Dennis Phillips Cooperative Digital Preservation
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The LDS Church has successfully implemented a cooperative digital preservation system across its various organizations. Key aspects include: 1) The Church History Department works with over 30 other Church departments to appraise, acquire, and preserve their born-digital records in the Digital Records Preservation System (DRPS). 2) The system also supports the long-term storage and access of large audiovisual projects for the Media Services department, even if they do not fully meet the History Department's acquisition criteria. 3) Cooperation extends to BYU campuses and other potential partners to ensure the long-term preservation of important Church-related records through standardized processes and legal agreements.
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Dennis Phillips Cooperative Digital Preservation
- 1. Working Across Organizations to Successfully Implement Cooperative Digital Preservation Dennis Phillips, Ph.D. LDS Church dlphillips@ldschurch.org Future Perfect 2012
- 2. Introducing the LDS Church • The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Global Christian church with 14 million members • 700,000 students enrolled in religious training • 3 universities, 1 college • State-of-the-art audio- visual capabilities • Scriptural mandate to keep and preserve records photo by Henok Montoya
- 3. Church Organizations • 30 departments that • Auditing support Church • Finance functions and activities • Facilities • Legal, • Security, etc. • BYU • Church Education System • BYU-Idaho • BYU-Hawaii • LDS BC • Deseret Management • Hospitality Corporation KSL • Insurance • Media
- 4. Media Services Department • Audiovisual records will consume vast majority of archive capacity Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra Free Bible videos from biblevideos.lds.org • 100+ PB in a decade for a single copy! Conference Center on Temple Square
- 5. Church History Department • Collects and preserves records of enduring value from Church organizations • Outreaching, cooperative approach to digital preservation • Has been remarkably effective Church History Library on Temple Square
- 6. Fixity Creation DRPS Ingest Tools Preservation Digital Functions Records Fixity Storage Extensions Preservation Bridge Information System Lifecycle StorageGRID Management (DRPS) Tape Interface TSM
- 7. CHD Internal Cooperation • Records Management • Acquisitions • Archival Processing • Integration and Access • DRPS Operations
- 8. Cooperative Records Management • CHD Records Management Team • Department Records Coordinator • Department Records Management Plan – Identify records collections – Set retention schedules (active to archive) – Set final disposition (destroy, comply, archive) – Identify records to digitize • Appraisal Advisory Committee
- 9. CHD Acquisition Criteria Applicability to CHD purpose Provenance Historical significance Usefulness Relative value Anticipated costs Physical condition Legality of title
- 10. Archival Records Stewardship • When the Church History Department acquires records . . . • . . . whether they are donated • . . . or created by Church organizations, • the Church History Department takes over stewardship of the records • Thus the donors and Church organizations transfer responsibility for preserving their records to the Church History Department
- 11. Cooperative Digital Preservation • Acquisitions Team processes donated records for preservation • Archival Processing Team processes organization records for preservation • Integration and Access Team sets metadata standards and specifies how records are to be organized • But . . . some archival records don’t meet CHD acquisition criteria!
- 12. Media Services Archiving Needs • To support ongoing production, many projects must have long term accessibility from DRPS • These projects need to be stored in production format (DNxHD), not preservation format (MJ2) • Applies to projects that meet CHD acceptance criteria and those that do not Scene from biblevideos.lds.org
- 13. DRPS Service Model • Solution to Media Services archiving needs • CHD does not take over stewardship of projects, but will manage them when ingested into DRPS • Media Services— – Responsible for master catalog of projects – Provides preservation metadata – Assists with future format transformations • A truly cooperative solution for all Church organizations!
