California Digital Library

The ingest and its preparation are crucial steps and of strategical importance for digital preservation. If we want to move digital preservation into the mainstream we have to make them as easy as possible. The aim of the NESTOR guide "Into The Archive" is to help streamlining the planning and execution of ingest projects. The main challenge for such a guide is to provide help for a broad audience with heterogeneous use cases and without detailed background knowledge on the producer side. This paper will introduce the guide, present first experiences and discuss the challenges.

TIPR, Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories, is a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create and test the Repository eXchange Package (RXP). The package will make it possible to transfer complex digital objects between dissimilar preservation repositories. For reasons of redundancy, succession planning and software migration, such repositories must be able to exchange copies of archival information packages with each other. Every different repository design, however, describes and structures its archival packages differently. Therefore each type produces dissemination packages that are rarely understandable or usable as submission packages by other repositories. The RXP is an answer to that mismatch. Other solutions for transferring packages between repositories focus either on transfers between repositories of the same type, such as DSpace-to-DSpace transfers, or on processes that translate a specific dissemination format into a specific submission package. Rather than build translators between many dissimilar repository types, the TIPR project has defined a standards-based package of metadata files that can act as an intermediary information package, the RXP, a lingua franca all repositories can read and write. In this paper we present the assumptions and principles underlying the TIPR concept of repository-to-repository exchange, and proceed to describe three aspects of the TIPR project: the RXP format itself; the tests we are conducting to prove and improve the use of the RXP; and finally, issues that have arisen in the course of the project so far.

For millions of legacy documents, correct rendering depends upon resources such as fonts that are not generally embedded within the document structure. Yet there is significant risk of information loss due to missing or incorrectly substituted fonts. In this paper we use a collection of 230,000 Word documents to assess the difficulty of matching font requirements with a database of fonts. We describe the identifying information contained in common font formats, font requirements stored in Word documents, the API provided by Windows to support font requests by applications, the documented substitution algorithms used by Windows when requested fonts are not available, and the ways in which support software might be used to control font substitution in a preservation environment.

The Chronopolis Digital Preservation Initiative, one of the Library of Congress' latest efforts to collect and preserve atrisk digital information, has completed its first year of service as a multi-member partnership to meet the archival needs of a wide range of cultural and social domains. In this paper we will explore the major themes within Chronopolis.

A digital repository can be seen as a combination of services, resources, and policies. One of the fundamental design questions for digital repositories is how to break down the services and resources: who will have responsibility, where they will reside, and how they will interact. There is no single, optimal answer to this question. The most appropriate arrangement depends on many factors that vary across repository contexts and are very likely to change over time. This paper reports on our investigation and testing of various repository "slicing and dicing" scenarios, their potential benefits, and implications for implementation, administration, and service offerings. Vital considerations for each option (1) efficiencies of resource use, (2) management of dependencies across entities, and (3) the repository business model most appropriate to the participating organizations.

Library and Archives Canada has a wide mandate to preserve and provide access to Canadian published heritage, records of national significance, as well as to acquire the records created by the Government of Canada, deemed to be of historical importance. To address this mandate, Library and Archives Canada has undertaken the development of a digital preservation infrastructure covering policy, standards and enterprise applications which will serve requirements for ingest, metadata management, preservation and access. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the efforts underway to engage digital recordkeeping activities in the Government of Canada and to influence and align those processes with LAC digital preservation requirements. The LAC strategy to implement preservation considerations early in the life cycle of the digital record is to establish a mandatory legislative and policy framework for recordkeeping in government. This includes a Directive on Recordkeeping, Core Digital Records Metadata Standard for archival records, Digital File Format Guidance, as well as Web 2.0 and Email Recordkeeping Guidelines. The expected success of these initiatives, and collaborative approach should provide a model for other digital heritage creators in Canada.

nestor, the German network of expertise in digital preservation started as a time-limited project in 2003. Besides the establishment of a network of expertise with an information platform, working groups, and training opportunities, a central goal of the project phase was to prepare a sustainable organization model for the network's services. In July 2009, nestor transformed into a sustainable organization with 6 of the 7 project partners and 2 additional organizations entering into a consortium agreement. The preparation of the sustainable organization was a valuable experience for the project partners because vision and mission of the network were critically discussed and refined for the future organization. Some more aspects were identified that also need further refinement in order to make nestor fit for the future. These aspects shall be discussed in the paper.

The challenge of digital preservation of scientific data lies in the need to preserve not only the dataset itself but also the ability it has to deliver knowledge to a future user community. A true scientific research asset allows future users to reanalyze the data within new contexts. Thus, in order to carry out meaningful preservation we need to ensure that future users are equipped with the necessary information to re-use the data. This paper presents an overview of a preservation analysis methodology which was developed in response to that need on the CASPAR and Digital Curation Centre SCARP projects. We intend to place it in relation to other digital preservation practices discussing how they can interact to provide archives caring for scientific data sets with the full arsenal of tools and techniques necessary to rise to this challenge.

Undoubtedly, long-term preservation has raised a great deal of attention worldwide, but in a broader perspective the attention is out of proportion compared to the number of real operational solutions – not to mention the big picture of a comprehensive digital preservation infrastructure. Up to now, the existing digital preservation infrastructure mainly consists of a small number of scattered trusted long-term archiving data repositories, which have the control of and the responsibility for our digital heritage. The ongoing discussion on e-Infrastructure points out that we are still lacking reliable structures which support the expected integrated digital preservation infrastructure provided jointly by cultural heritage organizations, data centers and data producers. The slow development towards a global integrated digital preservation infrastructure in combination with adjacent pressing questions for the information infrastructure in general has led to an extended strategic discussion within the last years in Europe and the US: In studies, position papers and evaluation approaches we find elaborated building blocks for a roadmap and definitions for a more advanced landscape. With a focus especially on the German situation and on existing and ongoing practical experiences, the paper discusses reasons and strategic aspects which maybe can illuminate the prohibitive factors for the unassertive progress.

This paper will describe the tools and infrastructure components which have been implemented by the CASPAR project to support repositories in their task of long term preservation of digital resources. We address also the capture and preservation of digital rights management and evidence of authenticity associated with digital objects. Moreover examples of ways to evaluate a variety of preservation strategies will be discussed as will examples of integrating the use of these infrastructure components and tools into existing repository systems. Examples will be given of a rich selection of digital objects which encode information from a variety of disciplines including science, cultural heritage and also contemporary performing arts.