The highlight of my digital archives week was the discovery of the Digital Curation Exchange. I promptly joined and began to explore their ‘space for all things ‘digital curation’ ‘. This led me to a fabulous list of resources, including a set of syllabi for courses related to digital curation. Each link brought me to an extensive reading list, some with full slide decks related to weekly in classroom presentations. My ‘to read’ list has gotten much longer – but in a good way!

On other days recently I have found myself involved in all of the following:

• review of metadata standards for digital objects
• creation of internal guidelines and requirements documents
• networking with those at other institutions to help coordinate site visits of other digitization projects
• records management planning and reviews
• learning about the OCR software available to our organization
• contemplation of the web archiving efforts of organizations and governments around the world
• reviewing my organization’s social media policies
• listening to the audio of online training available from PLANETS (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services)
• contemplation of the new Journal of Digital Media Management and their recent call for articles

My new favorite quote related to digital preservation comes from What we reckon about keeping digital archives: High level principles guiding State Records’ approach from the State Records folks in New South Wales Australia, which reads:

We will keep the Robert De Niro principle in mind when adopting any software or hardware solutions: “You want to be makin moves on the street, have no attachments, allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner” (Heat, 1995)

In other words, our digital archives technology will be designed to be sustainable given our limited resources so it will be flexible and scalable to allow us to utilise the most appropriate tools at a given time to carry out actions such as creation of preservation or access copies or monitoring of repository contents, but replace these tools with new ones easily and with minimal cost and with minimal impact.

I like that this speaks to the fact that no plan can perfectly accommodate the changes in technology coming down the line. Being nimble and assuming that change will be the only constant are key to ensuring access to our digital assets in the future.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Day of Digital Archives

I will break this down into a number of phases:

• Phase 1: Hardware
• Phase 2: Pull the data off the disk
• Phase 3: Extract the files from the disk image
• Phase 4: Migrate or Emulate

Phase 1: Hardware

Before you do anything else, you actually need a 5.25″ floppy drive of some kind connected to your computer.  I was lucky – a friend had a floppy drive for us to work with. If you aren’t that lucky, you can generally find them on eBay for around $25 (sometimes less). A friend had been helping me by trying to connect the drive to my existing PC – but we could never get the communications working properly. Finally I found Device Side Data’s 5.25″ Floppy Drive Controller which they sell online for $55. What you are purchasing will connect your 5.25 Floppy Drive to a USB 2.0 or USB 1.1 port. It comes with drivers for connection to Windows, Mac and Linux systems.

If you don’t want to mess around with installing the disk drive into our computer, you can also purchase an external drive enclosure and a tabletop power supply. Remember, you still need the USB controller too.

Update: I just found a fantastic step-by-step guide to the hardware installation of Device Side’s drive controller from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), including tons of photographs, which should help you get the hardware install portion done right.

Phase 2: Pull the data off the disk

The next step, once you have everything installed, is to extract the bits (all those ones and zeroes) off those floppies. I found that creating a new folder for each disk I was extracting made things easier. In each folder I store the disk image, a copy of the extracted original files and a folder named ‘converted’ in which to store migrated versions of the files.

Device Side provides software they call ‘Disk Image and Browse’. You can see an assortment of screenshots of this software on their website, but this is what I see after putting a floppy in my drive and launching USB Floppy -> Disk Image and Browse:

You will need to select the ‘Disk Type’ and indicate the destination in which to create your disk image. Make sure you create the destination directory before you click on the ‘Capture Disk File Image’ button. This is what it may look like in progress:

Fair warning that this won’t always work. At least the developers of the software that comes with Device Side Data’s controller had a sense of humor. This is what I saw when one of my disk reads didn’t work 100%:

If you are pressed for time and have many disks to work your way through, you can stop here and repeat this step for all the disks you have on hand.

Phase 3: Extract the files from the disk image

Now that you have a disk image of your floppy, how do you interact with it? For this step I used a free tool called Virtual Floppy Drive. After I got this installed properly, when my disk image appeared, it was tied to this program. Double clicking on the Floppy Image icon opens the floppy in a view like the one shown below:

It looks like any other removable disk drive. Now you can copy any or all of the files to anywhere you like.

Phase 4: Migrate or Emulate

The last step is finding a way to open your files. Your choice for this phase will depend on the file formats of the files you have rescued. My files were almost all WordStar word processing documents. I found a list of tools for converting WordStar files to other formats.

The best one I found was HABit version 3.

