Digital preservation for da masses..? Archive Team, meet the DPC

Jeremy Keith (Adactio) has been fretting over the loss of his bookmarks with the dead-pooling of Magnolia, not to mention Pownce last year. Fortunately for Jeremy, he's a true alpha geek (not to mention trail-blazing, platform-pounding, left-clearing, good guy), so his response is to wonder how he can scrape, spider, and grab by hook or by crook all the stuff of his that he leaves scattered across the Web. Turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that he's not the only one with both the coding prowess and the strong sense of proprietorship over their stuff to try to do something like this. The spanking new Archive Team is up for it, guerilla-stylee, and hatching plans to help yer average Joe: as they put it, "We're gonna rescue your shit". Which is nice.

I like this. There's an active and sophisticated digital preservation community that has developed over many years. It has its roots, as far as I know, largely in the research and higher education communities, libraries, and the IT industry, all with their own priorities and preoccupations (museums are late-comers and minor players at best right now). And of course, lay people must have always played a part in some of this stuff, and some initiatives that could come under the DP banner - like the Internet Archive, I expect - rely heavily on informal communities to stash and curate stuff. Over the years ad hoc groups have sprung up to try to resuscitate corpsed forums, to salvage stuff from dying web-rings, to plan exit strategies for flaky virtual worlds and so on. But I don't think that there's really been a concerted approach to help individuals to keep a-hold of their stuff, spread as it often is across an array of sites from your many Google services, to Flickr and Delicious, to Twitter and your blog, Facebook, Slideshare and as many more as you care to mention. This is a huge variety, and what we might want to preserve in each will vary, as will the context required to make sense of it, so each service may need its own assessment for each individual (convergent evolution of the "significant properties" concept seems inevitable). It's a huge challenge but the Archive Team seem up for it.

I hope that these guys (and Jeremy K) and the "formal" DP community (DPC/DCC etc.) hook up and share knowledge. My guess is the latter have lots to offer in terms of technical expertise, connections, hardware and software, good theorisation, whilst the former group have wicked coding skills, motivation, inside-out knowledge of social software and its users, and a focus on the needs of individuals. They could offer each other a lot.

NEDCC conference

"Persistence of Memory:Sustaining Digital Collections" is a conference being run shortly in Chicago by the NEDCC (December 9-10), and I should have stuck up a note about it yonks ago but it's mainly strictly "digital preservation" stuff as opposed to sustainability in the way I treat it. However there are a couple of papers that look closer to my research interests, notably Simon Tanner's (of KCL), entitled "Making Digital Preservation Affordable: Values and Business Models": the emphasis on valuation is key. Katherine Skinner's "Collaborative Adventures in Digital Preservation: Creating and Sustaining External Partnerships" may be relevant too, although it looks as though it's in essence about developing networks of partners for preservation activity. Having spent the first part of this week hanging out with various very interesting people from KCL, it's clear the place is stuffed with people I should be pestering for insights in my research area. If I whisper, perhaps they won't hear me coming....

Google kills Lively, advises on digital preservation

Google's well-reported putting-out-of-misery of Lively was announced here, where pragmatically and somewhat amusingly they advise on the digital preservation methods available to those poor suckers who took a chance on a Google Labs experiment. It's pretty simple, really:
"We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms"
Fair enough. I think plenty of DP types would accept that at the moment there aren't that many options for virtual worlds. It's certainly another argument for improving the transportability of material between VWs environments, but presumably this would mean compromising on innovation to some extent. Hey ho, there's plenty more VWs to go around (and I never go to any of them. Not exactly an early adopter, me)

Delayed post #1: aspects of [web] preservation

[[this post never got finished but I'm having a clear-out of my drafts and they're getting published or deleted, ready or not]]

Brian Kelly just blogged [[hmm, well, back in July, I think....]] on the JISC-PoWR site about "three key aspects of web preservation": experience, information, and access. I have a fourth, but I've been using it in the context of "sustainability" (the subject of my thesis), and so first I want to say a couple of words about this vs preservation, since although I've been writing papers for Ross for a couple of years arguing about the distinction between the concepts, I've not really rehearsed this in public before.


For the last couple of years I've been arguing that the problem of sustainability (S) is distinct from that of archive-style preservation (P). I won't go into the details of the distinction here but in essence I see P as concerning the persistence of a state, and S as the persistence of a process or activity. Recent work by Chris Rusbridge and others has been blurring the boundary ever more, although in a useful way: by questioning the purpose of preservation and weighing up what are the important aspects ("significant properties") of resources, they have been starting to argue for an approach to preservation that looks a lot more like what I was previously describing as sustaining. I still sort of believe that it is useful to distinnguish between the two concepts, but there's a lot of overlap.


