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An Architecture for Community-Based Curation and Presentation of Complex Digital Objects
Abstract
Preservation of complex, non-linear digital objects such as digital art or ancient computer environments has been a domain reserved for experts until now. Digital culture, however, is a broader phenomenon. With the introduction of the so-called Web 2.0 digital culture became a mass culture. New methods of content creation, publishing and cooperation lead to new cultural achievements. Therefore, novel tools and strategies are required, both for preservation but in particular for curation and presentation.
We propose a scaleable architecture suitable to create a community driven platform for preservation and curation of complex digital objects. Further, we provide novel means for presenting preserved results including technical meta-data, and thus, allowing for public review and potentially further community induced improvements.
... Finally, the community-based approaches to archiving and curating of intricate digital objects provide new ways of sustaining digital culture in the long run [74]. These findings contribute to the existing knowledge on digital legacy preservation by incorporating perspectives from library science, digital arts, information technology, and health care. ...
Digital immortality, the idea of endless life and ultimate happiness in a virtual afterlife, has become a subject of human fascination. This article reports the results of a comprehensive research project focused on identifying the challenges and potential options related to digital immortality. Analyzing 39 relevant studies, our research concentrates on two main themes: the barriers to achieve the digital immortality and the tools created to preserve digital memories. Our findings reveal that the challenges associated with digital immortality are deeply rooted in legal, ethical, and social issues. Importantly, our focus is the challenges related to digital content left by the deceased, its collection method, and integrity in digital immortality research, as content forms the basis for achieving this objective. Furthermore, the research highlights the need for more advanced technology, as the number of studies is limited and current progress is primarily future-oriented. However, our analysis demonstrates that the digital content left by the deceased is paramount, as it constitutes the raw material for achieving digital immortality.
... Beyond documentation to support an understanding of significant properties, documentation standards within digital preservation are linked primarily to the metadata which accompanies a particular object in archival storage. There are established standards for this, ranging from the baseline Dublin Core specification (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 2012), primarily supporting access, to the specialized PREMIS standard (PREMIS Editorial Committee, 2015), which enables sophisticated machine-driven management of digital objects. Off-the-shelf storage and management systems have also been developed, that provide digital object management, access and information services for collections, such as the free and open-source Archivematica (Artefactual Systems Inc., 2019). ...
The emergence of digital technologies has impacted not only the nature of museums as institutions, but also the practice of artists. Consequently, artworks which employ digital media (such as video and software) in their access or display are making their way into permanent collections in increasing numbers. These digital media can pose considerable challenges in terms of long-term access and display, due to a changing technological environment and resulting risk of obsolescence. Contemporary art museums are among those leading the way in developing approaches to collecting and caring for these types of object. This accompanies a general shift in conservation theory and practice, from a traditional object-centric approach to one which allows the continued evolution of the work through time. The presence of digital media in collections is also forcing the art museum to look beyond its walls and engage with experts from formerly unfamiliar domains. In this chapter, we will introduce the imperatives driving digital preservation and discuss the state of the art in the field of conserving and preserving digital art. We will then focus on recent research relating to specific digital media types and present a number of case studies from the Tate collection.
... As large scale, institutionally focused digital preservation projects forge ahead, it is important that an exchange between these and the enthusiast community is encouraged. Indeed, some recent research (Rechert et al. 2013) explicitly proposes community driven approaches to preserving complex digital objects, which combined with growing interest in open sourcing artwork (Dekker 2014) could see a dramatic change in the way software-based art is collected and conserved. The current time presents great opportunities alongside the challenges I have discussed in this paper, and the promise of a world in which anyone with an internet connection and some time on their hands can start collecting art is undeniably exciting. ...
Software-based art (i.e. that in which software is the primary medium) presents considerable challenges for artists, collectors, and conservators, who are hoping to preserve artworks in the long-term. It is essential then that these parties consider the implications of technological change, and take action where appropriate. However as with artistic practise itself, software-based artworks vary considerably in their components and behaviour, and typically require a bespoke approach to conservation which can be both time consuming and expensive. There has up until recently been little consideration of the role of the private collections in the context of software-based art, with collections of such works being a relative rarity. Despite this lack of representation, the medium presents great opportunities for the democratisation (via open, internet distribution) of collecting, an activity which has traditionally been something of a rarefied hobby. Drawing on research into the preservation of complex digital objects, I discuss some of the major challenges for those collecting and conserving software-based art, and outline some approaches to these challenges achievable without the resources of a major institution.
Over the past 20 years, many thousands of CD-ROM titles were published; many of these have lasting cultural significance, yet present a difficult challenge for libraries due to obsolescence of the supporting software and hardware, and the consequent decline in the technical knowledge required to support them. The current trend appears to be one of abandonment – for example, the Indiana University Libraries no longer maintain machines capable of accessing early CD-ROM titles.In previous work, we proposed an access model based upon networked ‘virtual collections’ of CD-ROMs which can enable consortia of libraries to pool the technical expertise necessary to provide continued access to such materials for a geographically sparse base of patrons, who may have limited technical knowledge.In this paper, we extend this idea to CD-ROMs designed to operate on ‘classic’ Macintosh systems with an extensive case study – the catalog of the Voyager Company publications, which was the first major innovator in interactive CD-ROMs. The work described includes emulator extensions to support obsolete CD formats and to enable networked access to the virtual collection.
