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Long‐term preservation of digital humanities scholarship
Abstract
Purpose
To inform digital humanists about digital preservation metadata requirements and to inform digital librarians about the dynamic, multimedia content of digital humanities research and teaching resources that needs to be addressed by digital preservation initiatives.
Design/methodology/approach
Literature‐based review of the issues.
Findings
Tools to facilitate automatic and semi‐automatic capture, collection, and creation of digital preservation metadata are crucially needed to ensure long‐term preservation of digital humanities scholarship.
Practical implications
Without tools to capture and create the majority of the metadata recommended to ensure long‐term preservation of and access to digital resources, the born‐digital multimedia resources created by humanities scholars are in danger of becoming unusable in the long term, nullifying years of scholarship and millions of dollars of investment by scholars, institutions, and funding organizations.
Originality/value
Provides current information for humanities scholars and librarians who must work in tandem to ensure long‐term preservation of digital humanities scholarship.
... Os estudos apontam que o acesso aos registros digitais a longo prazo só será possível mediante a adoção de políticas de preservação digital que incluam, dentre outros fatores, normas relacionadas aos metadados (SPENCE et al 2019;RIES, 2018;FORMENTON et al, 2017;RAMALHO et al, 2017;SVÄRD, 2017;LI;SUGIMOTO, 2014;SAYÃO, 2010;CANTARA, 2006;BRINDLEY et al 2004). O que se verificou foi que, ao se estudar sobre registros digitais arquivísticos, a preservação e gestão deste tipo de registro arquivístico está vinculada aos seus metadados. ...
... Destaque-se que a referida agência americana, por meio do Comitê Consultivo para Sistemas de Informação Espacial (CCSDS), de acordo com Brindley (2004), Cantara (2006) Assim, buscando identificar os metadados de preservação necessários para a preservação digital dos registros digitais arquivísticos, mapeou-se na literatura os elementos constitutivos de tais metadados e conceitos que permitam a análise desse tema. ...
... Primeiramente, o termo "preservação digital" pode ser entendido como um processo de acompanhamento do ciclo de vida dos objetos digitais, uma responsabilidade de gestão contínua, começando com a criação do recurso e continuando por um período indefinido (CANTARA, 2006 O PREMIS pode ser entendido como uma aplicação do modelo OAIS, constituído dos metadados necessários para o processo de preservação digital. O PREMIS estabelece cinco entidades: Environment (Suporte), Object (Objeto), Event (Evento), Agent (Agente) e Rights Statement (Declaração de direitos). ...
A intensa utilização de plataformas eletrônicas, especialmente no contexto da pandemia do Covid-19, provocou um aumento significativo dos registros digitais, que documentam os mais variados tipos de atividades pessoais e profissionais. Isto evidenciou a necessidade de descrever e contextualizar estes registros, a fim de contribuir para sua preservação e acesso a longo prazo. Assim, este artigo objetiva fazer uma reflexão acerca das condições que tornam um registro digital, arquivístico e a importância de se considerar os metadados destes registros para a sua preservação. As discussões foram desenvolvidas com base em uma revisão sistemática de literatura, fazendo uso do método PRISMA. Constatou-se que, a partir do instante que o metadado passa a fazer parte do registro digital arquivístico, os cuidados para a gestão desses metadados passam a ser tão importantes quanto os cuidados para a gestão do documento ou registro, isoladamente. Já que é impossível realizar a preservação de longo prazo destes materiais sem o efetivo gerenciamento dos metadados que o compõem. Conclui-se que é premente, por parte dos Arquivistas, ampliar a compreensão dos registros digitais arquivísticos como um constructo teórico com desafios conceituais e pragmáticos diferentes, mas não excludentes, daqueles existentes no documento arquivístico digital
... Traditionally, it has been the role of librarians, curators and archivists to ensure long-term viability of and access to cultural heritage materials (Cantara, 2006) The Librarian's role has always been that of a gatherer, organizer, keeper and disseminator of information and knowledge. In most cases the librarian has always skipped the first step of his/her role and wholly leaned on the other three steps; thereby leaving the first for other professionals. ...
... Primary responsibility for initiating the life cycle management of digital resources to ensure longterm viability begins with the creator of the resource. As scholars create increasingly sophisticated multimedia research and teaching resources, they need to capture, collect, and create the documentation or metadata -descriptive, administrative, and structural -necessary to migrate, emulate, or otherwise translate existing resources to future hardware and software configurations (Cantara, 2006). Compiling this detailed information is a task outside the realm of expertise of librarians, but we are always ready to give the necessary support towards long-term preservation of digital material. ...
