This book begins with an introduction to fundamental issues related to digital preservation metadata before proceeding to in-depth coverage of issues concerning its practical use and implementation. It helps readers to understand which options need to be considered in specifying a digital preservation metadata profile to ensure it matches their individual content types, technical infrastructure, and organizational needs. Further, it provides practical guidance and examples, and raises important questions. It does not provide full-fledged implementation solutions, as such solutions can, by definition, only be specific to a given preservation context. As such, the book effectively bridges the gap between the formal specifications provided in a standard, such as the PREMIS Data Dictionary – a de-facto standard that defines the core metadata required by most preservation repositories – and specific implementations. Anybody who needs to manage digital assets in any form with the intent of preserving them for an indefinite period of time will find this book a valuable resource. The PREMIS Data Dictionary provides a data model consisting of basic entities (objects, agents, events and rights) and basic properties (called “semantic units”) that describe them. The key challenge addressed is that of determining which information one needs to keep, together with one’s digital assets, so that they can be understood and used in the long-term – in other words, exactly which metadata one needs. The book will greatly benefit beginners and current practitioners alike. It is equally targeted at digital preservation repository managers and metadata analysts who are responsible for digital preservation metadata, as it is at students in Library, Information and Archival Science degree programs or related fields. Further, it can be used at the conception stage of a digital preservation system or for self-auditing an existing system.

This book addresses the process of maintaining digital objects through time to ensure continued access, an aspect that has become a crucial issue in recent years. It offers a concise yet comprehensive discussion of key concepts and requirements for long-term digital preservation, and presents a pioneering framework for digital repositories that enables the long-term archiving and metadata management for large volumes of digital resources based on a system that has already been completely designed and launched. In the framework, the reliability of information readouts is ensured by the repository with two-level data recording replication and monitoring mechanisms in the repository management system (RMS) and the file systems, and by the RMS’s distributed nature. The advanced RMS allows operations on the archival storage to be scheduled, while also taking into account low energy consumption requirements. After presenting the framework in detail, the book assesses and demonstrates the approach’s viability in terms of delivering accessibility, authenticity and usability. As such, the book offers a valuable resource for information technology (IT) researchers and practitioners, as well as archivists and librarians.

Protect your digital resources! This book addresses critical issues of preservation, giving you everything you need to effectively protect your resources-from dealing with obsolescence, to responsibilities, methods of preservation, cost, and metadata formats. It also gives examples of numerous national and international institutions that provide frameworks for digital libraries and archives. A long-overdue text for anyone involved in the preservation of digital information, this book is critical in understanding today's methods and practices, intellectual discourse, and preservation guidelines. A must for librarians, archiving professionals, faculty and students of library science, administrators, and corporate leaders!

This new edition of Digital Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums is the most current, complete guide to digital preservation available today. For administrators and practitioners alike, the information in this book is presented readably, focusing on management issues and best practices. Although this book addresses technology, it is not solely focused on technology. After all, technology changes and digital preservation is aimed for the long term. This is not a how-to book giving step-by-step processes for certain materials in a given kind of system. Instead, it addresses a broad group of resources that could be housed in any number of digital preservation systems. Finally, this book is about “things (not technology; not how-to; not theory) I wish I knew before I got started.” Digital preservation is concerned with the life cycle of the digital object in a robust and all-inclusive way. Many Europeans and some North Americans may refer to digital curation to mean the same thing, taking digital preservation to be the very limited steps and processes needed to insure access over the long term. The authors take digital preservation in the broadest sense of the term: looking at all aspects of curating and preserving digital content for long term access. The book is divided into four part: 1.Situating Digital Preservation, 2.Management Aspects, 3.Technology Aspects, and 4.Content-Related Aspects. Digital Preservation will answer questions that you might not have even known you had, leading to more successful digital preservation initiatives.

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways. This guide is written with a broad audience in mind that includes librarians, archivists, scholars, curators, technologists, lawyers, and administrators. Readers may use this guide to gain both a philosophical and practical understanding of the emerging field of distributed digital preservation, including how to establish or join a network.

The United States Congress in December 2000 appropriated funds to the Library of Congress (LC) to spearhead an effort to develop a national strategy for the preservation of digital information. LC staff scheduled a series of conversations with representatives from the technology, business, entertainment, academic, legal, archival, and library communities, and asked the Council on Library and Information Resources to commission background papers for these sessions and to summarize the meetings. The resulting papers, along with an integrative essay by Amy Friedlander, are presented in this document. Contents include: "Summary of Findings" (Amy Friedlander); "Preserving Digital Periodicals" (Dale Flecker); "E-Books and the Challenge of Preservation" (Frank Romano); "Archiving the World Wide Web" (Peter Lyman); "Preservation of Digitally Recorded Sound" (Samuel Brylawski); "Understanding the Preservation Challenge of Digital Television" (Mary Ide, Dave MacCarn, Thom Shepard, and Leah Weisse); and "Digital Video Archives: Managing through Metadata" (Howard D. Wactlar and Michael G. Christel). (AEF).