Mat Kelly (Old Dominion University) has written a thorough wrap-up of the Digital Preservation 2014 conference, held July 22-23 in Washington, D.C. Kelly’s post includes links to recordings of 25 of the talks given at DigiPres2014.

The conference organizers have also uploaded slides for all talks, which can be viewed by scrolling down to the schedule and clicking the “(PDF…)” link next to each time slot.

Finally, the keynote speakers have posted the text of their talks:

• Matt Kirschenbaum (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities), “Software, It’s a Thing”
• Shannon Mattern (The New School), “Preservation Aesthetics”

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Standards (NDSA) and Practices Working Group have released “Staffing for Effective Digital Preservation: An NDSA Report,” a survey of 85 institutions with a mandate to preserve digital content. The questions focused on staffing and organization, and some of the key findings include:

• There is no dedicated digital preservation department in most organizations surveyed.
• Images and text files are the most common types of content being preserved.
• Most organizations are retraining existing staff to manage digital preservation functions rather than hiring new staff.
• For new hires, respondents believe that passion for digital preservation and a knowledge of digital preservation standards, best practices, and tools are the most important characteristics of a good digital preservation manager, not a particular educational background or past work experience.

In his latest post for The Signal, Trevor Owens explores digital objects through the lens of archival theory, such as respect des fonds, or the archival imperative to maintain original order. He explains:

While the representations of digital objects often appear non-linear it is critical to not be seduced by the flickering and transitory view of digital objects provided by our screens. At the end of the day, every digital object is encoded on some medium and that encoding is an ordered sequence of bits.

Two recent posts address two important issues in museums: digital preservation policies and copyright.

In a piece in The Signal, “Towards a Digital Preservation Policy For Museums,” Madeline Sheldon discusses her research into digital preservation policies, noting that, while libraries and archives tend to maintain published policies, she has only found one museum thus far that does so (the National Museum of Australia). While some arts organizations, such as Rhizome and the Guggenheim are active in the digital preservation of video, animation, and art, “it appears that museums are fully invested in the preservation of time-based media, but few have taken the next step towards compiling their experiences into a definite strategy or policy.”

Kevin Smith (Duke University) provides a useful primer on getting copyright permission from museums to use images of artworks in projects. Smith builds on the arguments presented in a recent article by Kenneth Crews that delves deeper into issue, “Museum Policies and Art Images: Conflicting Objectives and Copyright Overreaching,” to outline how DH projects and the public benefit when museums (as well as archives and libraries) create less restrictive rules for copyright and licensing of content. Put simply, Smith states,

For those beginning to explore the uncharted territory of the digital humanities, permission fees and reuse restrictions will probably continue to create nearly unnavigable thickets of complication…Libraries and the digital archives associated with them need to model the best practices that we can in hopes that the most absurd kinds of copyright overreaching will become less common and rational policies based on an accurate assertion.

In addition to creating clear rules for the use of images, LAM organizations can also contribute to DH projects by making their data publicly available and grant reuse rights. For example, last week the Penn Museum released metadata for 332,882 object records in CSV, XML and JSON format under a CC-BY licence.

From the description:

“The post holder will work as a Research Associate on the EU FP7 project PERICLES (“Promoting and Enhancing Reuse of Information throughout the Content Lifecycle taking account of Evolving Semantics”), which was funded as part of the EU’s Digital Preservation program. The post holder will contribute to a range of the research activities of the project, and will work closely with research staff at King’s and at partner institutions.

• researching and developing sustainable e-infrastructures for research;
• the theory and practice of digital libraries and digital archives;
• knowledge organisation, digital information and records management,
• digital preservation and digital curation;
• researcher and citizen practices in the digital domain;
• computational methods in the arts and humanities.”

Salary: £31,331 to £36,298, per annum plus £2,323 per annum London Allowance.

Preserving (Digital) Objects With Restricted Resources (POWRR) has created a useful grid that tracks 24 different features of over 45 digital preservation tools, ranging from the very basic (e.g. Dropbox) to powerful, full-service platforms (e.g. Portico). The information was culled from tool websites, contacting the tool developers directly, discussion boards, and some direct tool testing, and POWRR also includes a short biography for each tool.

At Spellbound Blog, Jeanne Kramer-Smith has posted on a session from The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation conference, sponsored by UNESCO in cooperation with the University of British Columbia and held in September 2012 in Vancouver. Untangling the acronyms, Kramer-Smith identifies the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) as part of the International Council for Science. CODATA hosts the Data at Risk Task Group (DARTG), which seeks “to preserve scientific data that is in danger of loss because they are not in modern electronic formats, or have particularly short shelf-life.”

In summarizing talks included in the session and helpfully linking out to presenters’ slides, Kramer-Smith also provides an opportunity to consider the implications of data preservation and loss– including for DH and libraries. As she notes in her summary of a presentation by D. R. Fraser Taylor and Tracey Lauriault, of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University, on “The Map as Fundamental Source in the Memory of the World”:

“The 1986 BBC Domesday Book [sic] 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 were 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.”

In a previous post on dh+lib, Jefferson Bailey outlined some of the ways in which the digital humanities could enhance access and discovery of cultural heritage materials. Now, in “Visualizations and Digital Collections,” he explores the potential of visualization as a technique for appraisal in born digital collections:

[G]iven the ever-increasing volume of material in born-digital archival collections, visualizations are increasingly a crucial tool in a variety of managerial functions for digital stewards, from analyzing directory contents prior to acquisition, to risk assessment, to visualizing contextual relations between collections.

Checksum? Bagger? Ingest?

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance has released a glossary of digital stewardship terms.

NDSA members have been working on a “Levels of Digital Preservation” activity to provide basic digital preservation guidance on how an organization should prioritize its resource allocation. This glossary provides a common language for NDSA members to communicate about the levels work and should also be useful as a general digital stewardship glossary.