... Some other experts (Calanag, Tabata & Sugimoto, 2004;Chilvers & Feather, 1998;James et al., 2003;Cantara, 2006) provided guidelines for creating standard metadata for repositories. Lavoie & Gartner (2005) provided standard definition and also reviewed a number of existing initiatives in this ontext. ...
Conducting literature review on open access (OA) institutional digital repositories (IDRs) is a challenging task as it is a new concept and started to develop rapidly throughout the world. The paper aims to place the current investigation within the existing scholarly research literature regarding some key policy issues. There are so many barriers in developing IDR specially developing different policies such as preservation policy, interoperability policy, and metadata policy as all are related to technical matter. All these issues need to to be properly formulated for smooth functioning of any IDR system. Here, the following three policy issues viz. a preservation policy, interoperability policy and metadata policy included in technical part have been discussed.
Sustainability and continued access to digital cultural heritage, digital humanities content and research materials can be challenging. For any research project, available resources and dependencies set the limits for what is possible. In the digital environment, consideration of these limitations can tend to focus on the technological aspect. However, it is not just technology that ensures the success of a project or long-term access to digital content. Using the Three-Legged Stool Model for Digital Preservation (Kenney and McGovern in Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short-term Strategies for Long-term Problems, 2003 [38]) (and other relevant models) provides an important foundation to ensure that any digital cultural heritage or digital humanities project is approached holistically. In addition, digital stewardship (Lazorschak in The Signal, 2011 [44]) should also be considered as an essential building block for digital cultural heritage and the digital humanities. Historically, questions of sustainability and ongoing access are often brought to the fore only as funding streams near their end, or as research project champions retire. Sustainability of digital content has been a topic of debate for many years (Bodleian Libraries in Digital Humanities Archives for Research Materials, Oxford, [2], Cantara in Longterm Preservation of digital humanities in OCLC Systems and Services 22:38–42, 2006 [10]). In recent years, the importance of sustainability is being further recognised, with research funding bodies requiring plans for long-term preservation and access as a part of applications for project funding, such as requiring the inclusion of this information in Data Management Plans (DMP) (UK Research and Innovation—Arts and Humanities Research Council in Research Funding Guide, 2019 [61]). The author advocates for creating specific technical information necessary for long-term preservation, as well as borrowing and adapting from other disciplines. While long-term preservation and access may have been considered from the outset, the author also argues that not enough is done to establish a digital stewardship framework approach. The Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge (DPOC) project (2006–2018) (Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge, 2016 [21]), provides the opportunity to look more holistically at how digitised and born-digital content is created, acquired, preserved and made available. At Cambridge University Library (CUL), a case study approach has been adopted, in order to better understand the needs of different ‘classes’ of digital content. Examples discussed include digitised fragments from the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection and the interactive data in the Kymata Atlas, illustrating two very different challenges of stewarding digital content. Through the case study research, the author and colleagues have identified that digital cultural heritage and digital humanities projects often develop a website or online resource as a mechanism for providing access to digital content project outputs. If not adequate planned for, digital content is at risk of becoming inaccessible after a project ends. Migration of files and various web archiving approaches are examined as possible preservation techniques, as well as other digital capture and documentation approaches more commonly used in contemporary art, time-based media and multi-platform archiving domains (Langley et al. in Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA 2013, 2013 [43]). Considering how to preserve and provide access to digital content right from the beginning of a project is essential. Taking a holistic digital stewardship approach—while learning from the lessons of past projects and borrowing from similar disciplines—can assist in better preparing for the end of a digital cultural heritage or digital humanities project.
Libraries and cultural institutions have been proactive in adopting different policies for preservation of culture. This is evident by the growing number of cultural repositories and digital libraries set for managing and making accessible different forms of cultural assets ranging from folklore, custom documentaries, craft designs and patterns, architectural setups etc. These procedures not only help them to preserve valuable indigenous knowledge but explore the richness in the cultural values of different nations. The proliferation of Information communication technology (ICT) has resulted in the merging of different forms of digitalized information which combine print, voice, video, and graphics for educational and recreational purposes. The application of Digital Humanities in preservation, management and accessibility of cultural resources ranging from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets cannot be neglected. The chapter discusses the concept of Digital Humanities in the light of its rich background and importance in present times for preserving human culture by acquiring, managing and making available cultural assets for further research. The chapter also attempts to explore and identify the recent contributions to the concept by analyzing ongoing Digital Humanities initiatives and projects by different organizations and information centers to stimulate future Research and development trend in the field.
