From the Abstract

For centuries the archival community has understood and practiced the art of adding contextual information while preserving an artifact. The question now is how these practices can be transferred to the digital domain. With the growing expansion of production and consumption of digital objects (documents, audio, video, etc.) it has become essential to identify and study issues related to their representation. A cura­tor in the digital realm may be said to have the same responsibilities as one in a traditional archival domain. However, with the mass production and spread of digital objects, it may be difficult to do all the work manually. In the present article this problem is considered in the area of digital video preservation. We show how this problem can be formulated and propose a framework for capturing contextual infor­mation for ephemeral digital video preservation. This proposal is realized in a system called ContextMiner, which allows us to cater to a digital curator’s needs with its four components: digital video curation, collection visualization, browsing interfaces, and video harvesting and monitoring. While the issues and systems described here are geared toward digital videos, they can easily be applied to other kinds of digital objects.

Direct to Complete Article (18 pages; PDF)

Source: The International Journal of Digital Curation

Direct to Issue (4 pages; PDF)

Articles Include:

+ Project MUSE announces new titles and prices for 2010

+ MUSE and Social Technology

+ New Features and Functionality Enhance MUSE Experience

+ Using MUSE to Your Advantage: More By an Author

See Also: Project Muse Facebook Page

Source: Project Muse

From a Post:

The Library of Congress has developed new tools to transfer large quantities of digital content. During 2008, the Library used these tools to add approximately 80 terabytes to its digital collections.

As described in the Library of Congress’s video, Bagit: Transferring Content for Digital Preservation, the sender of a digital collection prepares for the transfer by packaging the collection and making it accessible for the Library to download. The Library prefers data packaged into standardized “bags,” a means of organizing and containing data for transfer as described in the BagIt specification.

Direct to Video

See Also: Read more about the Library’s bag-related data transfer tools.

Source: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program / Library of Congress

From the Announcement:

Portico (www.portico.org) is pleased to announce the signing of an agreement with Emerald Group Publishing Limited to preserve its entire online journals collection. Established in 1967, Emerald Group Publishing Limited is the world’s leading publisher of management research. In total, Emerald publishes over 700 titles, comprising 200 journals, over 300 books and more than 200 book series as well as an extensive range of online products and services.

Source: Portico

From a Web Site:

ArchivePress is a blog-archiving project being undertaken by the University of London Computer Centre and the British Library Digital Preservation department, funded by the JISC Information Environment Programme under its Rapid Innovation Grants Call (03/09).

The project will explore practical issues around the archiving of weblog content, focusing on blogs as records of institutional activity and corporate memory. As an alternative to the web crawling/harvesting approach of the Internet Archive and the UK Web Archive, ArchivePress will test the viability of using RSS feeds and blog APIs to harvest blog content (including comments, embedded content and metadata). The archived content will be stored and managed using instances of Wordpress, thereby maintaining the blogs’ native data structures, formats and relationships. We hope to develop tools and methodology that will enable organisations to use simple, free, open source blogging software to manage a central archive of designated institutional blog outputs, even if they are spread over different blog hosts and platforms. The benefits of this approach will include:

+ targeted gathering of selected weblogs

+ improved reliability and authenticity of records

+ citable blog content with persistent identifiers

+ automated, ongoing harvesting, via newfeeds

+ accessibility of content, using native blog interfaces

+ use of native web and database file formats, compatible with registry-based preservation activities.

Direct to ArchivePress Web Site

Source: ArchivePress
Hat Tip: The JISC-PoWR Blog (Excellent Overivew of Project

From a Blog Post:

We have recently published a number of new briefing documents on digital preservation.The new documents cover Introduction to Web Resource Preservation, Preserving Web 2.0 Resources, Preserving Your Home Page, Selection for Web Resource Preservation and Web Archiving.

Source: Cultural Heritage (Blog) from UKOLN

From a Guardian Article:

For Robin Baker, the head curator of the BFI archive [British Film Institute] archive, more important still are the grandchildren yet to come. His stock of thousands of miles of film and documents on television and film stretches, as you would expect, far into the past, but it also reaches for the future. Each week the archive , which is housed around a group of old farm buildings in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, selects a range of current images from feature films, commercial network television and the visual arts to preserve for the ages.

The team that selects television programmes for the archive tries to represent the general output, but their curatorial concerns centre on whether to pick out those episodes of, say, Britain’s Got Talent that had the most impact at time of broadcast or those that were most typical of the talent show genre in 2009.