It converts Wordstar files into text or html and even keeps the spacing reasonably well if you choose that option. If you are interested in the content more than the layout, then not retaining spacing will be the better choice because it will not put artificial spaces in the middle of sentences to preserve indentation. In a perfect world I think I would capture it both with layout and without.

Summary

So my rhythm of working with the floppies after I had all the hardware and software installed was as follows:

• create a new folder for each disk, with an empty ‘converted’ folder within it
• insert floppy into the drive
• run DeviceSide’s Disk Image and Browse software (found on my PC running Windows under Start -> Programs -> USB Flopy)
• paste the full path of the destination folder
• name the disk image
• click ‘Capture Disk Image’
• double click on the disk image and view the files via vfd (virtual floppy drive)
• copy all files into the folder for that disk
• convert files to a stable format (I was going from WordStar to ASCII text) and save the files in the ‘converted’ folder

These are the detailed instructions I tried to find when I started my own data rescue project. I hope this helps you rescue files currently trapped on 5 1/4″ floppies. Please let me know if you have any questions about what I have posted here.

Update: Another great source of information is Archive Team’s wiki page on Rescuing Floppy Disks.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Rescuing 5.25″ Floppy Disks from Oblivion

I do have a request for all of you out there in the blogosphere: If you had to recommend a favorite book or journal article published in the past few years on the topic of electronic records, what would it be? Pointers to favorite reading lists are also very welcome.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Career Update

In my presentation at the Spring 2010 Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC), Whirlwind Tour of Visualization-Land,  I showed some screenshots of a tool called Gridworks. At the time, Gridworks was not available to the general public. The good news is that earlier this month Gridworks 1.0 was officially released and you can get Gridworks right now.

For those of you who didn’t see my presentation, Gridworks is tool you run locally on your computer via a web browser. It permits you to load ‘grid-shaped data’ for examination, filtering and data cleanup. That makes is sound so much less exciting than it is. The best way to get a sense of what you can do is to watch the Gridworks Videos.

What sort of data do I think there is in archives to be pumped into Gridworks? How about collection descriptive data and electronic record datasets? Since all the data is kept locally, you don’t need to worry about uploading your data to some anonymous server in order to work with it. It all stays safely on your local computer the whole time.

A quick list of things that Gridworks can do:

• Cluster data to find values that are almost the same so you can normalize your data (for example – NYC vs N.Y.C.)
• Create instant facetted browsing based on any column in your data
• Provide scatterplots of the values from any two numeric columns as well as a way to spot the most interesting combinations across many possible columns
• Reconcilliation and validation of values based on data from within Freebase.com
• Pull data from Freebase.com based on a matched column – such as the population of a country, if you have a column in your dataset with country specified
• Splitting data within a cell based on a specified delimiter
• Application of regular expressions and other simple code to data to create new columns

This list just scratches the surface, but it should give you a decent idea of the power of Gridworks. Even if the only feature you ever use is the one which lets you cluster and update your data to remove the ‘almost the same’ values, Gridworks can save you hours of painstaking data cleanup.

Why is data cleanup exciting? Because once you have nice clean data with all the attributes that are usefull to have for your data set – then you can start playing with the data in visualization tools! So go watch some Gridworks Videos, get Gridworks for yourself and start playing with data. It is free and it makes working with data fun!

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Gridworks: Super Data Cleanup and Exploration Tool

Digital lives is a joint project of UCL, British Library and University of Bristol

What? We need a better understanding of how people manage digital collections on their laptops, pdas and home computers. This is important due to the transition from paper-based personal collections to digital collections. The hope is to help people manage their digital archives before the content gets to the archives.

How? Talk to people with in-depth narrative interview. Ask people of their very first memories of information technology. When did they first use the computer? Do they have anything from that computer? How did they move the content from that computer? People enjoyed giving this narrative digital history of their lives.

Who? 25 interviewees – both established and emerging people whose works would or might be of interest to repositories of the future.

Findings?

• They created a detailed flowchart of users’ reported process of document manipulation.
• Common patterns in use of email showed that people used email across all these platforms and environments. Preserving email is not just a case of saving one account’s messages:
  • work email
  • Gmail/Yahoo
  • mails via Facebook
  • Twitter
• Documented personal information styles that relate skills dimension to data security dimension.

The one question I caught was from someone who asked if they thought people would stop using folders to organize emails and digital files with the advent of easy search across documents. The speaker answered by mentioning the revelations in the paper Don’t Take My Folders Away!. People like folders.

My Thoughts

This session got me to think again about the SAA2008 session that discussed the challenges that various archivists are facing with hybrid literary collections. Matthew Kirschenbaum also pointed me to MITH’s white paper: Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use.