Libraries and cultural institutions have been proactive in adopting different policies for preservation of culture. This is evident by the growing number of cultural repositories and digital libraries set for managing and making accessible different forms of cultural assets ranging from folklore, custom documentaries, craft designs and patterns, architectural setups etc. These procedures not only help them to preserve valuable indigenous knowledge but explore the richness in the cultural values of different nations. The proliferation of Information communication technology (ICT) has resulted in the merging of different forms of digitalized information which combine print, voice, video, and graphics for educational and recreational purposes. The application of Digital Humanities in preservation, management and accessibility of cultural resources ranging from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets cannot be neglected. The chapter discusses the concept of Digital Humanities in the light of its rich background and importance in present times for preserving human culture by acquiring, managing and making available cultural assets for further research. The chapter also attempts to explore and identify the recent contributions to the concept by analyzing ongoing Digital Humanities initiatives and projects by different organizations and information centers to stimulate future Research and development trend in the field.
The Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 presents over 500 English-language articles, books, and technical reports that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. It covers digital curation and preservation copyright issues, digital formats (e.g., data, media, and e-journals), metadata, models and policies, national and international efforts, projects and institutional implementations, research studies, services, strategies, and digital repository concerns. Most sources have been published from 2000 through 2010. "Librarians and scholars who are concerned with managing digital resources and preserving them for future use will find a crash course on the subject in this bibliography. . . . This book is recommended for librarians working with original digital resources, scholars interested in digital repositories, and students in the field." - Journal of the Medical Library Association. Citation: Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 (Houston: Digital Scholarship, 2011), http://www.digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/dcpb2010.htm. Bailey, Charles W., Jr. Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010. Houston: Digital Scholarship, 2011. http://www.digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/dcpb2010.htm.
No humanists have moved more aggressively in the digital world than students of the Greco-Roman world but the first generation of digital classics has seen relatively superficial methods to address the problems of print culture. We are now beginning to see new intellectual practices for which new terms, eWissenschaft and eClassics, and a new cyberinfrastructure are emerging.
Addressing the preservation and long-term access issues for digital resources is one of the key challenges facing informational organisations such as libraries, archives, cultural institutions and government agencies today. A number of major initiatives and projects have been established to investigate or develop strategies for preserving the burgeoning amounts of digital content being produced. To date, the alternative preservation approaches have been based on emulation, migration and metadata - or some combination of these. Most of the work has focussed on digital objects of a singular media type: text, HTML, images, video or audio and to date few usable tools have been developed to support or implement such strategies or policies. In this paper we consider the preservation of composite, mixed-media, objects, a rapidly growing class of resources. Using three exemplars of new media artwork as case studies, we describe the optimum preservation strategies that we have determined for each exemplar and the software tools that we have developed to support and implement those strategies.
The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a data communication standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML Schema Language of the World Wide Web Consortium. An initiative of the Digital Library Federation, METS is under development by an international editorial board and is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress. Designed in conformance with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, a METS document encapsulates digital objects and metadata as Information Packages for transmitting and/or exchanging digital objects to and from digital repositories, disseminating digital objects via the Web, and archiving digital objects for long-term preservation and access. This paper represents an introduction to the METS standard and, through illustrated examples, how to build a METS document.
With the rapid advancements in the realm of data management especially in terms of data volume, data quality and data availability; the necessity for adequate, well managed and high quality Metadata is becoming increasingly essential for successful long-term high quality data preservation. Data preservation over substantially long periods of time is needed to enable burgeoning amounts of data, being produced today, to be accessible with its quality intact and independent of associated software or hardware, to e.g. future scientists or researchers in order to aid in their experiments and research. From this perspective, wellmanaged and high quality metadata holds the key to avoiding the high cost of replicating expensive to produce data as well as ensuring the proper and efficient use of these data over the long term with dynamic evolvements in related technologies. This dissertation details the main achievements of a MSc. project that endeavours to address the aforementioned issues by conducting an in-depth research on various aspects of Metadata management, such as current approaches & techniques for Metadata management & quality assurance, existing tools, standards etc. In addition, as devised on the basis of the assessed results of this extensive and scrupulous investigation, this thesis provides detailed plan of work for the coming 2.5 years, which subsumes specific recommendations for developing a working prototype of metadata management system in the context of digital curation.
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