Digital Preservation Program Update

By Kirsten Neilsen, Digital Preservation Service Manager

Digital Preservation Repository (DPR)
The Digital Preservation Repository (DPR) provides the UC Libraries with a shared solution for the preservation, management, and controlled dissemination of digital collections.

To date, UC Libraries have successfully moved about 250 GB – more than 55,000 objects – into the production DPR environment, with several projects on deck. Thus far objects ingested have been predominantly image and text files, but DPR can ingest video and audio files as well.

With core ingest, storage, and management functionality in production, the Digital Preservation Group is developing additional preservation services, such as remote data replication, and enhancing reporting functionality. Research into data storage and data transfer, issues central to digital preservation, is ongoing.

Web-at-Risk Update
In collaboration with archivists and librarians from a number of UC (and other) libraries, the Web-at-Risk program is developing the Web Archiving Service, a set of tools for capturing and preserving at-risk materials from the web. Development of the service proceeds in a series of phased pilot tests. During each pilot release, the project’s curators test functionality and suggest improvements. Feedback from curators is incorporated into the subsequent releases.

Development of the Web Archiving Service (WAS) is progressing toward the 4th of 7 releases, scheduled for July. The upcoming release includes collection building features that allow curators to selectively add captured web content to a thematic collection.  The release will also include website change analysis tools to help curators identify files on a site that have changed or that are new. The Web-at-Risk curators, a group of approximately 30 UC, Stanford, NYU and University of North Texas government information specialists, will be meeting in Oakland at the end of May.  A smaller group of curators will be taking part in usability testing sessions on the new WAS interface.

The most recent WAS release took place in January and included the ability to better analyze capture results and to explore results by file type.  The analysis of that pilot test is complete, and is posted on the Web-at-Risk wiki: http://wiki.cdlib.org/WebAtRisk/ .

The Web-at-Risk program recently received additional funding from the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program to explore end user access to web archives.

NOID (Nice Opaque Identifier): Minter and Name Resolver
A new Inside CDL page (http://www.cdlib.org/inside/diglib/noid/) contains a brief discussion of opaque identifiers, persistence, and name resolution as a way of introducing NOID, software created at CDL to provide part of the solution to the problem of persistent identifiers.

For information, contact: Kirsten Neilsen, Digital Preservation Service Manager