Many digital preservation scenarios are based on the migration strategy, which itself is heavily tool-dependent. For popular, well-defined and often open file formats – e.g., digital images, such as PNG, GIF, JPEG – a wide range of tools exist. Migration workflows become more difficult with proprietary formats, as used by the several text processing applications becoming available in the last two decades. If a certain file format can not be rendered with actual software, emulation of the original environment remains a valid option. For instance, with the original Lotus AmiPro or Word Perfect, it is not a problem to save an object of this type in ASCII text or Rich Text Format. In specific environments, it is even possible to send the file to a virtual printer, thereby producing a PDF as a migration output. Such manual migration tasks typically involve human interaction, which may be feasible for a small number of objects, but not for larger batches of files.We propose a novel approach using a software-operated VNC abstraction layer in order to replace humans with machine interaction. Emulators or virtualization tools equipped with a VNC interface are very well suited for this approach. But screen, keyboard and mouse interaction is just part of the setup. Furthermore, digital objects need to be transferred into the original environment in order to be extracted after processing. Nevertheless, the complexity of the new generation of migration services is quickly rising; a preservation workflow is now comprised not only of the migration tool itself, but of a complete software and virtual hardware stack with recorded workflows linked to every supported migration scenario. Thus the requirements of OAIS management must include proper software archiving, emulator selection, system image and recording handling. The concept of view-paths could help either to automatically determine the proper pre-configured virtual environment or to set up system images for certain migration workflows. View-paths may rise in demand, as the generation of PDF output files from Word Perfect input could be cached as pre-fabricated emulator system images. The current groundwork provides several possible optimizations, such as using the automation features of the original environments.
Game preservation is a critical issue for game studies. Access to historic materials forms a vital core to research and this field is no different. However, there are serious challenges to overcome for preservationists in terms of developing a strategic and inclusion programme to retain access to obsolete games. Emulation, as a strategy already applied by major developers and the gaming community, is introduced and the KEEP project, designed to create an open emulation access platform is described. Author Keywords Games, preservation, emulation, archiving
Emulation is frequently discussed as a failsafe preservation strategy for born-digital documents that depend on contemporaneous software for access (Rothenberg, 2000). Yet little has been written about the contextual knowledge required to successfully use such software. The approach we advocate is to preserve necessary contextual information through scripts designed to control the legacy environment, and created during the preservation workflow. We describe software designed to minimize dependence on this knowledge by offering automated configuration and execution of emulated environments. We demonstrate that even simple scripts can reduce impediments to casual use of the digital objects being preserved. We describe tools to automate the remote use of preserved objects on local emulation environments. This can help eliminate both a dependence on physical reference workstations at preservation institutions, and provide users accessing materials over the web with simplified, easy-to-use environments. Our implementation is applied to examples from an existing collection of over 4000 virtual CD-ROM images containing thousands of custom binary executables.
Emulation evolves into a mature digital preservation strategy, providing authentic functional access to a wide range of digital objects, using their original creation environments. In contrast to format migration strategies a functional, emulation-based approach requires a number of additional components, i.e. the full softwarestack required to render a digital object but also its configuration. The goal of the bwFLA project is the implementation and development of a distributed framework for emulation-based services and technologies to address Baden-Württemberg state and higher education institutes’ libraries’ and archives’ new challenges in digital long-term preservation.
Accessible emulation is often the method of choice for maintaining digital objects, specifically complex ones such as applications, business processes, or electronic art. However, validating the emulator’s ability to faithfully reproduce the original behavior of digital objects is complicated.
This article presents an evaluation framework and a set of tests that allow assessment of the degree to which system emulation preserves original characteristics and thus significant properties of digital artifacts. The original system, hardware, and software properties are described. Identical environment is then recreated via emulation. Automated user input is used to eliminate potential confounders. The properties of a rendered form of the object are then extracted automatically or manually either in a target state, a series of states, or as a continuous stream. The concepts described in this article enable preservation planners to evaluate how emulation affects the behavior of digital objects compared to their behavior in the original environment. We also review how these principles can and should be applied to the evaluation of migration and other preservation strategies as a general principle of evaluating the invocation and faithful rendering of digital objects and systems. The article concludes with design requirements for emulators developed for digital preservation tasks.
The futility of media art in a contemporary art world
- M Watz
Future-proof preservation of complex software environments
- K Rechert
- I Valizada
- D Von Suchodoletz
Emulation as a business solution: The emulation framework
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What a wonder is a terrible monitor
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Emulation as a strategy for the preservation of games: the keep project
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