Inuit terms for different types of sea ice. In some cases they record the audio of an elder talking about a place. The narrative of the route becomes part of the atlas. There is no right or wrong answer. There are many versions and different points of view. All are based on the same set of facts – but they come from different angles. The atlases capture them all.

The Gwich’in Place Name Atlas is building in the idea of long term preservation into the application from the start

The Cybercartographic Atlas of the Lake Huron Treaty Relationship Process is taking data from surveyors diaries from the 1850s.

There are lots of government of Canada geospatial data preservation intitatives, but in most cases there is a lot of retoric, but not so much action. There have been many consultations, studies, reports and initiatives since 2002, but the reality is that apart from the Open Government Consultations (TBS), not very much as translated into action. Even in the case where there is legislation, lots of things look good on paper but don’t get implemented.

There are Library and Archives Guidelines working to support digital preservation of geospatial data. The InterPares 2 (IP2) Geospatial Case Studies tackle a number of GIS examples, including the Cybercartographic Atlas of Antartica. See the presentation slides online for more specific examples.

In general, preservation as an afterthought rarely results in full recovery of born digital maps. It is very important to look at open source and interoperable open specifications. Proactive archiving is an important interim strategy.

Geospatial data are fundamental sources of our memory of the world. They help us understand our geo-narratives (stories tied to location), counter colonial mappings, are the result of scientific endeavors, represent multiple worldviews and they inform decisions. We need to overcome the challenges to ensure their preservation.

Q&A:

QUESTION: When I look at the work you are doing with recovering Inuit data from people. You recover data and republish it – who will preserve both the raw data and the new digital publication? What does it mean to try and really preserve this moving forward? Are we really preserving and archiving it?

ANSWER: No we are not. We haven’t been able to find an archive in Canada that can ingest our content. We will manage it ourselves as best we can. Our preservation strategy is temporary and holding, not permanent as it should be. We can’t find an archive to take the data. We are hopeful that we are moving towards finding a place to keep and preserve it. There is some hope on the horizon that we may move in the right directions in the Canadian context.

Luciana: I wanted to attest that we have all the data from InterPARES II. It is published in the final. I am jealously guarding my two servers that I maintain with money out of my own pocket.

QUESTION: Is it possible to have another approach to keep data where it is created, rather than a centralized approach?

ANSWER: We are providing servers to our clients in the north. Keeping copies of the database in the community where they are created. Keeping multiple copies in multiple places.

QUESTION: You mention surveys being sent out and few responses coming back. When you know there is data at risk – there may be governments that have records at risk that they are shy to reveal to the public? How do we get around that secrecy?

ANSWER: (IEDRO representative) We offer our help, rather than a request to get their data.

As is the case with all my session summaries, 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.

Image Credit: NARA Flickr Commons image “The North Jetty near the Mouth of the Columbia River 05/1973”

Updated 2/20/2013 based on presenter feedback.

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MARAC Spring 2012: Preservation of Digital Materials (Session S1)

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The official title for this session is “Preservation and Conservation of Captured and Born Digital Materials” and it was divided into three presentations with introduction and question moderation by Jordon Steele, University Archivist at Johns Hopkins University.

Digital Curation, Understanding the lifecycle of born digital items

Isaiah Beard, Digital Data Curator from Rutgers, started out with the question ‘What Is Digital Curation?’. He showed a great Dilbert cartoon on digital media curation and the set of six photos showing all different perspectives on what digital curation really is (a la the ‘what I really do’ meme – here is one for librarians).

“The curation, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets.” — Digital Curation Center.

What does a Digital Curator do?

Aquire digital assets:

  • digitized analog sources
  • assets that were born digital, no physical analog exists

Certify content integrity:

  • workflow and standards and best practices
  • train staff on handling of the assets
  • perform quality assurance

Certify trustworthiness of the architecture:

  • vet codecs and container/file formats – must make sure that we are comfortable with the technology, hardware and formats
  • active role in the storage decisions
  • technical metadata, audit trails and chain of custody

Digital assets are much easier to destroy than physical objects. In contrast with physical objects which can be stored, left behind, forgotten and ‘rediscovered’, digital objects are more fragile and easier to destroy. Just one keystroke or application error can destroy digital materials. Casual collectors typically delete what they don’t want with no sense of a need to retain the content. People need to be made aware that the content might be important long term.

Digital assets are dependent on file formats and hardware/software platforms. More and more people are capturing content on mobile devices and uploading it to the web. We need to be aware of the underlying structure. File formats are proliferating and growing over time. Sound files come in 27 common file formats and 90 common codecs. Moving images files come in 58 common containers/codecs and come with audio tracks in the 27 file formats/90 common codecs.

Digital assets are vulnerable to format obsolescence — examples include Wordperect (1979), Lotus 1-2-3 (1978) and Dbase (1978). We need to find ways to migrate from the old format to something researchers can use.

Physical format obsolescence is a danger — examples include tapes, floppy disk, zip disk, IBM demi-disk and video floppy. There is a threat of a ‘digital dark age’. The cloud is replacing some of this pain – but replacing it with a different challenge. People don’t have a sense of where their content is in the physical world.