The aspect that I think is especially pertinent to sustaining is "purpose". I don't think this is the same as the "experience" that Brian cites Kevin Ashley on (although experience and information may feed into purpose). It's focused on the objectives of the resource, which may be attainable through radically different experiences; for example (in the case of the environment in which KA operates), the learning objectives that an educational resource was created to serve. For a museum, perhaps a resource was prepared for use in a temporary exhibition, with the objective of enriching the experience visitors to that physical space by illustrating relationships betweeen objects, and providing media resources to bring them to life. When that exhibition closes, the original objective is partially voided - there is no physical visit to enrich - but aspects of it may still be viable - the objects probably still exist and the tales about them are still worth telling, perhaps more so than ever since we've stuck them back in the store-room out of easy access. Brian was talking about web preservation, of course, and I've taken a non-web resource as an example, but my interest in the question of sustainability extends beyond the web and the point applies regardless.

In any given digital resource that we're talking about preserving/sustaining, experience and information at least (perhaps access, too, sometimes) will have contributed to the original purpose to varying degrees - sometimes the experience is the whole purpose, sometimes it's an unimportant side effect of providing access to information. And sometimes it's important to the preserver regardless of its significance to the original purpose.

So if the original purpose is no longer served by a resource, what then for our "preservation" plans? There are still often reasons to preserve (freeze) or sustain (keep alive) an application, or aspects of it - in other words, some sources of value, ranging from historical interest to new uses, which may let a resource adapt and survive. The "significant properties" idea fits in to this. For me, if you are trying to maintain some quality of the original it's more of a preservation activity; whereas if you are more fundamentally interested in continuing to extract value through maintaining utility of whatever sort, we're talking sustaining.

Chris Rusbridge on significant properties

I've been a fan of Chris Rusbridge for a while now, increasingly so as I delved into the work he's been involved in previously, not least (as he mentions in his latest post) CEDARS. I was thinking along the same lines in terms of the need to identify what's important about a digital resource before you settle on a strategy for "sustaining" it (ideally before you build it, actually), and then I came across the work they did on "significant properties". Clearly the properties for the sorts of data and file-based assets that digital curators typically deal with (not to mention the context and purpose of their work) will often be different from the properties that a museum cherishes in their digital investments, but the framework that CEDARS developed is a great starting point for me.
CR has just blogged about this topic again, in the run-up to a JISC workshop that I'll unfortunately miss next week.

Somewhat relevant: Task force on economic sustainability of digital data

From OCLC via Lorcan Dempsey, hopefully this will deliver half of what it promises:
Panel to address economic sustainability of digital preservation

PLANETS in alignment?

Thanks to my co-stude at Leicester, Alex Whitfield, who drew this project to my attention (the British Library, where Alex works). From the "About" page of the site:

Planets will deliver:

• 
  Preservation Planning services that empower organisations to define, evaluate, and execute preservation
  
• Methodologies, tools and services for the Characterisation of digital objects
  
• Innovative solutions for Preservation Actions tools which will transform and emulate obsolete digital assets
  
• An Interoperability Framework to seamlessly integrate tools and services in a distributed service network
  
• A Testbed to provide a consistent and coherent evidence-base for the objective evaluation of different protocols, tools, services and complete preservation plans
  
• A comprehensive Dissemination and Takeup program to ensure vendor adoption and effective user training.
  

The National Archives and MS

I'd wondered what to make of the news that MS are to provide a futureproofing "strategy" for TNA by giving them copies of Virtual PC 2007, apart from it being a pragmatic step, and fortunately Chris Rusbridge has done the thinking for me. I guess I agree also that the progress with Open XML can only be good, since it's pretty much irrelevant that they aren't using the same standard as Open Office - the point it it's an open standard and XML is designed to be transfomed.
I'd be interested to know how TNA plan to integrate the emulation approach with any need they may have to preserve non-Windows or non-MS Office formats.

eFoundations: The Repository Roadmap - are we heading in the right direction?

Too busy to have thoughts on this at the moment but here's the link:
eFoundations: The Repository Roadmap - are we heading in the right direction?

See also Nik Honeysett's sceptical posting on Trusted Digital Repositories. Right or wrong he encapsulates the sort of frustration we must all sometimes feel when we're looking at something a little outside our own area of obsession and wondering, "why does it have to be so complicated?" Actually that's probably misrepresenting what he's saying and where he's coming from; in any case he makes a good point: most of the time we're migrating stuff frequently, and most of the time this is perfectly adequate.

Perpetuity, huh? Remind me, how long is that?

Another thing I meant to write about an awfully long time ago: http://ahds.ac.uk/news/futureAHDS.htm
The death of the AHDS (but not, it appears, the ADS for now) is not just a blow for the service itself and its users, but for the very idea of data repositories funded by UK Research Councils are trustworthy. Data preservation is for the long term and a broken thread may as well never have existed. With the AHRC (declaration of interest: they fund my PhD) pulling the rug from beneath the AHDS, and JISC being obliged to follow, who is going to want to hand their data to another such data service? I don't think it needs me to say much, there are better informed people out there who have plenty to say.