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Digital Preservation Budget Tips for Technophobes
- 1. Digital Preservation for Technophobes on a Budget Susan Barrett M.L.I.S., Moving Image Archives M.A.S., Film, Media and Culture Susan Barrett Twitter: @suebeeinaz http://dmia.drupalgardens.com
- 2. Digital Object + Access = Digital Asset http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File-Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg Digital Asset Management Strategy: 1.Format 2.Fixity checks 3.Metadata 4.Storage migration 5.Redundancy 6.Geographic dispersal
- 3. Access and Authority Control • Every digital record is unique • Digitization ≠ copy of a paper file • Digital image ≠ tangible object surrogate • Document transformations • Access is digital preservation WorkByNight https://www.behance.net/WorkByKnight
- 4. Format http://www.movingimageeducation.org Best Practices: •Digitization: limit preservation formats •Use widely adopted formats •Uncompressed or lossless formats
- 5. Codec + Container Raiders of the Lost Ark, Stephen Spielberg, Dir., 1981
- 6. Storage External drive (plugs into your computer) Magnetic tape – another digital mortuary M-disc (aka, Millenniata) •Stable for 100+ years •20 pack of discs = $70 (U.S.) •Approx. 5-10 hours of video per disc •M-disc writer (burner) = $100 (U.S.)
- 7. Nobody understands the cloud! Sex Tape, Jake Kasdan, Dir., 2014
- 8. Storage Best-practices: •LOCKSS: Multiple Copies •Geographic dispersal •In-house AND off-site Raiders of the Lost Ark, Stephen Spielberg, Dir., 1981
- 9. Fixity Digital documents last forever – or five years, whichever comes first. ~ Jeff Rothenberg andy2, c. The Andy Warhol Museum, 1985
- 10. Metadata Best-practices: •Administrative •Legal •Intellectual •Technical •In the digital object, not the folder
- 11. Check the Expiration Date Hardware •External hard drive = 2 years •CD/DVD = 5 years •Magnetic tape = 3 years •M-disc = 30+ years Software Format Transfer cables and cords Policies Expiration Date, Rick Stevenson, Dir., 2006
- 12. Make a DAM Plan Desk Set, Walter Lang, Dir., 1957
- 14. Workflow
- 15. Share it and they will come
- 17. Collaborations Budget •Ask around •Geographically unfettered •Consortiums share costs and expertise •Pick one strategy to learn: storage, formats, metadata 8 ½, Federico Fellni, Dir., 1963
- 18. Joy in Blue, gaspi, 2004, https://www.flickr.com/photos/gaspi/12944421/ Play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving ~ Henry Jenkins
- 19. 1. The Greatest Illusion, image courtesy Missy Dufourq, https://www.flickr.com/photos/eq-photography/ 8606175218 2. Attributes of Trusted Digital Repositories, OCLC, http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/trustedrep.html? urlm=160068 and Trustworthy Digital Repositories, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/repository-audit-and-assessment/ trustworthy-repositories 3. Rothenberg, Jeff (1999). Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation. A Report to the Council on Library and Information Resources. Washington DC:CLIR 4. Frick, Caroline (2011). Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation. New York:Oxford 5. Sustainability of Digital Formats, Planning for Library of Congress Collections, http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/descriptions.shtml 6. Volk, Jonah (2009). Digital Preservation Workflow: Wrapper Formats (Unpublished). New York University: New York. 7. Lunt, Barry M., et. al., (2013). Toward Permanence in Digital Data Storage, http://www.researchgate.net/publication/236000392_Toward_Permanence_in_Digital_Data_Storage 8. Digital Preservation in a Box, DP Outreach, http://dpoutreach.net 9. The Little Guide to Cloud Computing, JISC Digital Media, http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/search/results/a1234b3161b4fbfdfb96dd576b65bbea and Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe, http://www.lockss.org/ 10. LOC Blog (2013). Fixity Check, http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/03/file-fixity-and-digital-preservation- storage-more-results-from-the-ndsa-storage-survey, and Previously Unknown Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985, http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/events/warhol-discovery 11. Understanding Metadata, NISO Press (2004), http://www.niso.org/publications/press/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf
