DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES" Bogdan Trifunovi ć Digitization Centre Public Library Čačak, Serbia bogdan @cacak-dis.rs Zadar, 25 May 2010 LIDA 2010

OVERVIEW
State-of-the-art report
Support of Digital Scholarship through Digital Libraries
Duration and Reliability of digital information
Stability of digital objects

Digital Dark Ages
The state of:
1) Too-much information
2) Non-accessible information
3) Non-reliable information
* Kuny, Terry (1997). "A Digital Dark Ages? Challenges in the Preservation of Electronic Information". 63rd International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) Council and General Conference . <http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla63/63kuny1.pdf>

Digital Scholarship relies on accurate, reliable and unchanged digital information, including digital objects inside digital libraries. When scholar use digital repository, looking for the relevant literature about some old manuscript, it is natural that he or she will also use digital image of that manuscript for the research, supposing that original is preserved in some library or archive far away.

That put stress on the
- quality of digital copy,
- its credibility and
- reliability to adequately represents original in digital form for the long time.
The question should be where that source will be in five or fifty years or will it exist at all.

Nikoljsko Gospel, late XIV Century

The original is in The Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, where it is cataloged as Bosnian manuscript “Gospel-book in Serbian Church Slavonic”
The National Library of Serbia published digital copy in its Digital Library , under the name “Nikoljsko Gospel” (the name of the monastery where it had been found in the XIX century)
Collision of metadata?
Is it possible for the researchers to identify digital object as authentic copy?

“ Institutional repositories are firmly based within the theoretical framework of digital libraries.”
[Wells, P. (2009). “Institutional Repositories: Investigating User Groups and Comparative Evaluation Using Link Analysis”. Bristol Institute of Technology, 2009, 13]

“ In differentiating between institutional repositories, digital libraries and other repositories, the only distinction given is the institutional focus of the service or collection. However, this does not preclude institutional repositories from serving a useful purpose and being seen as one tool amongst many in the scope of the digital libraries.” [Wells, 15]

“ The development of stable open source software with which to implement institutional repositories is seen as pivotal to the rapid increase in their deployment.” [Wells, 12]
This interest in the case of digital libraries did not happen yet, so there is few stable open source solutions for digital libraries.

OAI-PMH
Recognized a standard level of metadata required for digital repositories and enabled the automation of record-sharing between institutional repositories and secondary services (e. g. search engines, harvesters) to give institutional repositories a wider audience
First operational Greenstone OAI-PMH collections were created in Dec. 2009

An example
While the most popular (open source, “free”) solutions for Digital Repositories (DSpace, Fedora Commons, EPrints) are developed mostly by researchers for their needs (at MIT, Cornell University, University of Virginia, University of Southampton), Digital Libraries have not gain such attention from the academic community

It is/was believed that digital objects like images, video, audio will be preserved by memory institutions (libraries, archives...) as a “digital cultural heritage”

How to provide the long-term integrity and preservation of digital objects.
One solution suggests that one of the major aspects of digital libraries should be merging of library and publishing industry functions and direct system maintenance.
[Atkinson, R., Library functions, scholarly communications, and the foundation of the digital library: laying claim to the control zone , Library Quarterly, 66 (3), 1996, 239-265.]

The instability of digital formats and ephemeral character of the Internet (on one side), with uncertain development of technologies used to create, disseminate, store, describe, retrieve, read and present (on the other) put stress on the management of digital information and thorough re-investigation of the preservation methods and practices used in the last two decades

“ Link Rot”
“ The 2010 analysis reveals that nearly 28 percent of the online publications archived between March 2007 and March 2008 have now disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project’s preservation efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs.”
[The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive]

Our findings
In the course of six years (from 2003) 40% of the cited online sources in one research paper, published in respectable historical journal, are not correct any more – 33 of 84 URL addresses do not point to the cited papers or authors mentioned in the text.

“ Internet Corner”, an article published annually from 2006, describing three different web sites dealing with digital libraries and digital preservation
10 out of 12 web sites still work (May 2010)
One has changed URL address
One has gone through “System Crash” (“ Aging hardware and conversion issues following a system crash have taken their toll on DLIST, the University of Arizona's Digitial Library of Information Science and Technology. We are currently exploring choices and alternatives both to short term recovery and long term sustainability .”)

The problems
URL address
Hardware/Software changes
Digitalna knjiga sudnjeg dana
Primer sajtova iz Internet coska
BBC Doomsday Project in the 1980s - an example of technology influence on digitization
Bogdan Trifunovi ć , Digital Libraries and the challenge of a “Digital Dark Ages” | 2/12

Proposals
Digital Libraries should be built around or in accordance with established DOI and OAI-PMH systems
Handle System and URN example
Separating the name from all associated metadata, including location
Making the URL information irrelevant
ISO standards

Proposals
Avoiding file formats which don't have larger industry or user base (DjVu, etc.)
There is no dilemma “size or usability” (using advanced compression technology of some less-used digital document formats to save storage resources) - storage is cheap
The Web is digital playground, digital cultural heritage should be Web friendly

THANKS! QUESTIONS? Bogdan Trifunovi ć Digitization Centre Public Library Čačak, Serbia bogdan @cacak-dis.rs LIDA 2010, Zadar 24-28 May 2010

DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

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DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES" — Presentation Transcript