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SUPPORTING DIGITAL PRESERVATION AND ACCESS WITH FEDORA

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HELLO!

I’m Evviva Weinraub

I’m the Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies at Northwestern University and a member of Fedora Steering.

You can find me at evviva.weinraub@northwestern.edu and @evviva

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HELLO!

I’m David Wilcox

I am the Fedora Product Manager with DuraSpace.

You can find me at dwilcox@duraspace.org and @d_wilcox

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Our community

is part of an interconnected,

worldwide, scholarly ecosystem.

Source: The Digital Ecosystem in the Balanced Value Impact Model (illustrated by Alice Maggs); http://simon-tanner.blogspot.com/2014/09/do-you-understand-your-digital-ecosystem.html

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From 2013 - 2020, the digital universe will grow by a factor of 10--from 4.4 trillion gigabytes to 44 trillion. It more than doubles every two years.

“

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USABLE DATA

Only 5% of data across the world was useable in 2013
Only 14% of Northwestern faculty store work on university servers

If data is not usable, it’s not useful.

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WHAT IS DIGITAL PRESERVATION

Digital preservation is more than just backups
Digital Preservation requires curatorial activities as well as technical activities
Technical activities around Digital Preservation are significantly more complex than just backing up data.

Often, Digital Preservation is synonymous with backups, but they aren’t the same thing at all. True digital preservation is more than identifying objects for digitization or providing online access to born-digital materials; it requires curation and identification of whether the object is worthy of long term preservation activities. It requires us to think of digital things in much the same way we view physical objects - curatorial activities need to occur because the digital preservation is costly. If we think of digital storage like a storage unit, you pay for a space to put the things you own. Those things can sit in the storage unit for years without being touched. Perhaps you’ve labeled your boxes with detailed information, or perhaps you’ve labeled your box “photos” and assumed you’d get back to it later. You ignore the storage unit, perhaps dumping more stuff into it from time to time. One day, you find out that there has been a leak in your storage unit and some of your stuff is ruined. You have no real idea of what was there and no real ability to retrieve or restore those objects. You have no idea what was valuable or useful and you then need to make a decision about what needs to be taken care of and how. Digital Preservation, however, is a much more time consuming and complex procedure. To extend the metaphor, your storage unit has a manifest of things you’ve put into it and you’ve likely put your objects inside some sort of packaging that protects it from the elements. You make regular visits to the storage unit to touch each one of your packages to make sure nothing has happened to it while you’ve been doing other things. If, when you poke a package, it feels weird, you can check it against the manifest you created when you deposited the content. You can then talk to another storage unit with the exact same objects and transfer an exact replica from a storage unit far far away back into your storage unit. You spend a lot of time making sure the climate is right, the roof doesn’t leak, and the way you’ve described the objects is still usable. Your local systems are keeping track of what you’ve ingested, where it is, and when last it was checked to make sure it’s still usable.

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COSTS OF DIGITAL PRESERVATION

Digital Preservation is expensive

Not just infrastructure
Copyright, Intellectual property, breach of privacy
Ethics and the right to be forgotten

The cost of true digital preservation shouldn’t be underestimated. The cost of curation, the cost of maintaining and touching copies of your objects on disparate architecture and in multiple environments is difficult enough to consider in a physical environment; when you’re dealing with technologies that change quickly, it gets even more complex. From a non-technical perspective, the preservation of digital objects carries with it issues around intellectual property, concerns about breach of privacy, and the reality that you can’t really get rid of anything from the digital landscape. This brings up a host of ethical issues around the acquisition of objects that put people and institutions at risk, the right to be forgotten, and other policy issues which professionally we’ve been grappling with for years, but which become more pressing in the digital world. Our approaches to Digital Preservation have, until recently, been around the idea of just keeping whatever is given to us, because storage is cheap. But we need to move into a mindset of thinking of our digital collections in the same way we view any other collection development activity. If we decide we need to keep it, we need to make preservation decisions; otherwise, we’ll end up with a storage unit full of broken and unusable things because the costs and technologies around doing this right are significant. Fedora is just one piece of this incredibly intricate landscape.

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Stores, preserves, provides access to digital objects
Supports flexible data models
Supports semantic relationships using RDF

Fedora is designed to interoperate with other applications and services.

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FOCUS ON DURABILITY

Checksums are calculated and stored
An audit history can be maintained
Changes can be versioned

Fedora has features that support long-term digital preservation.

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LONG TERM ACCESS

Flexible file storage
Import/export capabilities
Standards-based outputs

The contents of Fedora can be exported in standards-based formats for long term access.

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COMPONENT OF ECOSYSTEM

Fedora

Binaries

Sources: https://www.w3.org/RDF/icons/

https://pixabay.com/en/icon-communication-sender-antenna-157359/

HTTP- API

Import/Export

IIIF

Server?

Site

?

Profiles

?

FS

Research

Data

?

DDP

Binaries

Triple

store

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THE VALUE OF COMMUNITY

Software is difficult to support and maintain
Even large institutions can’t go it alone
No single point of failure or control

Fedora is supported by a distributed, global community of stakeholders and contributors.

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TRAINING WORKSHOPS AND CAMPS

Fedora and Samvera Camp UK Sept. 4-8

https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2017-09+Fedora+and+Samvera+Camp+UK

Fedora Camp Texas Oct. 16-18

https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2017-10+Fedora+Camp+Texas

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LEARN MORE

Fedora website

http://fedorarepository.org/

Mailing lists

https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Mailing+Lists+etc

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THANKS!

Any questions?

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CREDITS

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