- 20. 12. Lazorchak, William M. (2004). The Ghost in the Machine: Traditional Archival Practice in the Design of Digital Repositories for Long-term Preservation. (Unpublished). University of North Carolina:Chapel Hill. 13. The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials, National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, http://www.ninch.org/guide.pdf and Practical Digital Preservation for Small Archives, Alexandra Eveleigh, http://80gb.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/practical-digital- preservation-for-small-archives-link-roundup/ 14. Risk Assessment Handbook, The National Archives, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/risk-assessment-handbook.pdf 15. Collections Trust. SPECTRUM Digital Asset Management. http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum/spectrum-digital-asset-management 16. Florida Memory Project, http://www.floridamemory.com/, and the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/index.php 17. Prelinger, Rick (2010). We Are the New Archivists: Artisans, Activists, Cinephiles, Citizens. From Reimagining the Archive: Remapping and Remixing Traditional Models in the Digital Era Symposium, UCLA. http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/reimagining/keynote.htm, and Gibson, David (2008). Digital Asset Symposium: Museum of Modern Art, New York City. The Moving Image, 8(2), and Personal Digital Archiving, http://digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving 18. Sheldon, Karan (2007). Regional Moving Image Archives in the United States. Cinema Journal, 46(3), 118; and Enticknap, Leo (2007). Have Digital Technologies Reopened the Lindgren/Langlois Debate? Spectator, 27(1). 19. Jenkins, Henry, et. al., (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/NMLWhitePaper.pdf 20. The Digital Moving Image Archives: A Guide for Independent Filmmakers, http://dmia.drupalgardens.com
- 21. Digital Moving Image Archives: A Guide for Independent Filmmakers Susan Barrett dmia.drupalgardens.com
Editor's Notes
- Welcome: I’m Sue Barrett, and today we are going focus on Digital Asset Management, or DAM, for emerging digital curators. I’ll discuss how to apply DAM standards to any size digital project. Background: I’m a knowledge manager at Arizona State University, and I have an MLIS in moving image archives and digital repository management, and an MAS in film and media studies. I provide volunteer processing support in the special collections archives, including the Child Drama Collection, which houses the largest international collections dedicated to theatre for youth. My community service includes providing educational outreach to local independent filmmakers, nonprofits and cultural institutions about digital asset management. I frequently work with people who are overwhelmed by digital preservation options, and are afraid of making costly mistakes. Today I’ll provide an overview of digital asset management as it applies to moving image archives. This presentation is based on a website I developed to educate independent filmmakers about digital preservation: http://dmia.drupalgardens.com. I want to extend a special thank you to Professor Jennifer Jenkins, of the University of Arizona, for her exceptional generosity providing review and feedback of the website and the associated paper. She responded to my request for assistance on the AMIA listserv - another example of the exceptional support of the AMIA community.
- DAM: Digital Asset Management is a stewardship plan that mitigates the risk of loss by providing a strategy to curate and preserve digital assets. A digital asset is the combination of digital object and the ability to find and access that object. This presentation will provide an overview of each of these standards. An important concept is “transformation” = to create a new digital object in a different format than the original. When we digitize film materials, we are transforming the content from a tangible format to a digital format. Born-digital objects also require transformation when formats, software and hardware are no longer supported. Transformation of the original object is a foundational digital preservation strategy. DAM is more than a new method for cataloging – it is a system for organizing, storing, accessing and preserving digital assets. Digital assets include still and moving images, creative information, provenance documentation, authority and intellectual property information. For example, DAM systems can include digital moving images and audio, digital accession records, donor documents, scripts, shot records, production documents, unlimited descriptive information AND the ability to connect all these assets to one another for robust search and retrieval.
- Accessions and Authority Control: Every digital object is unique. Authority of the Original is a challenge in the digital world, because every copy, edit, update or version change produces a new, unique asset. Digitization does not produce tangible object surrogates. Digital assets remain accessible only through the transformations required to sustain long-term access. Documenting those transformations provides authority control and provenance. Access is digital preservation. When we undertake to digitize and preserve digital assets, we are committing to a versatile plan that incorporates planned obsolescence - transformation is critical to maintaining access to digital materials. Preservation focuses on access to the artistic and intellectual content of the digital object. DAM systems document every digital transformation to establish authority control and provenance. As formats change, keep a master inventory of the formats in your collections to assist in deciding when and how to transform an object to another format. You can keep the artist’s original, and the transformed asset. Institutional policies should address how access will be maintained for both internal curators and external users.