I am very interested to see how ideas about preserving personal digital records evolve. For example, what happens to the idea of a ‘draft’ in a world that auto-saves and versions documents every few minutes such as Google Documents does?

With born digital photos we run into all sorts of issues. Photos that are simultaneously kept on cameras, hard drives, web based repositories (flickr, smugmug, etc) and off-site backup (like mozy.com). Images are deleted and edited differently across environments as well. A while back I wrote a post considering the impact of digital photography on the idea of photographic negatives as the ‘photographers’ sketchbooks’: Capa’s Found Images and Thoughts on Digital Photographers’ Sketchbooks.

I really liked the approach of this project in that it looked at general patterns of behavior rather than attempting to extrapolate from experiences of archivists with individual collections. This sort of research takes a lot of energy, but I am hopeful that basically creating these general user profiles will lead to best practices for preserving personal digital collections that can be applied easily as needed.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

DH2009: Digital Lives and Personal Digital Archives

Below I have include two diagrams that seek to illustrate the process of adopting new technology. I think they are both useful in aiding our thinking on this topic.

The first is the “Hype Cycle“, as proposed by analyst Jackie Fenn at Gartner Group. It breaks down the phases that new technologies move through as they progress from their initial concept through to broad acceptance in the marketplace. The generic version of the Hype Cycle diagram below is from the Wikipedia entry on hype cycle.

Each summer, Gartner comes out with a new update on Where Are We In The Hype Cycle?. Last summer, microblogging was just entering the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’, public virtual worlds were sliding down into the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ and location aware applications were climbing back up the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’. There is even a book about it: Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time.

The other diagram is the Technology Adoption Lifecycle from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. This perspective on the technology cycle is from the perspective of bringing new technology to market. How do you cross the chasm between early adopters and the general population?

Archivists need to consider new technology from two different perspectives. When to use it to further their own goals as archivists and when to address the need to preserve records being generated by new technology. A fair bit of attention has been focused on figuring out how to get archivists up to speed on new web technology. In August 2008, ArchivesNext posted about hunting for Web 2.0 related sessions at SAA2008 and Friends Told Me I Needed A Blog posted about SAA and the Hype Cycle shortly thereafter.

But how do we know when a technology is ‘important enough’ to start worrying about the records it generates? Do we focus our energy on technology that has crossed the chasm and been adopted by the ‘early majority’? Do we watch for signs of adoption by our target record creators?

I expect that the answer (such as there can be one answer!) will be community specific. As I learned in the 2007 SAA session about preserving digital records of the design community, waiting for a single clear technology or software leader to appear can lead to lost or inaccessible records. Archivists working with similar records already come together to support one another through round tables, mailing lists and conference sessions. I have noticed that I often find the most interesting presentations are those that discuss the challenges a specific user community is facing in preserving their digital records. The 2008 SAA session about hybrid analog/digital literary collections discussed issues related to digital records from authors. Those who worry about records captured in geographic information systems (GIS) were trying to sort out how to define a single GIS electronic record when last I dipped my toes into their corner of the world in the Fall of 2006.

It is not feasible to imagine archivists staying ahead of every new type of technology and attempting to design a method for archiving every possible type of digital records being created. What we can do is make it a priority for a designated archivist within every ‘vertical’ community (government, literary, architecture… etc) to keep their ear to the ground about the use of technology within that community. This could be a community of practice of its own. A group that shares info about the latest trends they are seeing while sharing their best practices for handling the latest types of records being seen.

The good news is that archivists aren’t the only ones who want to be able to preserve access to born digital records. Consider Twitter, which only provides easy access to recent tweets. A whole raft of third-party tools built to archive data from Twitter are already out there, answering the demand for a way to backup people’s tweets.

I don’t think archivists always have the luxury of waiting for technology to be adopted by the majority of people and to reach the ‘Plateau of Productivity’. If you are an archivist who works with a community  that uses cutting edge technology, you owe it to your community to stay in the loop with how they do their work now. Just because most people don’t use a specific technology doesn’t mean that an individual community won’t pick it up and use to the exclusion of more common tools.

The design community mentioned above spoke of working with those creating the tools for their community to ensure easy archiving down the line. In our fast paced world of innovation, a subset of archivists need to stay involved with the current business practices of each vertical being archived. This group can work together to identify challenges, brainstorm solutions, build relationships with the technology communities and then disseminate best practices throughout the archives community. I did find a web page for the SAA’s Technology Best Practices Task Force and its document Managing Electronic Records and Assets: A Working Bibliography, but I think that I am imagining something more ongoing, more nimble and more tied into each of the major communities that archivists must support. Am I describing something that already exists?

