California Digital Library » Stephen Abrams

DMPTool wins Sautter award

Stephen Abrams — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 22:25:44 +0000

The DMPTool, http://dmptool.org/, has won a Larry L. Sautter Golden Award for Innovation in Information Technology. The Sautter Awards were established by the University of California’s Information Technology Leadership Council in 2000 and are awarded annually to “encourage and recognize innovative deployment of information technology in support of the University’s mission.” The DMPTool is one of five winners of the Sautter Award this year.

The DMPTool is an online service for creating data management plans, and was developed in response to requirements from funding agencies that researchers include data management plans in their grant proposals. The DMPTool now supports requirements of 5 major US federal funders, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Studies, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The DMPTool also supports one private funder, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

The DMPTool is available to all researchers, regardless of institutional affiliation, and allows them to:
• Create ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies
• Meet funder requirements for data management plans
• Get step-by-step instructions and guidance for your data
• Learn about resources and services available at local institutions to help fulfill the data management requirements of grants

The DMPTool was developed by UC3 in collaboration with NSF-funded DataONE project, Digital Curation Centre, Smithsonian Institution, UCLA Library, UCSD Libraries, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Virginia Library. By joining together, these partners were able to develop the tool efficiently and quickly by consolidating their expertise. The primary goal of the partnership is to support researchers and keep their grant proposals competitive, while highlighting services and resources that we provide to researchers.

The award will be presented at the annual UC Computing Services Conference (UCCSC) at UC Berkeley in August.

Unified Digital Format Registry (UDFR) now available

Stephen Abrams — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:02:10 +0000

The University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the CDL is pleased to announce the availability of the Unified Digital Format Registry (UDFR), http://udfr.org/.
A deep understanding of digital formats is necessary to support the long-term preservation of digital assets, as it facilitates the preservation of the information content of those assets, rather than just their bit stream representations. A format is the set of syntactic and semantic rules that govern the mapping between information and the bits that represent that information. The UDFR is a new semantically-enabled, community-supported open source platform for the collection, long-term management, and dissemination of the significant properties of formats of interest to the preservation community. The UDFR builds upon and “unifies” the function and holdings of two existing registry solutions: PRONOM, from the UK National Archives; and GDFR (Global Digital Format Registry), from Harvard University . While these services rely on older relational and XML database technology, the UDFR uses a semantic database in which all information is represented in RDF form and exposed as Linked Data for interoperability with the evolving semantic web. Use of the UDFR is open to the public, although contribution or editing of information requires prior self-service account registration.
The UDFR was developed by UC3 with funding from the Library of Congress as part of its National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP).
The UDFR is expected to become a key piece of preservation infrastructure of use to the international preservation, curation, and repository communities. The information that it manages is important for purposes of preservation risk analysis, planning, and intervention.

Digital preservation: content now more secure than ever

Stephen Abrams — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 21:36:59 +0000

In order to provide a greater level of preservation assurance to its customers, the University of California Curation Center (UC3) has upgraded the Merritt curation repository with a new version of the Fixity micro-service. “Fixity” refers to a method of verifying the bit-level integrity of digital content through the use of message digest numbers created by an algorithm that represent that file uniquely (or checksums). Every piece of content in Merritt receives an initial digest value as the result of the successful processing of the Ingest micro-service. (This is either a validated digest supplied by the content submitter or a digest newly computed by the Ingest service itself.) Once established, these values are then continuously recalculated and verified by the Fixity service. If any bit-level corruption is uncovered, the damaged asset can be replaced with a verified copy from a Merritt replication site. (In addition to the primary copy hosted in the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) data center, all Merritt content is automatically replicated to the UC Berkeley data center. UC3 is currently investigating options for a third replica, possibly hosted in cloud storage.) Work is now underway to expose the fixity status of managed content in the Merritt User Interface (UI) at the collection, object, version, and file level to provide collection managers and curators with summary view of content “health”.

The new Fixity service is able to perform its function with significant increases in performance and function over its predecessor. Among the new features are support for wide range of digest algorithms –each exhibiting a particular trade-off between cryptographic security and computational efficiency; flexible reporting (although currently restricted to UC3 administrative systems and users); and the ability to validate content outside of Merritt as long as it is addressable with a stable URL. The technical specification for the new service is available at <http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/curation/fixity.html>.

For more information please contact <uc3@ucop.edu>.

Spreading the Word about JHOVE2: Tutorial Delivered in Salt Lake City, Rome

Stephen Abrams — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:41:38 +0000

For the past two years the University of California Curation Center (UC3) has been partnering with Portico and Stanford on a project to develop JHOVE2, an open source format-aware characterization application and framework. The goals of the project were to address a number of known deficiencies in design and implementation of the original JHOVE tool (such as API simplification, increased performance, and extensive customization options), as well as adding significant new features, such as the automatic recursive characterization of objects arbitrarily nested in containers (such as directories or Zip files), aggregate-level format identification of complex objects composed of multiple files (such as ESRI Shapefile), and rules-based assessment for determinations of acceptability. (More information is available at http://jhove2.org/.)

Following the initial production release in April and part of UC3’s ongoing outreach effort, JHOVE2 project staff presented a full day tutorial on JHOVE2 at the IS&T Archiving conference taking place in Salt Lake City the week of May 16, 2011. Tutorial topics included a general introduction to characterization, background on the JHOVE2 project (goals, methodology, deliverables), new JHOVE2 concepts and architecture, installation and configuration, use of the assessment feature, APIs and module development, and community building and sustainability. The tutorial attendees were highly engaged and included representatives from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), National Library of Medicine, National Library of Australia, National Library of New Zealand, and Ex Libris.

A similar workshop aimed at the European user community will be held the week of May 23 in Rome. This four day workshop, co-sponsored by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (in the process of a large digital publishing initiative) and the Open Planets Foundation (an organization established to provide practical solutions and expertise in digital preservation, building on the research and development outputs of the Planets project), will offer an intensive introduction to digital preservation issues (the first two days) and hands-on use of JHOVE2 (the second two days).

CDL Staff at IFLA Conference

Stephen Abrams — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:02:19 +0000

By Stephen Abrams, CDL Manager for Digital Preservation Technology

Margaret Low, software engineer in Digital Preservation, recently returned from the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) Annual Conference in Quebec, where she presented a very well-received paper on the CDL preservation infrastructure. The paper is available for download at: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla74/papers/084-Low-en.pdf.