Research data is the bleeding edge. Datasets come in lots of different flavors. Lots of new and special file formats relating specifically to scientific data gathering and reporting… long list including things like GRIB (for meterological data), SUR (MRI data), DWG (for CAD data), SPSS (for statistical data from the social sciences) and on and on. You need to become a specialist in each new project on how to manage the research data to keep it viable.

There are ways to mitigate the challenges through predictable use cases and rigid standards. Most standard file types are known quantities. There is a built-in familiarity.

File format support: Isaiah showed a grid with one axis Open vs Closed and the other Free vs Proprietary. Expensive proprietary software that does the job so well that it is the best practice and assumed format for use can be a challenge – but it is hard to shift people from using these types of solutions.

Digital Curation Lifecycle

  • Objects are evaluated, preserve, maintained, verified and re-evaluated
  • iterative – the cycle doesn’t end with doing it just once
  • Good exercise for both known and unknown formats

The diagram from the slide shows layers – looks like a diagram of the geologic layers of the earth.

Steps:

  • data is the center of the universe
  • plan, describe, evaluate, learn meanings.
  • ingest, preserve curate
  • continually iterate

Controlled chaos! Evaluate the collection and needs of the digital assets. Using preservation grade tools to originate assets. Take stock of the software, systems and recording apparatus . Describe in the tech metadata so we know how it originated. We need to pick our battles and need to use de facto industry standards. Sometimes those standards drive us to choices we wouldn’t pick on our own. Example – final cut pro – even though it is mac and proprietary.

Establish a format guide and handling procedures. Evaluate the veracity and longevity of the data format. Document and share our findings. Help others keep from needing to reinvent the wheel.

Determine method of access: How are users expected to access and view these digital items? Software/hardware required? View online – plug-in required? third party software?

Primary guidelines: Do no harm to the digital assets.

  • preservation masters, derivatives as needed
  • content modification must be done with extreme care
  • any changes must be traceable, audit-able, reversible.

Prepare for the inevitable: more format migrations. Re-assess the formats.. migrate to new formats when the old is obsolete. Maintain accessibility while ensuring data integrity.

At Rutgers they have the RUcore Community Repository which is open source, and based on FEDORA. It is dedicated to the digital preservation of multiple digital asset types and contains 26,238 digital assets (as of April 2012). Includes audio, video, still images, documents and research data. Mix of digital surrogates and born digital assets.

Publicly available digital object standards are available for all traditional asset types. Define baseline quality requirements for ‘reservation grade’ files. Periodically reviewed and revised as tech evolves. See Rutgers’ Page2Pixel Digital Curation standards.

They use a team approach as they need to triage new asset types. Do analysis and assessment. Apply holistic data models and the preservation lifecycle and continue to publish and share what they have done. Openness is paramount and key to the entire effort.

More resources:

The Archivist’s Dilemma: Access to collections in the digital era

Next, Tim Pyatt from Penn State spoke about ‘The Archivist’s Dilemma’ — starting with examples of how things are being done at Penn State, but then moving on to show examples of other work being done.

There are lots of different ways of putting content online. Penn State’s digital collections are published online via ContentDM, Flickr, social media and Penn State IR Tools. The University Faculty Senate put up things on their own. Internet Archive. Custom built platform. Need to think about how the researcher is going to approach this content.

With analog collections that have portions digitized they describe both, but then includes a link to digital collection. These link through to a description of the digital collection.. and then links to CONTENTdm for the collection itself.

Examples from Penn State:

  • A Google search for College of Agricultural Science Publications leads users to a complimentary/competing site with no link back to the catalog nor any descriptive/contextual information.
  • Next, we were shown the finding aid for William W. Scranton Papers from Penn State. They also have images up on Flickr ‘William W. Scranton Papers’ . Flickr provides easy access, but acts as another content silo. It is crucial to have metadata in the header of the file to help people find their way back to the originating source. Google Analytics showed them that 8x more often content is seen in Flickr than CONTENTdm.
  • The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection is a hybrid collection. The finding aid has a link to the curriculum site. There is a separate site for the Judy Chicago Art Education Collectiion more focused on providing access to her education materials.
  • The University Curriculum Archive is a hybrid collection with a combination of digitized old course proposals, while the past 5 years of curriculum have been born digital. They worked with IT to build a database to commingle the digitized & born digital files. It was custom built and not integrated into other systems – but at least everything is in one place.

Examples of what is being done at other institutions:

PennState is loading up a Hydra repository for their next wave!

Born-Digital @UVa: Born Digital Material in Special Collections

Gretchen Gueguen, UVA

Presentation slides available for download.

AIMS (An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship) born digital collections: a 2 year project to create a framework for the stewardship of born-digital archival records in collecting repositories. Funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with partners: UVA, Stanford, University of Hull, and Yale. A white paper on AIMS was published in January 2012.

