Digital Preservation by Design Steve Knight

1. Future Perfect 2012: Digital Preservation by
Design - Panel
Kris Carpenter Negulescu (Internet Archive)
Gabe Nault (The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints)
Andrew Waugh (Public Records Office Victoria)
Jan Dalsten Sǿrensen (Danish National Archives)
What are the top 3 products or services that the digital
preservation community needs right now(this can
include something that we have but which doesn’t work
properly)?
Is digital preservation a domain where we can let a
thousand flowers bloom or does it require more
DESIGN? If the latter what does this mean?

2. Q1 – Top 3 products or services
Automatic ingest for data, scalability.
Improving tools. Tools to manage records in agencies.
Formats and their longevity, format validation tools, shared registry, full text
search. What are ‘good formats’ that will be around for a long time.
Good development won't happen until there is economic benefit for
developers. Potential for fee based access to tools and services.
Exit strategies in all planning.
Open exchange of metadata.
Full text search engine - that span scope and scale of our collections.
Support for text mining.
Standard format for database preservation (around SIARD?).
Better cost models for digital preservation. What are the economical
consequences of the decisions we are making today. Tools to assess
economical consequences.
Repository of all ICT documentation of systems that made the objects in our
repositories.

3. Q2 – DESIGN or let a 1000 flowers bloom
Way NSW is doing things is completely different than at Victoria and this is fantastic. This is a
time of experimentation and different approaches are essential as we just don't know yet.
Don't have a choice - we must let 1000 flowers bloom as there are so many contexts /
initiatives / organisations in which digital preservation is happening.
There are common challenges so we should be able to come up with some common
processes (eg OAIS). Storage/risk/cost models?
Actual DP must happen within the cultural context of the organisation/country and therefore
there will be differences.
What would DESIGN mean? Who, where, when does design happen?
Need a framework for requirements. Should be able to develop requirements communally.
Need a framework for development – common tools, system approaches.
Need a framework for sharing - registries.
The best solution for the problem at hand.
We need flexibility to adapt over time. We need to remove dependencies on any one tool. We
need to be designing to be able to walk away from tools that don’t work/stop working/stop
being useful. We need to be looking for best solutions but not be locked in.
We must challenge Not Invented Here. We must look for what is good and we must
collaborate and contribute. It is essential that organisations that start things up don't get left
holding all the responsibility. We must have a community that takes contributing seriously.

4. Some other thoughts
Orson Scott Card: The Originist .. tales from Isaac
Asimov Foundation ..
“… but everything was catalogued so you knew
exactly what humanity had lost forever”.
There is a market here.
We get what we pay for.
Make economics our friend.
Bware the ‘tyranny of the immediate’.

5. Future Perfect 2012: Digital Preservation by
Design – Wrap up
The Hon Amy Adams made it clear that we
need:
•coherent government direction
•an all of government approach to digital
preservation
so that
•all can make the best use of government
information.

6. iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1
Jeff Rothenberg in his keynote noted that
the digital preservation community has
been trundling along:
•without much technological depth of
understanding in most cases
•that things are not in great shape at the
moment
•the need to perform serious cost and
process analyses.

7. iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1
Kris Carpenter Negulescu introduced us
to the Internet Archive and the singular
vision of Brewster Kahle.
The Internet Archive’s latest gig is a
library of every book ever published.
It is great to see, in the current
environment, that there is still space for
grand challenges.

8. iPres We heard National Strategies 1 how data works to
- Aligning Shaun Hendy describe
support innovation, raising the question of what data
resides in the information in cultural heritage
institutions.
How can we expose that data and how can we get it to
the folk that will do for our data what Shaun is doing
with his.
Papers Past has over 3 million pages. Let’s pretend
that each page has 2,000 words on it.
That’s 6 billion units of data. Surely someone’s got to
be interested in that? Sociologists, historians,
computational linguistics folk.
What else is in our collections? How do we get into the
innovation ecosystem?

9. iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1
And all our other presenters who have provided us with the
skeleton of a work programme:
Formats – too much emphasis, not enough.
Emulation and migration
Preservation and archival practice.
Preservation and access as two sides of the same coin
Collaboration, specialisation, multi-disciplinary teams
Diversity, volume, mihi, proactive, progress, do the best we can
Collaboration and and communication and information sharing
Better data management.

10. iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1
FUTURE PERFECT 2012:
PRESERVATION BY DESIGN

11. IN DENIAL
Lokomotiv Team Pursuit Crash – at the Manchester Track Cycling World Cup 2008.
Photo by Adam Roberts.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adman_jamjar/2999411642/in/pool-909291@N20

12. BY DESIGN
Let’s be purposive about weaving digital preservation into the wider strategic
approach to digital activities.
Let’s engage more methodically with the increasing quantity and complexity of
materials going forwards.
Let’s get on with development of relationships with large institutional creators (eg
newspaper publishers), academic and private research producers etc.
Le t’s start moving from short term, project funding to ongoing sustainable funding
recognising the ongoing –ness as of digital preservation.
Let’s engage with the full spectrum of national stakeholders to make this work.
Let’s try and move from some of the current short term focus on front-end issues
and shine the light on digital preservation and the long-tail implications of digital
preservation.

13. The Long Tail
Lion’s Mane jellyfish – tentacles up to 37 meters long.
It is digital preservation that will ensure maximum
leverage and benefit of the digital long tail.
However, Wired Magazine noted recently that:
open data is not just about empowering the empowered
open data is not an end in itself
massive data dumps and even friendly online
government portals are insufficient
Ordinary people need to know what information is
available and they need the training to be conversant in
it.
And if people are to have anything more than theoretical
access to the information, it needs to be easy and cheap
to use.
That means investing in the kinds of organizations doing
outreach, advocacy, and education in the communities
least familiar with the benefits of data transparency.

14. iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1
BY DESIGN
Categories of design:
•Technical
•Organisational
•Standards
•Legal
•Educational
•Economic.
But how about meaning?
There seems to be an underlying assumption that we are all talking about the
same thing. Is this so?
What do we mean when we say digital preservation and what do we reference
when we say it (the OAIS model, PREMIS)? What else?

15. 2-4
Men's team pursuit on Monday, August 18 2008 at the Laoshan Velodrome in Beijing.
Photo by Ivan Sekretarev, The Associated Press.
http://therecord.blogs.com/take_the_lane/team-pursuit.html

16. iPres - Aligning NationalDESIGN
BY Strategies
6
How about a trusted market place for products,
tools and services that support all of our digital
preservation programmes?
3rd party tools from the community - PREMIS,
PRONOM, DROID, JHOVE, NLNZ MET.
3rd party tools from outside the community
(including primary infrastructure choices – virus
checkers, fixity checkers).

17. iPres - Aligning NationalDESIGN
BY Strategies
7
Laura Campbell (Tallinn, May 2011)
‘an international preservation body with a focus
on policy, perhaps assisted by an advisory
expert group to identify what categories of
digital objects are most at risk. The body could
promote an international notion of collection,
work on standards and tools, and maybe
maintain a common index of preserved
materials.’

18. Beaut
New Zealand Women's Team Pursuit, UCI World Track Cycling Championships, Hisense Arena on December 2, 2010 in Melbourne, Australia.
(December 1, 2010 - Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images AsiaPac)
http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/3wuZJIKxMmP/UCI+Track+World+Cycling+Day+1/ZLpCfGY8FAM

19. iPres One more time for our 1
- Aligning National Strategies sponsors:
Microsoft – major sponsor
Ex Libris – social function
Govis – lanyards
Silver & Ballard – coffee cart
Victoria University – morning tea
Mick Crouch - Convenor

20. iPres - Aligning National Strategies 1
Daniel Gomes (Portugeuse Web
Archive), TPDL 2011
Web archiving survey
277 people working on web archiving
globally
Google has 24,000 people working on
front ends
Let’s turn that around.