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Портал был создан при финансовой поддержке Российского гуманитарного научного фонда (РГНФ), проект № 07-04-12140в.

(c) "Информационные технологии и письменное наследие", 2008-2020

Long Term Preservation of Digital Content: Issues and Approaches PDF Печать E-mail
Автор(ы): Милена Петрова Добрева   
28.06.2008 г.

icon Тезисы в формате RTF (41.82 kB 2008-07-15 16:26:14)  icon Тезисы в формате PDF (77 kB 2008-07-15 16:26:39)

Introduction

Digital preservation is an issue that affects every citizen in the information society. It covers a whole spectrum of issues, from long-term access to and use of personal digital objects to the complex area of information objects’ lifecycle management in big institutions from the engineering, governmental, research and cultural heritage sectors. E-government, e‑science and e-culture greatly depend on proper storage and access to huge collections of digital resources, which should not be affected by changes in the technological environment.

The importance of this area had been recognised by the European Commission, which launched the Digital Library Initiative as one of its four flagship initiatives in the i2010 programme.[1] Digitalization, accessibility online and digital preservation are the basic areas of work in the digital libraries domain. From these three areas, digital preservation has a special place because it guarantees the interoperability of the digital resources in the future.

Despite its rapidly increasing role, Digital Preservation area has not yet reached a level of maturity similar to its constituent research domains. It is a multidisciplinary area involving researchers and practitioners from several fields ranging from Information Retrieval to Library and Archival Science, Content Management, Modelling, Simulation, Human-Computer Interaction, Scholarly Communication and Natural Language Processing. In particular, an issue which needs to be addressed is automation in digital preservation, as identified by the DigitalPreservationEurope’s research roadmap published in the second half of 2007.[2] It highlighted the urgent need for accelerated development in automating digital repository processes.

Automation in Digital Preservation

The field of digital preservation has been developing at an increasing pace in recent years. However, digital preservation is still not exploiting the potential of automated methods. One of the fundamental areas in digital preservation automation is information object lifecycle management, which includes extraction and handling of preservation metadata.

In the preservation metadata field much of the work has concentrated on modelling metadata schemas, paying comparatively little attention to the development and integration of automated extraction and management tools.[3] Current research in automated metadata extraction, on the other hand, has been dealing with metadata in the general sense, not with metadata designed to support preservation.

The current practice reflects several influences. On the one hand, we face an increasing constriction of the “metadata bottleneck”:[4] it is a cause for alarm that a growing amount of born-digital and digitally reformatted material does not have any metadata attached at all (see, for example, the research of Zhang and Iastram, who found that in a sample of 2400 websites only 62.83% contained embedded HTML metadata[5]).  On the other hand, the poor quality of metadata continues to be an obstacle. Studies show that the quality of manually-created metadata depends heavily on the institutional framework, personal motivation and competence,[6] and metadata redundancy is emerging as an increasingly common problem.[7] Redundancy appears in two ways: first when various institutions create metadata for the same digital object (lack of coordination), and second when different digital objects are given similar metadata (digital objects created with minor variations). Without adequate metadata, management of digital entities is not feasible, and the manual creation of such metadata is resource intensive. This makes it obvious that automatic generation of metadata is an absolute must. 

The scepticism towards the implementation of automated preservation extraction methods may be caused by the information retrieval results reported in research – precision between 0.79 and 0.96 and recall between 0.62 and 0.99, with different values for different metadata elements. Taking into account the importance of preservation metadata, and the risks of working with digital objects which do not have any metadata at all, even this seems to be a better option than waiting for the invention of the method which would guarantee 100% accuracy.

To achieve progress and establish a common framework, an analysis of the shortcomings of automated metadata creation should be combined with a study of the possibilities for developing combined approaches based on analysing manual versus automated extraction of different elements and on adding intelligent elements to automated metadata extraction methods, such as the analysis of the genre of the document to select the best automated extraction tool, as well as implementing self-documenting components into the metadata lifecycle to assist the process.

Automated metadata extraction is only one automation issue, but there are also further applications which need to be developed in order to automate overall digital object lifecycle management. The discussion of possible application scenarios for various digital preservation tasks will make it possible to address the multifaceted nature of digital preservation.

Conclusion

The paper will discuss the following topics:

-        What is the real place of automation in digital preservation?

-        How should we better understand user needs? How adequate to the user needs are the current approaches?

-        What are the general and specific application scenarios in digital preservation?

-        What are the recent achievements of DigitalPreservationEurope, Planets, CASPAR and SHAMAN projects supported by the European Commission?

Special place will be given to the question of what preservation elements should be considered by projects aimed at developing digital resources. This is important in order to build awareness of the importance of long-term preservation while planning the development of new resources in order to enhance their sustainability.

 

Длительное сохранение цифрового контента: проблемы и подходы

М. П. Добрева

Университет Стратклайд, Глазго, Шотландия, Великобритация

Институт математики и информатики Болгарской АН, София, Болгария

Долгосрочное хранение научных и культурных ценностей является важной предпосылкой успешного развития информационного общества. Оно связано не только с физической сохранностью данных, но и с гарантией возможности их использования программным обеспечением будущего. При этом особо важную роль имеют понятия интеграции, аутентичности, достоверности данных. В работе рассмотрены основные направления работ в области долгосрочного хранения электронный ресурсов на примерах европейских проектов CASPAR, DigitalPreservationEurope, Planets и SHAMAN.


[1] European Union. i2010: Digital Libraries Initiative. URL: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/index_en.htm.

[2] DPE: Digital Preservation Europe. EC Contract No. IST-2005-34762. [Online]. URL: http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu.

[3] Lavoie, B., Gartner R.: Preservation Metadata. A joint report of OCLC, Oxford Library Services, and the   Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), published electronically as a DPC Technology Watch Report (No. 05-  01). URL: http://www.dpconline.org/docs/reports/dpctw05-01.pdf (2005).

[4]  Liddy, E.D.: A Breadth of NLP Applications. IN: ELSENEWS of the European Network in Human Language Technologies. Winter. (2002).

[5]  Zhang, J. Jastram, I.: A Study of the Metadata Creation Behavior of Different User Groups on the Internet. Information Processing & Management, Vol. 42, pp. 1099–1122. (2006).

[6]  Crystal A., Greenberg J.: Usability of a Metadata Creation Application for Resource Authors, Library & Information Science Research V. 27(2), pp. 177–189 (2005).

[7]  Foulonneau M.: Information Redundancy across Metadata Collections. Information Processing & Management. Vol. 43(3), Special Issue on Heterogeneous and Distributed IR, pp. 740–751 (2007).

 
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