Planning

This panel from the Digital Preservation 2014 meeting features brief presentations about cooperative approaches to digital stewardship from the Academic Preservation Trust, the Research Data Alliance, the Preserving Digital Objects with Restricted Resources (PoWRR) and the Five Colleges Consortium followed by a panel discussion comparing and contrasting models for collaboration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMXUr1ov5mI

When evaluating cloud storage providers, it is dangerous to assume such services are only storage and therefore uncomplicated or that requirements for storage are obvious and therefore inherently met by the service provider. Experience with any technology selection will prove the opposite. No two services are the same and the variance between services often represents the difference between successful implementation and a failed initiative. Never purchase a service without proper vetting; uninformed decisions risk loss of time, money, and even assets.

This is the final issue of the TIMBUS newsletter so it’s a good time to reflect on how TIMBUS has offered new insights and capabilities for digital preservation and business continuity. These can be summed up in a single slogan: more than data!

Professional Outreach and Advocacy

It’s important for archivists to serve as advocates for their profession, especially in the workplace! These are some tools for advocating for your position, department, and collections.
Host a Personal Digital Archiving Workshop

The Society of Georgia Archivists, the Atlanta chapter of ARMA International, and the Georgia Library Association partnered in July 2014 to create personal digital archiving workshop materials that you can reuse to teach a workshop at your own workplace.

On-line scholarly communications: vd Sompel and Treloar sketch the future playing field of digital archives

This deliverable of the 4C project work package “WP4—Enhancement” proposes a pragmatic method for estimating costs of digital curation in two different scenarios:

Appeared in Proceedings of the 22th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS 2014).
For three decades, Kryder’s Law correctly predicted an exponential increase in bit density on disk platters, leading to an exponential drop in cost per gigabyte. However, disk now is over 7 times as expensive as it would have been had Kryder’s law continued unchanged from 2010, and industry projections suggest that in 2020 the gap will reach 200 times.

Preserving digital data for the long term is a complex business that requires sustained activity. It needs to be embedded in an organisation with a dedicated budget and applied as a business as usual activity.

Unfortunately we're a long way from this ideal, and a lot of digital preservation work is dependent on external grant funding. Transient projects can all too easily produce transient outputs, so how can we make sure the results are more effective and more sustainable?

Audio-visual resources in digital formats present even more challenges to preservation than do digital text resources. Reformatting information to a common file format can be difficult and may require specialists to ensure it is done with no loss in integrity. While digital text may still be usable if done imperfectly (e.g. skewed but still readable pages), even small errors in digital A/V files could render the material unusable.