Source: The Guardian (via AMIA)

See Also: On a Somewhat Related Note:
HBO Archives Opens Up March of Time Vault

The other day we posted about the Library of Congress will be capturing some Twitter “tweets” during the Supreme Court confirmation process of Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Today, while browsing the Library of Congress web site we came across a larger project to capture and archive web content dealing with the confirmation. In other words, the “tweets” are part of a larger LC initiative.

From a LC Web Capture site web page:

The Supreme Court Nominations 2009 Web Archive will be a selective collection of Web sites archived between June 2009 through the completion of the hearings process. Web sites collected will include materials produced by watchdog, public policy, and political advocacy groups, blogs and tweets, community and religious organizations, foreign and domestic news sources, educational and research institutions, and independent websites.

Collection dates: June 2009 through confirmation hearings.

Source LC

From the SAA Web Site:

SAA signed an agreement in April to have American Archivist participate in JSTOR, an independent not-for-profit organization that is dedicated to making a wide range of intellectual content available in a trusted digital archive. Currently the JSTOR archive includes the complete back runs of more than 800 journals, which are available to libraries. American Archivist would be part of the newly developing Arts and Sciences VII collection under “Library and Information Sciences.” The entire run of the journal is projected to debut in 2010. The recently retired Charles Schultz has generously donated his back issues of the journal (1963 through 2008) to SAA for use by JSTOR. Issues prior to 1963 will dovetail with the OCLC digitization project.

Source: Society of American Archivists

See Also: Learn More About the OCLC Project Mentioned in the Post

From an Article:

On May 4-7, 2009, 60 participants from 20 countries gathered at the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa for the annual International Internet Preservation Consortium General Assembly. The meeting focused on activities of the three IIPC working groups.

The Access Working Group featured guest speaker Brian Davison, from Lehigh University, presenting on “Searching Archival Webs Efficiently & Effectively.” Davison outlined early findings from a National Science Foundation project to implement improved search and navigation services for web archives. Breakout groups focused on the topics of “Scalability of Indexing Software,” “Resource Discovery of Web Archives: Cataloguing, Full-text Indexing, What Else?” and “Wayback/NutchWAX Integration (issues, tips, and best practice).”

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Source: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

From a Presentation by David Pearson:

What I am going to talk to you about today is some of my experience in dealing with, and the consequences of not looking after digital materials. Part 1: The current environment, some observations Part 2: Monster, what monster? Part 3: Some personal experiences 2002-2009 Part 4: What can ‘I’ do about it? Part 5: Conclusion

Direct to Full Text (27 Slides; PDF)

Source: National Library of Australia

A new issue of DPC What’s New in Digital Preservation is now available online. This issue aggregates a large number of stories and news from January, 2009-April, 2009.

Source: Digital Preservation Coalition

From the PADI Description:

This white paper and detailed resource list, have been prepared as part of an NDIIPP funded project. They provide an introduction to retrospective digitization of government records and include sections on: Legal requirements; Cost justification; In-house vs. outsourcing processes; Standard file formats: Resolution requirements: File naming guidelines; Metadata and indexing; Storage options; Preservation strategies; Disposition of originals; and,Developing a long-term program. Resource list available as Appendix A and as separate download.

Direct to White Paper (71 pages)

Source: Minnesota Historical Society (via PADI)

From the Open Content Alliance Blog:

…Cornell University Library [has] removed all restrictions on its digital public domain holdings. It did so in conjunction with a donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive. As these books are processed, they will appear on archive.org.

Cornell has removed restrictions not only on non-commercial use but commercial use as well. University Librarian Anne Kenney explains: “We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks.”

You can read the complete news release from the Cornell University Library here.

Direct to the 70,000 images via The Internet Archive

Source: Open Content Alliance

From the Announcement:

Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grants showcased innovative repository-based projects at the Fourth International Open Repositories Conference (OR2009) in Atlanta May 18-21. The meeting focuses on open-source repository platforms to manage and archive digital data from a variety of environments (education, research, science, cultural heritage) and contexts (national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal). Ultimately, the goal of these repositories is to support the creation and management of digital content, to enable its use and re-use, to interconnect information, and to ensure its long-term preservation and archiving.

The announcement also contains direct links to numerous projects.

Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services