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Archivists and New Technology: When Do The Records Matter?

The official title of Session 203 was Getting Our Hands Dirty (and Liking It): Case Studies in Archiving Digital Manuscripts. The session chair, Catherine Stollar Peters from the New York State Archives and Records Administration, opened the session with a high level discussion of the “Theoretical Foundations of Archiving Digital Manuscripts”. The focus of this panel was preserving hybrid collections of born digital and paper based literary records. The goal was to review new ways to apply archival techniques to digital records. The presenters were all archivists without IT backgrounds who are building on others work … and experimenting. She also mentioned that this also impacts researchers, historians, and journalists.For each of the presenters, I have listed below the top challenges and recommendations. If you attended the sessions, you can skip forward to my thoughts.

Norman Mailer’s Electronic Records

• Speaker: Gabriela Redwine from University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center
• Featured Collection: Norman Mailer Papers

Challenges & Questions:

• 3 laptops and nearly 400 disks of correspondence
• While the letters might have been dictated or drafted by Mailer, all the typing, organization and revisions done on the computer were done by his assistant Judith McNally. This brings into question issues of who should be identified as the record creator. How do they represent the interaction between Mailer & McNally? Who is the creator? Co-Creators?
• All the laptops and disks were held by Judith McNally. When she died all of her possessions were seized by county officials. All the disks from her apartment were eventually recovered over a year later – but it causes issues of provenance. There is no way to know who might have viewed/changed the records.

Revelations and Recommendations:

What is accessioning and processing when dealing with electronic records? What needs to be done?

• gain custody
• gather information about creator’s (or creators’) use of the electronic records. In March 2007 they interviewed Mailer to understand the process of how they worked together. They learned that the computers were entirely McNally’s domain.
• number disks, computers (given letters), other digital media
• create disk catalog – to reflect physical information of the disk. Include color of ink.. underlining..etc. At this point the disk has never been put into a computer. This captures visual & spacial information
• gather this info from each disk: file types, directory structure & file names

The ideal for future collections of this type is archivist involvement earlier – the earlier the better.

Papers of Peter Ganick

• Speaker: Melissa Watterworth
• Featured Collection: Papers of Writer and Small Press Publisher Peter Ganick, Thomas J Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut

Challenges & Questions:

• What are the primary sources of our modern world?
• How do we acquire and preserve born digital records as trusted custodians?
  
• How do we preserve participatory media – maybe we can learn from those who work on performance art?
• How do we incrementally build our collections of electronic records? Should we be preserving the tools?
• Timing of acquisition: How actively should we be pursuing personal archives? How can we build trust with creators and get them to understand the challenges?
• Personal papers are very contextual – order matters. Does this hold true for born digital personal archives? What does the networking aspect of electronic records mean – how does it impact the idea of order?
• First attempt to accession one of Peter Ganick’s laptops and the archivist found nothing she could identify as files.. she found fragments of text – hypertext work and lots of files that had questionable provenance (downloaded from a mailing list? his creations?). She had to sit down next to him and learn about how he worked.
  
• He didn’t understand at first what her challenges were. He could get his head around the idea of metadata and issues of authenticity. He had trouble understanding what she was trying to collect.
  
• How do we arrange and keep context in an online environment?
• Biggest tech challenge: are we holding on for too long to ideas of original order and context?
• Is there a greater challenge in collecting earlier in the cycle? What if the creator puts restrictions on groupings or chooses to withdraw them?
• Do we want to create contracts with donors? Is that practical?

Revelations and Recommendations:

• Collect materials that had high value as born digital works but were at a high risk of loss.
  
• Build infrastructure to support preservation of born digital records.
• Go back to the record creator to learn more about his creative process. They used to acquire records from Ganick every few years.. that wasn’t frequent enough. He was changing the tools he used and how he worked very quickly. She made sure to communicate that the past 30 years of policy wasn’t going to work anymore. It was going to have to evolve.
• Created a ‘submission agreement’ about what kinds of records should be sent to the archive. He submitted them in groupings that made sense to him. She reviewed the records to make sure she understood what she was getting.
• Considering using PDFa to capture snapshot of virtual texts.
• Looked to model of ‘self archiving’ – common in the world of professors to do ongoing accruals.
• What about ‘embedded archivists’? There is a history of this in the performing arts and NGOs and it might be happening more and more.

George Whitmore Papers

• Speaker: Michael Forstrom: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
• Featured Collection: George Whitmore Papers

Challenges & Questions:

• How do you establish identity in a way that is complete and uncorrupted? How do you know it is authentic? How do you make an authentic copy? Are these requirements as unreasonable and unachievable?

