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Digital Forensics

We’ve all thought about preservation of print materials and web archiving of born-digital material.  How about preservation of materials born on different (and obsolete) digital formats?  The Harvard Gazette has an interesting article about digital forensics which you can read here.

Have any digital projects going on at your institution?  Please fill out our Survey on Digitization Projects.

Planning your schedule for AALL?  Don’t miss the LIPA Business Meeting on Sunday, July 19 from 11:30am-12:45pm in Room 111B of the Philadelphia Convention Center.  Check back here for announcements about the agenda topics as the date gets closer.

 
 
 

LIPA Highlights

As we wrap up another annual Preservation Week, it seems like a good time to review LIPA’s services and our accomplishments for the year. Here are the highlights.

PALMPrint (Preserving America’s Legal Materials in Print):

  1. completed year 2 of the 3-year PALMPrint pilot project

  2. ingested over 60,000 volumes

  3. held a PALMPrint Update and Futures Meeting in October 2014

  4. working on gap filling to complete the federal and state primary law materials

  5. working on improving the access and retrieval processes

  6. appointed a Futures Committee to address issues and questions for Year 3 and beyond

Education efforts:

  1. produced a highly successful webinar on Feb. 6 (Digitization Is Possible: Identifying & Overcoming Barriers); the recording and toolkit are available here

  2. co-sponsored the Law Repositories conference and presented the Is Digitization Preservation? debate; see earlier blog posts on the conference and the program

  3. presenting a program at the July AALL annual meeting in Philadelphia (Quality Digitization Projects on a Budget)

Digitization registry – We launched our survey of digitization projects on April 29. The information gathered from this survey will allow us to build a registry of digitization projects in order to share expertise, avoid duplication of effort, and publicize and promote the work of our members.

Web archiving – We offer a subscription service that allows LIPA members to harvest and preserve collections of digital content and create digital archives, using the Archive-It web archiving service from the Internet Archive. Currently seven LIPA member libraries are archiving web content.

Law Review Preservation Program – We have a partnership with bepress and CLOCKSS that allows any law review content on the Digital Commons platform to be automatically archived in CLOCKSS. This program is open to all law reviews on Digital Commons, not just those from LIPA members.

We support other preservation projects and in particular are a supporting partner of Perma.cc, 2015 winner of the Webby Award in the Law category.

We are busy, but we welcome ideas for new programs and services. Preservation Week: Pass It On! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Margaret K. Maes Executive Director Legal Information Preservation Alliance P. O. Box 5266 Bloomington, IN  47407 Phone: 812-822-2773 mailto:mkmaes@gmail.com http://lipalliance.org/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 
 
 

Is Digitization Preservation? Another View

The following is a guest post by Tim Knight, Associate Librarian and Head of Technical Services, Osgoode Hall Law School Library. Originally published on Slaw, Canada’s online legal magazine.

Is Digitization Preservation?

That was the question that welcomed us on the morning of Day 2 at the law repositories conference in Williamsburg, Virginia. This session was billed as a “debate” between Sharon Bradley, University of Georgia School of Law, and Beth Williams, Louisiana State University Law Center, but it turned out that the two speakers didn’t really have much to disagree on; they both considered digitization a form of preservation.

Bradley stressed the need for libraries to get started. “Digitization can’t wait,” she said, “your books are deteriorating.” She sees digitization as a way to both protect the physical item from harm and preserve the intellectual content. Williams could not disagree and considered her position as a difference in emphasis.

She finds their motivation for digitization and preservation is as a means to provide access and framed the two terms like this:

  1. Digitization = Access now

  2. Preservation = Access later

Williams also pointed out that “digital media are fragile” noting that this is an area where everything quickly becomes obsolete. A long term approach to preservation must therefore consider the inevitable changes in technology to ensure that the digital files we access today will still be available in the future. In that respect she saw parallels in the disaster management process adding that organizational issues should also be considered and can be even more important than these inherent technical challenges.

Bradley agreed. The evaluation and organization of digital resources should be an ongoing process and our role as librarian and repositorians is really one of stewardship. It is our responsibility to minimize exposure of the physical items and ensure the authenticity of the digital object created to represent that original resource. Williams agreed and pointed to LIPA and the National Digital Stewards Alliance as sources to learn about standards and get guidance.

Williams mentioned these 4 principles from a 2012 OCLC report by Ricky Erway on managing born-digital resources created from physical media:

  1. Do no harm (to the physical media or the content)

  2. Don’t do anything that unnecessarily precludes future action and use

  3. Don’t let the first two principles be obstacles to action

  4. Document what you do

For me, preservation is more than just the act of digitizing a resource, although it’s definitely a start. It helps to preserve the original physical resource, and that’s a good thing, but digital resources will also need vigilant management. “Bit rot” can make files unreadable over time and steps need to be put in place to check and maintain the stability of digital files. Bradley recommended the migration of digital files every 3-5 years. The bepress platform uses the CLOCKSS protocol and repositories using this platform might consider investigating that option.

Unfortunately, neither the presentation slides nor a recording of this particular session are publicly available at this time.

Oh, and happy preservation week!

“Digital information lasts forever — or five years, whichever comes first.”—Jeff Rothenberg

 
 
 
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