- Format: Filmmakers shoot in the format native to their camera and sound recorder, and they insert computer-generated graphics from a variety of software. Large video files are often “compressed” for distribution. Compressed files are called “lossy” because some of their original digital bits have been discarded to produce a smaller file. During digitization and transformation you will select the digital format. Good news: audio is supported by an international standard, the Broadcast Wave format (.wav). For video, select widely adopted, lossless formats. Some archives avoid proprietary formats and that is fine, but all digital formats require support from a developer community, and widely adopted formats are more likely to be supported with future technology. Compressed formats are fine for daily access and sharing online.
- Container and Codec: Digital video and audio is managed using a “codec” and a “container” or “wrapper”. The codec tells the computer how to handle the digital file and the container collects the video, audio and metadata together in one package for access and distribution. The format you see when looking at digital files on your computer is actually a container format. Eg. .mxf or .avi. While this is a simplistic explanation of formats, it is important to understand the basic foundations of digital files to effectively preserve digital data. To get used to seeing and working with formats, adjust the settings on your computer to show file extensions.
- Storage: starting your digital project with local storage is an inexpensive way to start. Many people, including digital filmmakers use an external hard drive and that is the most common method for sharing and distribution among indie filmmakers. Several problems = replaced every 2-3 years, require constant monitoring, and external hard drives are a silo – assets are inaccessible to online users – they’re called digital mortuaries. Some filmmakers still work on digital tape, but you still have to transform tape assets to another format for online sharing. Promising research was presented on Thursday in the “How Safe is Your Data?” session by Dr. Lunt from BYU. He highlighted research on optical disc storage, called the M-disc, that indicates the M-disc could preserve data for more than 300 years. The M-disc offers emerging archives a real option for long-term storage that far surpasses other tools. We can’t rely on standard DVDs or magnetic tape beyond 5 years. Hard drives are a roll of the dice every day. We may not stay with M-disc for 300+ years, but it gives us time to watch other technologies advance.
- Cloud: the cloud means off-site (usually with a vendor or a storage provider). Someone outside of your institution is managing the digital infrastructure and access to the assets. Cloud services can also be free. Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, the Internet Archive and other online video services provide a platform for sharing assets at no cost to the archive. But remember, they are not responsible for preserving your assets.
- Storage Best-Practices: Multiple Copies – based on LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) store the same digital objects on 3 M-discs – exact duplicates. Geographic Dispersal - Keep each set of M-discs in a different geographic location. Environmental disaster can still destroy your archive if it’s stored in one location. Offer to swap with another cultural institution.
- Fixity is the ability of the image to remain intact and stable, and the process of verifying the integrity of a digital file is called fixity checking. Digital defects occur when data is migrated, transformed or compressed, resulting in loss of original data. The simplest fixity check is to view and listen to the files. Do this on a regular, annual or semi-annual schedule - Alice Guy’s birthday, tax day, Guy Fawkes Day, just pick a day and assign a staff member. Do it on different computers (every computer is set-up with different brightness, contrast, etc.) I like this image because it looks unstable, but it took a team of computer experts more than a year to recover this artwork from Andy Warhol’s 1985 floppy discs. DAM strategies will, hopefully, avoid or reduce these search and recovery missions.
- Metadata: it is the most important component of finding and accessing digital assets. Metadata identifies who created the digital materials, when, where and for what purpose. The National Information Standards Organization recommends three core categories of metadata: Descriptive (title, creator, subjects, locations). Structural (how documents are ordered, digital preservation needs). Administrative (technical hardware and software requirements, intellectual property rights). There are several subsets of the administrative category; one important subset is technical metadata. Technical metadata identifies: How the data was created. The hardware or software required to access the data. The type of hardware that created the data. Format and software versions. In our plan using M-disc, record metadata in the asset, not the folder. No matter how you duplicate, edit or distribute, the metadata will be retained in the asset. Proprietary and open-source editing software supports batch application of metadata. Also, remember that you can accession scripts, shot records and other materials related to a production and connect them to each other with metadata. Produces efficient search and retrieval. All the filmmakers I’ve worked with use semi-consistent naming conventions on folders and retain the camera-generated file number within the folders. Copy what they want to other folders (e.g., scene number, shooting date, weather conditions, location). Keep these folder naming conventions because they represent how filmmaker thought about putting together her film. Keep the folder structure AND describe in the object metadata. Filmmakers also transform their digital production files for distribution – DVDs, online, and digital theatres all require different video formats. You may receive duplicate and different audio, video and distribution formats for the same production. Metadata makes sense of these records and defines intellectual property rights.