Revelations and Recommendations:

• Refresh and replicate files on a regular schedule.
• They have had good success using Quick View Plus to enable access to many common file formats. On the downside, it doesn’t support everything and since it is proprietary software there are no long term guarantees.
• In some cases they had to send CP/M files to a 3rd party to have them converted into WordStar and have the ascii normalized.
• Varied acquisition notes.. and accession records.. loan form with the 3rd party who did the conversion that summarized the request.. they did NOT provide information about what software was used to convert from CP/M to DOS. This would be good information to capture in the future.
• Proposed an expansion of the standards to include how electronic records were migrated in the <processinfo> processing notes.

Questions & Answers

Question: As part of a writers community, what do we tell people who want to know what they can DO about their records. They want technical information.. they want to know what to keep. Current writers are aware they are creating their legacy.

Answer: Michael: The single best resource is the interPARES 2 Creator Guidelines. The Beineke has adapted them to distrubute to authors. Melissa: Go back to your collection development policies and make sure to include functions you are trying to document (like process.. distribution networks). Also communities of practice (acid free bits) are talking about formats and guidelines like that Gabriela: People often want to address ‘value’. Right now we don’t know how to evaluate the value of electronic drafts – it is up to authors.

Question: Cal Lee: Not a question so much as an idea: the world of digital forensics and security and the ‘order of volatility’ dictate that everyone should always be making a full disk copy bit by bit before doing anything else.

Comment: Comment on digital forensic tools – there is lots of historical and editing history of documents in the software… also delete files are still there.

Question: Have you seen examples of materials that are coming into the archive where the digital materials are working drafts for a final paper version? This is in contrast to others are electronic experiments.

Answer: Yes, they do think about this. It can effect arrangement and how the records are described. The formats also impact how things are preserved.

Question: Access issues? Are you letting people link to them from the finding aids? How are the documents authenticity protected.

Answer: DSpace gives you a new version anytime you want it (the original bitstream) .. lots of cross linking supports people finding things from more than one path. In some cases documents (even electronic) can only be accessed from within the on site reading room.

Question: What is your relationship is like with your IT folks?

Answer: Gabriela: Our staff has been very helpful. We use ‘legacy’ machines to access our content. They build us computers. They are also not archivists, so there is a little divide about priorities and the kind of information that I am interested in.. but it has been a very productive conversation.

Question: (For Melissa) Why didn’t you accept Peter’s email (Melissa had said they refused a submission of email from Peter because it didn’t have research value)?

Answer: The emails that included personal medical emails were rejected. The agreement with Peter didn’t include an option to selectively accept (or weed) what was given.

Question: In terms of gathering information from the creators.. do you recommend a formal/recorded interview? Or a more informal arrangement in which you can contact them anytime on an ongoing basis?

Answer: Melissa: We do have more formal methods – ‘documentation study’ style approaches. We might do literature reviews.. Ultimately the submission agreement is the most formal document we have. Gabriela: It depends on what the author is open to.. formal documentation is best.. but if they aren’t willing to be recorded, then you take what you can get!

My Thoughts

I am very curious to see how best practices evolve in this arena. I wonder how stories written using something like Google Documents, which auto-saves and preserves all versions for future examination, will impact how scholars choose to evaluate the evolution of documents. There have already been interesting examinations of the evolution of collaborative documents. Consider this visual overview of the updates to the Wikipedia entry for Sarah Palin created by Dan Cohen and discussed in his blog post Sarah Palin, Crowdsourced. Another great example of this type of visual experience of a document being modified was linked to in the comments of that post: Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie. If you haven’t seen this before – take a few minutes to click through and watch the screencast which actually lets you watch as a Wikipedia page is modified over time.

While I can imagine that there will be many things to sort out if we try to start keeping these incredibly frequent snapshot save logs (disk space? quantity of versions? authenticity? author preferences to protect the unpolished versions of their work?) – I still think that being able to watch the creative process this way will still be valuable in some situations. I also believe that over time new tools will be created to automate the generation of document evolution visualization and movies (like the two I link to above) that make it easy for researchers to harness this sort of information.

Perhaps there will be ways for archivists to keep only certain parts of the auto-save versioning. I can imagine an author who does not want anyone to see early drafts of their writing (as is apparently also the case with architects and early drafts of their designs) – but who might be willing for the frequency of updates to be stored. This would let researchers at least understand the rhythm of the writing – if not the low level details of what was being changed.

