Digital Curation

The first ever Boston cohort of the National Digital Stewardship Residency kicked off in September, and the five residents have been busy drinking from the digital preservation firehose at our respective institutions. You can look forward to individual blog posts from each resident as this 9-month residency goes on, but we decided to start with a group post to outline each of our projects as they’ve developed so far. (To keep up with us on a more regular basis, keep an eye on our digital preservation test kitchen blog.)
Sam DeWitt – Tufts University

A sizeable canon of research exists on cost modeling for digital curation. Although this research typically emphasizes the cost and complexity of digital curation and preservation, it is in many ways preliminary; the tools and methods developed have seen little uptake. Tools to manage and estimate costs, for example, have not been integrated into other digital curation processes or tools. The question is why? To answer it, a consortium of 13 European partners and cost modeling specialists launched the Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation (4C) project.

Data curation is increasingly important. Our previous work on a Kepler curation package has demonstrated advantages that come from automating data curation pipelines by using workflow systems. However, manually designed curation workflows can be error-prone and inefficient due to a lack of user understanding of the workflow system, misuse of actors, or human error. Correcting problematic workflows is often very time-consuming. A more proactive workflow system can help users avoid such pitfalls.

Two years after the MIT Libraries’ Institute Archives were chosen as the stewards of Noam Chomsky’s personal papers, more than 260 boxes of the professor emeritus’ materials have been transferred, organized, and re-housed in the archives.
A new website, “Unbox the Chomsky Archive,” offers a preview of some of the unique materials found in the collection, as well as a way to support the archival project.
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The next steps of the archival project will be to:

This new checklist aims to help UK Higher Education Institutions aid their researchers in making informed choices about what research data to keep. It offers practical steps to apply the more general guidance in 'How to Appraise & Select Research Data for Curation', and 'How to Develop Research Data Management Services', and is available here (along with those guides). The checklist can be adapted to highlight options that your institution offers researchers about storing and sharing data they produce.

BIBFRAME Testing and Implementation

OCLC Research staff observed that while there are a lot of discussions about changes in the scholarly record, the discussions are fragmented. They set out to provide a high-level framework to facilitate future discussion. That work is represented in our Evolving Scholarly Record report and formed the basis for an international workshop.

As archives increasingly process born-digital collections one thing is clear; processing digital collections often involves working with tons of email. There is already some great work exploring how to deal with email, but given that it is such a significant problem area it is great to see work focused on developing tools to make sense of this material. Of particular concern is how email is simultaneously so ubiquitous and so messy. I’ve heard cases of repositories needing to deal with hundreds of millions of email objects in a single collection.

Shannon Mattern discusses the aesthetics of preservation at the annual Digital Preservation meeting.

Elizabeth Griffin. Elizabeth is an astrophysicist at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria Canada. She is Chair of the International Astronomical Union Task Force for the Preservation and Digitization of Photographic Plates, and Chair of the Data at Risk Task Group of the International Council for Science Committee on Data for Science and Technology. Griffin presented on Preserving and Rescuing Heritage Information on Analogue Media (PDF) at Digital Preservation 2014.