- Expiration dates: Hard drives require regular refresh. Ensure that the latest software version can still access the assets. When you purchase new computers, keep the cable and cords needed to connect drives or M-Disc burners to your computer, and make sure the new computer has the receiving ports for those cords. The most important aspect is regular policy review: Do your current collection policies account for different production or distribution cuts? Those same policies can be applied to the digital assets you’ll receive from filmmakers. Define the policies for deciding what will be accessioned, digitized, and deaccessioned. Determine how you will manage digital accretions and use flexible file naming conventions that accommodate accretions. Digital technology is the great emancipator of filmmaking – anyone can make and distribute a film today. Define how digital collection strategies will address marginalized communities and reflect cultural diversity.
- Make a DAM Plan: Do you need to digitize fragile assets? Do you want to expose the collections and improve the visibility of the archives? Do you want to provide learning opportunities and professional development for staff? Answering those questions will help formulate a plan of attack.
- Inventory and planning for digitization: Risk analysis is used in IT project management to anticipate problems that will impact successful completion of a project. I adapted the risk analysis matrix to help prioritize assets for digitization or migration to M-disc. You may want to prioritize by the fragility or rarity/significance of assets, frequently requested materials, or research value. This is just an example of how to apply the methodology. The risk analysis results can be included in grant proposals and used to encourage increased funding from leadership. Perform the risk analysis when you inventory to save time.
- Workflow: incorporate all the DAM strategies: metadata, storage, multiple copies, geographic dispersal. Digital asset management enables logical storage and retrieval. DAM can manage tangible assets – a cataloging system cannot manage digital assets. Define ownership: who is responsible for care and feeding of assets. Define a schedule for ingest: employ existing record retention schedules. Archives have significant investments in legacy collection management systems, finding aids, cataloging software. It’s not necessary to abandon that work when developing a DAM strategy, but you will expand your work beyond legacy catalog systems.
- Exposing the collections: Use DAM to compliment the legacy catalog and finding aids. Explore free cloud options for exposing the collections. Flickr supports still and moving images, like the Florida Memory project, and is used by the US NARA, the National Archives of Australia and National Archives UK. The Internet Archive is dedicated to providing universal access to all knowledge. This martini-dry vocational film from 1947 has been downloaded more than 48,000 times. Get creative in your existing finding aids, link to the online asset. Close the loop by providing information about how users can gain access to the original and link back to the finding aid. Always provide a link for users to get more information about your archives. What do you want to learn about your assets or collections? Website reports can create new knowledge by evaluating user activities: you’ll know which is the most popular digital asset, which assets are shared and which receive comments. Folksonomy connects your assets to other institutions or individual’s materials to create new knowledge. While you will generate the initial meta tags based on your controlled vocabulary, users will view the collections with new eyes and add folksonomic meta tags that extend and expand those connections.
- Working with Filmmakers/Outreach: connect with archivists who are not working with moving image collections, join a local filmmaker community group or offer to host their meetings at the archive; host a Digital Archiving Day for indie filmmakers, amateurs or at youth events. Donate some time to a local film festival, you may meet a tech-savvy filmmaker who is willing to teach you non-linear editing.
- Collaborations/Consortiums: Budgets = this is the beginning of your commitment to digital preservation. Ask other museum or cultural organizations how they got started and what they would do differently. Collaborate with other museums on a shared DAM system. We are no longer tied to geography – technology allows us to connect with people anywhere in the world who curate similar collections. Start or join a consortium to share costs and team expertise. Have an idea of what you can/want to contribute and what you need for a successful consortium. Work together – pursue information in an area that fits your interests. Do you enjoy crossword puzzles? Metadata might be the area you want to pursue. Are you the kid who took your mom’s toaster apart? Storage might be the DAM area you wish to pursue. If you are particularly interested in clarity and fidelity, then formats might be your forte. You don’t have to be an expert in all things digital to get started. Break it down into manageable parts.
- Play: Digital filmmaking still relies on light, color, and sound. You know more about it than you think. So jump in, shoot some scenes in your back yard; play with digital formats, cameras, and non-linear editing software.
- Please send feedback about the DMIA site and connect with me on twitter: @suebeeinaz. Thank you.