I love the photo I found for the top of this post. I admit to still having stacks of 3 1/2 floppy disks. I have email from the early days of BITNET.  I have poems, unfinished stories, old resumes and SQL scripts. For the moment my disks live in a box on the shelf labeled ‘Old Media’. Lucky me – I at least still have a computer with a floppy drive that can read them!

Image Credit: oh messy disks by Blude via flickr.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2008, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SAA2008: Preservation and Experimentation with Analog/Digital Hybrid Literary Collections (Session 203)

Olympics.org uses the tag line “Official Website of the Olympic Movement” and include information about The International Olympic Committee’s Historical Archives. The even have an Olympic Medals Database with all the results from all the games.

The most detailed list of Olympics archives that I could find is the Olympic Studies International Directory listing of Archives & Olympic Heritage sites. It is from this page that I found my way to records from the Sydney Olympic Park Authority.

The Olympic Television Archive Bureau (OTAB) website explains that this UK based company “has over 30,000 hours of the most sensational sports footage ever seen, uniquely available in one library”  and aims to provide “prompt fulfilment of your Olympic footage requirements”.

Then I thought to dig into the Internet Archive. What a great treasure trove for all sorts of interesting Olympic bits!

First I found a Universal Newsreel from the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo (embedded below).

I also found a 2002 Computer Chronicles episode Computer Technology and the Olympics which explores the “high-tech innovations that ran the 2002 Winter Olympic Games” (embedded below).

Other fun finds included a digitized copy of a book titled The Olympic games, Stockholm, 1912 and the oldest snapshot of the Beijing 2008 website (from December of 2006). Seeing the 2008 Summer Games pages in the archive made me curious. I found the old site of the official Athens summer games from 2004 which kindly states: “The site is no longer available, please visit http://www.olympic.org or http://en.beijing2008.com/”. The Internet Archive has a bit more than that on the athens2004.com archive page – though some clicking through definitely made it clear that not all of the site was crawled. Lucky for us we can still see the Athens 2004 Olympics E-Cards you could send!

Then I turned to explore NARA‘s assorted web resources. I found a few photos on the Digital Vaults website (search on the keyword Olympics).  A search in the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) generates a long list – including footage of the US National Rifle Team in the 1960 Olympics in Italy.

My favorite items from NARA’s collections are in the Access to Archival Databases (AAD). First I found this telegram from the American Embassy in Ottawa to the Secretary of State in Washington DC (Document ID # 1975OTTAWA02204) sent in June 1975:

 1. EMBASSY APPRECIATES DEPARTMENT’S EFFORTS TO ASSIST CONGEN IN CARING FOR VIPS WHO CERTAINLY WILL ARRIVE FOR 1976 OLYMPIC GAMES WITHOUT TICKETS OR LODGING. HAS DEPARTMENT EXPLORED POSSIBILITY OF OBTAINING 4,000 TICKETS ON CONSIGNMENT BASIS FROM MONTGOMERY WARD, WITH UNDERSTANDING THAT, AS TICKETS ARE SOLD, PROCEEDS WILL BE REMITTED? PERHAPS SUCH AN ARRANGEMENT COULD BE WORKED OUT WITH FURTHER UNDERSTANDING THAT UNSOLD TICKETS BE RETURNED TO MONTGOMERY WARD AT SOME SPECIFIED DATE PRIOR TO BEGINNING OF EVENTS.

2. EMBASSY WILL FURNISH AMOUNT REQUIRED TO RESERVE SIX DOUBLE ROOMS FOR PERIOD OF GAMES. AT PRESENT HOTEL OWNERS AND OLYMPIC OFFICIALS ARE IN DISAGREEMENT AS TO AMOUNTS THAT MAY BE CHARGED FOR ROOMS DURING OLYMPIC PERIOD. NEGOTIATIONS ARE CURRENTLY BEING CARRIED OUT AND AS SOON AS ROOM RATES HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED, QUEEN ELIZABETH HOTEL MANAGER WILL ADVISE US OF THEIR REQUIREMENTS TO RESERVE THE SIX DOUBLE ROOMS.