- 14. Media Services Born-Digital Projects • Projects that meet CHD acceptance criteria must have long term accessibility from DRPS • CHD wants to minimize risk from multiple format transformations • Ingest DNxHD now, transform once to MJ2 later • Another cooperative solution! Scene from biblevideos.lds.org
- 15. Multiple System Integration • Multi-PB capacity of Media Services projects requires automated DRPS ingest • Cataloging issue (collection versus item level) • Automated metadata extraction • Return DRPS PIDs DRPS • Another success of cooperative digital preservation! ALEPH MAM
- 16. DRPS Version Copies Policy • Enhances DRPS Service Model • Specifies that DRPS copies be determined on a collections basis • Addresses current and previous version copies • Also considers physical copies
- 17. DRPS Service Model MOU • CHD reached out to BYU campuses with DRPS • BYU campuses do not have the same working relationship with CHD as Church departments • CHD created a customized Memo of Understanding for each institution • Initial ingest activities underway!
- 18. DRPS Ingest Tools • Fixity information is Fixity required to ensure Creation DRPS Ingest Tools DRPS data integrity Preservation • It should be created Functions before files are ingested Fixity Bridge Storage Extensions • ICS developed tools to Information do this automatically Lifecycle StorageGRID Management • Another cooperative Tape solution! Interface TSM
- 19. Looking to the Future • CHD has reached out to the University of Utah Library to help preserve records related to Church history • Some Deseret Management Corporation businesses have Deseret expressed interest in DRPS Book • CHD will continue to extend its DRPS cooperative reach
- 20. Critical Success Factors • Top down executive support and commitment to preservation • Internal cooperation between Church History Department divisions including Records Management, Library and Circulation, Archives and Museum. • External cooperation between the Church History Department, ICS, the technology arm and the several producing departments.
- 21. Secrets of Success Teams involved must— • Be willing to learn and understand the needs of others • Recognize and utilize the strengths and expertise of others • Be willing to adopt best practices from each professional discipline
Editor's Notes
- Good morning! My presentation will cover what we are doing at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to successfully implement cooperative digital preservation across multiple organizations. By the way, you will be able to download a white paper that covers my presentation along with the presentation itself when the conference is over.
- First let me introduce the Church.We are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the LDS Church. Headquarters are in Salt Lake City, Utah – a Western State in the United Sates of America. The building shown here is the Salt Lake Temple, which has come to be a widely-recognized symbol of the Church. For your information, the Church operates 134 temples around the world. Temples are not weekly meeting places; rather, they are sacred places where sacred ordinances are performed including sealing families together forever.We are a global Christian Church with more than 14 million members.The Church has more than 700,000 students enrolled in religious training around the world.It also operates three universities and a business college. Education is very important to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I will talk about these educational institutions later on.Over the last two decades, the Church has developed state-of-the-art digital audiovisual capabilities to support its vast, worldwide communications needs. I will talk more about this later.The Church has a scriptural mandate to keep records of its proceedings and preserve them for future generations. Accordingly, the Church has been creating and keeping records since 1830, when it was organized. A Church Historian’s Office was formed in the 1840s, and in 1972 it was renamed the Church History Department.
- The Church has numerous organizations that all have a need for digital preservation.One group of these organizations consists of 30 departments that support Church functions and activities. As you see here, many of them perform functions that are needed by any institution or business. Most of the work we are currently doing with digital preservation concerns these Church departments.Another group consists of the Church’s institutions of higher learning that are part of the Church Education System. These institutions consist of Brigham Young University (or BYU) located in Provo, Utah; BYU-Idaho; BYU-Hawaii; and the LDS Business College in Salt Lake City. BYU in Provo enrolls more than 34,000 students who come from all around the world. BYU is the United States’ largest religious university and its third largest private university. In 1966, the Deseret Management Corporation was organized to manage some of the commercial companies affiliated with the Church. Today, this corporation owns and oversees insurance, media, farming, ranching and hospitality businesses.