Parts of the framework: collection development, accessioning, arrangement & description, discovery & access are all covered in the whitepaper – including outcomes, decision points and tasks. The framework can be used to develop an institutionally specific workflow. Gretchen showed an example objective ‘transfer records and gain administrative control’ and walked through outcome, decision points and tasks.

Back at UVA, their post-AIMS strategizing is focusing on collection development and accessioning.

In the future, they need to work on Agreements: copyright, access & ownership policies and procedures. People don’t have the copyright for a lot of the content that they are trying to donate. This makes it harder, especially when you are trying to put content online. You need to define exactly what is being donated. With born digital content, content can be donated multiple places. Which one is the institution of record? Are multiple teams working on the same content in a redundant effort?

Need to create a feasibility evaluation to determine systematically if something is it worth collecting. Should include:

  • file formats
  • hardware/software needs
  • scope
  • normalization/migration needed?
  • private/sensitive information
  • third-party/copyrighted information?
  • physical needs for transfer (network, storage space, etc.)

If you decide it is feasible to collect, how do you accomplish the transfer with uncorrupted data, support files (like fonts, software, databases) and ‘enhanced curation’? You may need a ‘write blocker’ to make sure you don’t change the content just by accessing the disk. You may want to document how the user interacted with their computer and software. Digital material is very interactive – you need to have an understanding of how the user interacted with it. Might include screen shots.

Next she showed their accessioning workflow:

  • take the files
  • create a disk image – bit for bit copy – makes the preservation master
  • move that from the donor’s computer to their secure network with all the good digital curation stuff
  • extract technical metadata
  • remove duplicates
  • may not take stuff with PPI
  • triage if more processing is necessary

Be ready for surprises – lots of things that don’t fit the process:

  • 8″ floppy disk
  • badly damaged CD
  • disk no longer functions – afraid to throw away in case of miracle
  • hard drive from 1999
  • mini disks

These have no special notation taken of them in the accessioning.

Priorities with this challenging material:

  • get the data of aging media
  • put it someplace safe and findable
  • inventory
  • triage
  • transfer

Forensic Workstation:

  • FRED = forensic recovery of evidence device – built in ultra bay writeblocker with usb, firewire, sata, csi, ide ad molex for power- external 5.25 floppy drive, cd/dvd/blu-ray, microcard reader, LTO tape drive, external 3.5″ drive + external hard drive for additional storage.
  • toolbox
  • big screen

FRED’s FDK software shows you overview of what is there, recognizes 1,000s of file format, deleted data, finds duplicates, and can identify PPI. It is very useful for description and for selecting what to accession – but it costs a lot and requires an annual license.

BitCurrator is making an open source version. From their website: “The BitCurator Project is an effort to build, test, and analyze systems and software for incorporating digital forensics methods into the workflows of a variety of collecting institutions.”

Archivematica:

  • creates PREMIS record recording what activities are done – preservation metadata standard
  • creates derivative records – migration!!
  • yields a preservation master + access copies to be provided in the reading room

Hoping for Hypatia like thing in the future

Final words: Embrace your inner nerd! Experiment – you have nothing to loose. If you do nothing you will lose the records anyway.

Questions and Answers

QUESTION: How do you convince your administration that this needs to be a priority?

ANSWER:

Isaiah: Find examples of other institutions that are doing this. Show them that our history is at risk moving forward. A digital dark age is coming if we don’t do something now. It is really important that we show people “this is what we need to preserve”

Tim: Figure out who your local partners are. Who else has a vested interest in this content? IT was happy at Penn State that they didn’t need to keep everything – happy that there is an appraisal process.. and that they are preserving content so it doesn’t need to be kept by everyone. I am one of the authors of the upcoming report on born digital records — end of the summer: Association of Research Libraries – Managing Electronic Records – Spec Kit

Gretchen: Numbers are really useful. Sometimes you don’t think about it, but it is a good practice to count the size of what you created. How much time would it take to recreate it if you lost it. How many people have used the content? Get some usage stats. Who is your rival and what are their statistics?

Jordon: Point to others who you want to keep up with

QUESTION: would the panelists like to share experiences with preserving dynamic digital objects like databases?

ANSWER:

Isaiah: We don’t want to embarrass people. We get so many different formats. It is a trial and error thing. You need to say gently that there is a better way to do this. Sad example – burned DVDs from tapes in 2004.. got them in 2007. The DVDs were not verified. They were not stored well – stored in a hot warehouse. Opened the boxes and found unreadable DVDs – delaminating.

Tim: From my Duke Days, we had a number of faculty data sets in proprietary formats. We would do checksums on them, wrap them up and put them in the repository. They are there.. but who knows if anyone will be able to read them later. Same as with paper – preserve them now in good acid-free papers.

Gretchen: My 19 yo student held up a zip disk and said “Due to my extreme youth I don’t know what this is!” (And now you know why there is a photo of a zip disk at the top of this post – your reward for reading all the way to the end!)

Image Credit: ‘100MB Zip Disc for Iomega Zip, Fujifilm/IBM-branded‘ taken by Shizhao

As is the case with all my session summaries from MARAC, 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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