Immediately beneath that one, I found this telegram from October 1975 (Document Number 1975STATE258427):

SUBJECT:INVITATION TO PRESIDENT FORD AND SECRETARY
KISSINGER TO ATTEND OLYMPIC GAMES IN AUSTRIA,
FEBRUARY 4-15, 1976

THE EMBASSY IS REQUESTED TO INFORM THE GOA THAT MUCH TO THE PRESIDENT’S AND THE SECRETARY’S REGRET, THE DEMANDS ON THEIR SCHEDULES DURING THAT PERIOD WILL NOT MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR THEM TO ATTEND THE WINTER GAMES. KISSINGER

There are definitely a lot of moving parts to Olympic Archival Records. So many nations participate.  New host countries with the option to handle records however they see fit. I explored this whole question two years ago and came up against the fact that control over the archival records produced by each Olympics was really in the hands of the hosting committee and their country. A quick glance down the list of Archives & Olympic Heritage sites I mentioned above gives you an idea of all the different corners of the world in which one can find Olympic Archival Records in both government and independent repositories. Given that clearly not all Olympic Games are represented in that list, it makes me wonder what we will see on this front from China now that the closing ceremony is complete.

I also suspect that with each Olympic Games we increase the complexity of the electronic records being generated. Would it be worthwhile to create an online collection for each games – as has been done for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank or The September 11 Digital Archive, but extend it to include access to Olympic electronic records data sets? The shear quantity of information is likely overwhelming – but I suspect there is a lot of interesting information that people would love to examine.

Update: For those of you (like me) who wondered what Montgomery Ward had to do with Olympic Tickets – take a look at Tickets For The ’76 Olympics Go On Sale Shortly At Montgomery Ward over in the Sports Illustrated online SI Vault. Sports Illustrated’s Vault is definitely another interesting source of information about the Olympic Games. If my post above has made you nostalgic for Olympics gone by – definitely take a look at the current Summer Games feature on their front page. I couldn’t figure out a permanent link to this feature, but if I ever do I will update this post later.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

After The Games Are Over: Olympic Archival Records

As announced in SAA’s online newsletter, the Official Proceedings of the New Skills for a Digital Era Colloquium, edited by Richard Pearce-Moses and Susan E. Davis, is now available for free download. Published under Creative Commons Attribution, this document is 143 pages long and includes all the original case studies. I have a lot of reading to do!

The meat of the proceedings consists of a 32 page ‘Knowledge and Skills Inventory’ and a page and a half of reflections – both co-authored by Richard Pearce-Moses and Susan E. Davis. The Keynote Address by Margaret Hedstrom titled ‘Are We Ready for New Skills Yet?’ is also included.

I am very pleased with how much access has been provided to these materials. These topics are clearly of interest to many beyond the 60 individuals who were able to take part in the original gathering. As an archival studies student it has often been a great source of frustration that so few of the archives related conferences publish proceedings of any kind. It is part of what has driven me to attempt to assemble exhaustive session summaries for those sessions I have personally attended at the past two SAA Annual meetings (see SAA2006 and SAA2007). I think that the Unofficial Conference Wiki for SAA2007 was also a big step in the right direction and I hope it will continue to evolve and improve for the upcoming SAA2008 annual meeting in San Francisco.

The course I elected to take this term is dedicated to studying Communities of Practice. This announcement about the New Skills for a Digital Era’s proceedings has me thinking about the community of practice that seems to currently be taking form across the library, archives and records management communities. I will share more thoughts on this as I sort through them myself.

Finally, a question for anyone reading this post who attended the colloquium: Are you still discussing the case studies with others from that session two years ago? If not, do you wish you were?

Image Credit: The image at the top of this post is from the New Skills for a Digital Era website.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

New Skills for a Digital Era: Official Proceedings Now Available

On the Digital Preservation page of the Dioscuri website I found this paragraph on their goals:

To prevent a digital black hole, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands, and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project to research and develop a solution. Both institutions have a large amount of traditional documents and are very familiar with preservation over the long term. However, the amount of digital material (publications, archival records, etc.) is increasing with a rapid pace. To manage them is already a challenge. But as cultural heritage organisations, more has to be done to keep those documents safe for hundreds of years at least.

They are nothing if not ambitious… they go on to state:

Although many people recognise the importance of having a digital preservation strategy based on emulation, it has never been taken into practice. Of course, many emulators already exist and showed the usefulness and advantages it offer. But none of them have been designed to be digital preservation proof. For this reason the National Library and Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project on emulation.

The aim of the emulation project is to develop a new preservation strategy based on emulation.

Dioscuri is part of Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access via NETworked Services) – run by the Planets consortium and coordinated by the British Library. The Dioscuri team has created an open source emulator that can be ported to any hardware that can run a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Individual hardware components are implemented via separate modules. These modules should make it possible to mimic many different hardware configurations without creating separate programs for every possible combination.

You can get a taste of the big thinking that is going into this work by reviewing the program overview and slide presentations from the first Emulation Expert Meeting (EEM) on digital preservation that took place on October 20th, 2006.

