2014 DLF Forum

Two project updates:

Running Up That Hill: The Academic Preservation Trust: A Community Based Approach to Digital Preservation
Community Notes
The Academic Preservation Trust (APT), a consortium of 17 institutions, was formed two and a half years ago when a small group of academic library deans agreed to take a community approach in building and managing a repository that would provide long-term preservation of the scholarly record. The repository also aims to aggregate content, to provide for disaster recovery, to leverage economies of scale, and to explore access and other services. From its beginning, APTrust has been a layered collaboration of deans, technology experts, content/preservation specialists, and a small APTrust staff located at the University of Virginia. 

The growth of the consortium has been bumpy at times, with differences of opinion regarding technology decisions and, inside the University of Virginia, in building awareness that an entrepreneurial program requires quick responses from the infrastructure. APTrust remains repository and format agnostic by using the Baglt specification for content submission. Metadata is managed by Fedora with pointers to content preserved in Amazon S3 and Glacier with administrative functions built using Hydra and Blacklight. The repository is scheduled to go live in July and will become a DPN node. A panel of APTrust partners and UVA staff will describe the interplay in decision making among deans, technologists, and content experts and will discuss the evolving nature of an effort that is approaching full production, including questions of governance, business modeling, certification goals and the consortium's evolving approach to the complex issues related to digital preservation.

Session Leaders
Bradley Daigle, University of Virginia
Scott Turnbull, APTrust
Laura Capell, University of Miami
Stephen Davis, Columbia University
Elisabeth Long, University of Chicago
Nathan Tallman, University of Cincinnati 

AND

Accessing Digital Art: Emulation and Preservation of Complex Digital Art Objects
Community Notes
We will provide an overview of the strategies and desired outcomes of PAFDAO: Preservation and Access Frameworks for Digital Art Objects, a two-year Research and Development, NEH-funded project. We will describe technical challenges in general as well as those that are idiosyncratic to the content at hand, and outline strategies we employ to address them. The talk will focus primarily on technical components of the project: disc imaging, the metadata framework and the organization of the PAFDAO deposit to the Cornell University Library Archival Repository (CULAR). The requirements specific to this project for imaging, metadata and organization of deposit are more complex than typical digital preservation projects due to these works' interdependencies with emulation environments and concerns over fidelity of experience in an emulated environment. 

We will share our processes and encourage discussion with participants concerning digital preservation of complex media.

Project Background: 

In February 2013, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, part of Cornell University Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, received a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop PAFDAO: preservation and access frameworks for complex digital media art objects: http://www.neh.gov/files/grants/cornell_universitypreservation_and_access_framework_for_digital_art_objects.pdf. 

PAFDAO's test collection includes more than 300 interactive born-digital artworks created for CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and web distribution, many of which date back to the early 1990s. Though vitally important to understanding the development of media art and aesthetics over the past two decades, these materials are at serious risk of degradation and are unreadable without obsolete computers and software.

Our goal is to create a scalable preservation workflow to ensure the best feasible access to these materials for decades to come, and also contribute to the development of coherent best practices in the area of preserving complex media collections.

Session Leaders
Jason Kovari, Cornell University
Dianne Dietrich, Cornell University
Michelle A. Paolillo, Cornell University