Newsletter Issue 6

Editorial | Summer School on Preservation | ELAG 2006 Workshop

DELOS Digital Library Manifesto | Multilinguality in the European Library

Summer School on Multimedia Digital Libraries | DELOS Researcher Exchange

The 5th DELOS Summer School: Digital Preservation in Digital Libraries

The Centro Studi "I Cappuccini" in San Miniato

The 5th DELOS Summer School was held at the Centro Studi "I Cappuccini" in San Miniato, Italy, over 4-10 June 2006. The event was organised by the DELOS digital preservation cluster, with additional sponsorship from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale. The academic directors of the school - Seamus Ross of the University of Glasgow (UK), Hans Hofman of the Nationaal Archief (Netherlands), and Maria Guercio of the University of Urbino (Italy) - put together a very interesting programme comprising ten three-hour sessions with breakout groups.

To begin, Heike Neuroth, Göttingen State and University Library, gave an overview of the role of digital preservation in digital libraries emphasizing the importance of digital preservation as the set of processes needed to ensure that authentic objects remained accessible, usable and understandable in the future. Key topics raised were the interaction of document lifecycles and preservation workflows and the importance of determining the 'significant properties' of objects.

Then Wendy Duff, University of Toronto, looked at the complex topic of metadata, focusing largely on metadata supporting records management processes and digital preservation (e.g. the PREMIS Data Dictionary). Important issues raised included the observation that metadata standards are rarely static, posing problems for the longer-term management of associated objects. Wendy highlighted the potential of metadata registries in addressing such problems.

The Cathedral (Duomo) of San Miniato from the castle ruins

On Day 2, David Giaretta, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) introduced the influential Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), with practical exercises on the different classes of information needed if a designated community were to use an object in 50 years time.

Next Andrew Wilson of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (UK) and Michael Day of UKOLN provided detailed introductions to object authenticity and approaches to digital preservation. Their presentation on preservation approaches emphasized the impact of different strategies on the 'significant properties' of objects being preserved.

On Day 3, Andreas Rauber, Vienna University of Technology and Hans Hofman investigated the development of experimental frameworks for the evaluation of different digital preservation strategies and methods. Such test environments would help inform the selection of appropriate preservation strategies but also help to document the decision-making process itself.

Then Ross Harvey, Charles Sturt University (Australia), led a session on selection and appraisal issues, examining the range of existing practices developed by libraries and archives and emphasizing the importance of documenting decisions about selection when preserving digital materials.

Day 4 began with ingest processes. Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard and Lars Clausen of the State and University Library in Århus, led on what to consider when objects are transferred to a repository, citing experiences with handing research outputs and digital television content. Then Lars focused on the capture of Web content.

Andrew McHugh, University of Glasgow, introduced the linked topics of trust, audit and certification. The breakout group exercises looked at the draft certification criteria by a task force supported by RLG and the US National Archives and Records Administration, criteria currently being evaluated by projects led by the DCC and the Center for Research Libraries.

Day 5 began with a look at the vulnerability of digital objects once outside the relative safety of collections. This session, led by Manfred Thaller of the Universität zu Köln (Germany), encouraged students to consider the persistence of object content (also context, authenticity and metadata) after 10, 100 and 1000 years.

The very last session, led by Yunhyong Kim, University of Glasgow, concerned the automatic extraction of semantic metadata. The presentation looked at the role of machine-learning techniques for extracting semantic metadata from text-based documents, focusing initially on automatic genre identification and classification.

A more detailed report of the summer school is available here.

Michael Day, UKOLN, University of Bath

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