In the presentation given by Geoffrey Brown from Indiana University titled Virtualizing the CIC Floppy Disk Project: An Experiment in Preservation Using Emulation I found the following simple answer to the question ‘Why not just migrate?’:

• Loss of information — e.g. word edits

• Loss of fidelity — e.g. WordPerfect to Word isn’t very good

• Loss of authenticity — users of migrated document need access to original to verify authenticity

• Not always possible — closed proprietary formats

• Not always feasible — costs may be too high

• Emulation may necessary to enable migration

After reading through Emulation at the German National Library, presented by Tobias Steinke, I found my way to the kopal website. With their great tagline ‘Data into the future’, they state their goal is “…to develop a technological and organizational solution to ensure the long-term availability of electronic publications.” The real gem for me on that site is what they call the kopal demonstrator. This is a well thought out Flash application that explains the kopal project’s ‘procedures for archiving and accessing materials’ within the OAIS Reference Model framework. But it is more than that – if you are looking for a great way to get your (or someone else’s) head around digital archiving, software and related processes – definitely take a look. They even include a full Glossary.

I liked what I saw in Defining a preservation policy for a multimedia and software heritage collection, a pragmatic attempt from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a presentation by Grégory Miura, but felt like I was missing some of the guts by just looking at the slides. I was pleased to discover what appears to be a related paper on the same topic presented at IFLA 2006 in Seoul titled: Pushing the boundaries of traditional heritage policy: Maintaining long-term access to multimedia content by introducing emulation and contextualization instead of accepting inevitable loss . Hurrah for NOT ‘accepting inevitable loss’.

Vincent Joguin’s presentation, Emulating emulators for long-term digital objects preservation: the need for a universal machine, discussed a virtual machine project named Olonys. If I understood the slides correctly, the idea behind Olonys is to create a “portable and efficient virtual processor”. This would provide an environment in which to run programs such as emulators, but isolate the programs running within it from the disparities between the original hardware and the actual current hardware. Another benefit to this approach is that only the virtual processor need be ported to new platforms rather than each individual program or emulator.

Hilde van Wijngaarden presented an Introduction to Planets at EEM. I also found another introductory level presentation that was given by Jeffrey van der Hoeven at wePreserve in September of 2007 titled Dioscuri: emulation for digital preservation.

The wePreserve site is a gold mine for presentations on these topics. They bill themselves as “the window on the synergistic activities of DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR), and Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services (PLANETS).” If you have time and curiosity on the subject of digital preservation, take a glance down their home page and click through to view some of the presentations.

On the site of The International Journal of Digital Curation there is a nice ten page paper that explains the most recent results of the Dioscuri project. Emulation for Digital Preservation in Practice: The Results was published in December 2007. I like being able to see slides from presentations (as linked to above), but without the notes or audio to go with them I am often left staring at really nice diagrams wondering what the author’s main point was. The paper is thorough and provides lots of great links to other reading, background and related projects.

There is a lot to dig into here. It is enough to make me wish I had a month (maybe a year?) to spend just following up on this topic alone. I found my struggle to interpret many of the Power Point slide decks that have no notes or audio very ironic. Here I was hunting for information about the preservation of born digital records and I kept finding that the records of the research provided didn’t give me the full picture. With no context beyond the text and images on the slides themselves, I was left to my own interpretation of their intended message. While I know that these presentations are not meant to be the official records of this research, I think that the effort obviously put into collecting and posting them makes it clear that others are as anxious as I to see this information.

The best digital preservation model in the world will only preserve what we choose to save. I know the famous claim on the web is that ‘content is king’ – but I would hazard to suggest that in the cultural heritage community ‘context is king’.

What does this have to do with Dioscuri and emulators? Just that as we solve the technical problems related to preservation and access, I believe that we will circle back around to realize that digital records need the same careful attention to appraisal, selection and preservation of context as ‘traditional’ records. I would like to believe that the huge hurdles we now face on the technical and process side of things will fade over time due to the immense efforts of dedicated and brilliant individuals. The next big hurdle is the same old hurdle – making sure the records we fight to preserve have enough context that they will mean anything to those in the future. We could end up with just as severe a ‘digital black hole’ due to poorly selected or poorly documented records as we could due to records that are trapped in a format we can no longer access. We need both sides of the coin to succeed in digital preservation.

Did I mention the part about ‘Hurray for open source emulator projects with ambitious goals for digital preservation’? Right. I just wanted to be clear about that.

Image Credit: The image included at the top of this post was taken from a screen shot of Dioscuri itself, the original version of which may be seen here.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Digital Preservation via Emulation – Dioscuri and the Prevention of Digital Black Holes