Preservation, New Media, Oral Cultures

1. Preservation, New Media, Oral Cultures How to Build a Digital Library Ian H. Witten and David Bainbridge

2. Mission of a Library • The mission of a library is twofold: • To collect, organize, and provide access to information • To pass it down to succeeding generations as a record of culture

3. The Librarian’s Duty • The librarian has twin duties: • Accessto the world’s literature for today’s readers • Preservationfor future generations

4. The Problem of Preservation • Paper • Acid-based paper decomposes after only a few decades • Film • Film containing nitrate decays quickly • Analog audio • Wax cylinders or magnetic tapes must be preserved by transferring into digital formats

5. The Problem of Preservation • Technological progress comes at the expense of preservation • A process of regular copying can be established to preserve digital material without loss • “No one understands how to archive digital documents”

6. Preservation Technology • Enormous amounts of digital information are already lost forever • Information technologies become obsolete very quickly • Document and media formats continue to proliferate • Technology standards will not solve fundamental issues in the preservation of digital information

7. Availability of Material • Libraries will shortly see a demographic bulge of electronic material as the baby boom generation of authors and academics contribute material gathered during their careers • Much material will never make it into library collections for preservation because of increasingly restrictive intellectual property and licensing regimes • Archiving and preservation functions in a digital environment will increasingly become privatized as information continues to be commodified

8. Traditional Library Functions • Financial resources available to libraries and archives continue to decrease • Libraries and archives will be required to continue their existing archival and preservation practices as the current paper publishing boom continues

9. Preservation Strategies • Digital documents are vulnerable to loss because the media on which they are stored decays and becomes obsolete • They become inaccessible when the software or hardware becomes obsolete

10. Preservation Strategies • Digital formats have advantages over analog formats • Digital formats seem to promote preservation • The advantages make digital preservation even harder

11. Preservation Strategies • Ease of creation causes information glut • Easy of copying makes “copies” seem dispensable • Improvements in hardware and software promote obsolescence

12. Preservation Strategies • “May all your problems be technical ones” • Computer people recognize that the technical problems can be solved • It’s the human part that causes problems • Administrative and political processes take time and cause frustration • Technical problems have solutions which yield to honest intellectual work

13. Preservation Strategies • Paper and Museums • Involves printing the material on paper or microfilm and storing in museums • Not considered a long-term preservation strategy • Emulation and Migration • Involves preserving the physical stream of bits and/or the logical means by which the bits are interpreted as a document

14. Preservation Strategies • Preserving the physical bit stream • Regular copying to new media • Error detection to determine if degradation is occurring • Error correcting codes to ensure new generations are faithful copies of the original

15. Preservation Strategies • Emulation • Keeping the documents in exactly the same form • Emulate the functionality of the original, obsolete system on future, unknown systems

16. Preservation Strategies • Migration • Translating the document from the old format to a format accepted by new software • Designed for near-obsolete software • Involves copying the physical bit stream to new media • Involves translation to a new logical format

17. Preservation Strategies • Emulation or Migration? • Migration may be cheaper • No special emulation software needs to be written • Conversion software is usually available • Conversion is a kind of translation • May lose features of the data

18. Preservation Strategies • An important feature of any format used for preserving documents it that it is open - the details are made publicly available • It must be open in principle as well as practice • Documented well enough for others to understand and build their own interpreters • Examples: PostScript and PDF

19. New Media • Text remains the principal means for searching and browsing collections, even when they contain documents in other media

20. Music • Music information retrieval • Motifs in music are analogous to key phrases in text • OMR • Optical music recognition • Music analog of OCR

21. Images • Thumbnails • Visual material can be rapidly browsed using thumbnails • Captures the readers attention • Gives a feeling for what the collection is about • Difficult to automatically search images rather than manually browse them • Collection Understanding …

22. Videos • Video • a sequence of pictures? • Cut detection • Locating techniques where the scene changes • Movies • Browsed and manipulated using thumbnails • Each thumbnail represents a typical image or the initial image in a scene

23. Realia • Real artifacts • Computer graphics allow three-dimensional objects to be captured in the form of a data set • Artifacts are indexed and located on the basis of metadata

24. Other Document Types • Teaching material • Multimedia elements • Research material • Laboratory notebooks • Scientific and engineering data • Results of experiments, simulations, and surveys • Information is expressed in many forms

25. Digital Libraries for Oral Cultures • Libraries are about literature • Literature: • The writings of a society, in prose or verse • Broadly speaking, literature includes all types of fiction and nonfiction writing intended for publication

26. Digital Libraries for Oral Cultures • It should be possible to create digital library collections intended for people in oral cultures • Useful for people who may be illiterate or semi-literate • Useful for people who cannot speak or read the language of the digital library

27. Digital Libraries for Oral Cultures • Iconic Form • Serious practical information can be conveyed in a purely iconic form • Examples • How to splint a broken forearm • User manual for underground transport system • Historical precedent of Beggar’s Bibles

28. Digital Libraries for Oral Cultures • Libraries for the illiterate • We are all illiterate with respect to some other languages and cultures • Media types: • Static images • Motion, sound, video, interaction, 3D objects, simulations, virtual reality