- I mentioned earlier that the Church has developed state-of-the-art digital audiovisual capabilities to support its vast, worldwide communications needs. The Media Services Department uses these capabilities to support the rest of the Church organizations in their audiovisual needs. Because of the average size of Media Services’ audiovisual files, which is several hundred gigabytes so far, Media Services’ projects will consume the vast majority of archive capacity in the Church’s Digital Records Preservation System.One example of audiovisual records we preserve are weekly broadcasts of Music and the Spoken Word—the world’s longest continuous network broadcast (now in its 83rd year). Each broadcast features an inspirational message and music performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, also known as “America’s Choir,” and the Orchestra at Temple Square. These National Radio Hall of Fame broadcasts are clearly a priceless treasure for the world that are being preserved for future generations.Another example of audiovisual records we preserve is semiannual broadcasts of General Conference, which is held in the remarkable Conference Center shown here that seats 21,000. The meetings are broadcast in high definition video via satellite to more than 7,400 Church buildings in 102 countries and now through the Internet to millions of homes. The broadcasts are simultaneously translated into 76 languages. Ultimately, digital audio tracks for 93 languages are created and preserved to augment the digital video taping of each meeting. As a gift to all the world, the Church launched a new website last Christmas that provides free Bible videos of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Viewable with a free mobile app, these videos are faithful to the biblical account, and of course will be preserved for future generations. I encourage you to visit the website at biblevideos.lds.org.With audiovisual files such as these, we expect that our archive capacity within a decade will exceed 100 petabytes for a single copy!
- The stated goal of the Church History Department is to Collect, Preserve and Share. The first major reason for the success of the preservation effort at the LDS Church is strong and consistent executive sponsorship. Due to the scriptural mandate to keep and preserve records, preservation is seen as a very important to the leadership of the LDS Church. In addition, the office of the Church Historian and Recorder gives constant and vigilant oversight into the preservation efforts. I cannot over emphasize the value of having executive support for this program. Today, the Church History Department has ultimate responsibility for collecting and preserving records of enduring value that originate from its ecclesiastical leaders and within the various Church departments, the Church’s educational institutions, and its affiliations. With such a broad range of records-producing sources, the Church History Department has implemented an outreaching, cooperative approach to digital preservation that I will explain shortly.I am pleased to report that this outreaching, cooperative approach is proving to be remarkably effective.
- The Church History Department’s Digital Records Preservation System, or DRPS, is based on Ex Libris Rosetta. Rosetta provides configurable preservation workflows and advanced preservation planning functions, but only writes a single copy of an Archival Information Packet (AIP) to a storage device for permanent storage. Therefore, an appropriate storage layer must be integrated with Rosetta in order to provide the full capabilities of a digital preservation archive, including AIP replication.After investigating a host of potential storage layer solutions, the Church History Department chose NetApp StorageGRID to provide the Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) capabilities that were desired. In particular, StorageGRID’s data resilience and data replication capabilities were attractive. In order to support ILM migration of AIPs from disk to tape, StorageGRID utilizes IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, or TSM, as an interface to tape libraries.DRPS also employs software extensions developed by my team, which is part of Church Information and Communications Services (ICS) . The first is a set of ingest tools that help with fixity information creation, which I will discuss later. The second involves a fixity information bridge that will be covered in a presentation tomorrow to be given by Gabe Nault, the ICS Solution Manager for digital preservation.
- The second major reason for our success in preservation is unity among branches of the Church History Library Division. Our outreaching, cooperative approach to digital preservation requires coordinated efforts by several different groups. Let me introduce them to you.One of them is the Church History Library’s Records Management team. This team sets the outreaching, cooperative approach in motion. Next is the Acquisitions team, that works with records donated by the public.The Archival Processing team prepares digital records for preservation. One member of this team has the title of Digital Archivist.Another key team is called Integration and Access. I will talk about all of these teams in more detail shortly.Another team that is crucial to our outreaching, cooperative approach to digital preservation is the DRPS Operations team. Our preservation planners are part of this team.
- The foundation of cooperative digital preservation is cooperative records management.As I mentioned, our Records Management team sets the process in motion. Each Church department has a Records Coordinator—usually the controller of the department. Our Records Management team works with the Records Coordinator of each Church department to develop a detailed records management plan for that department.The plan identifies all records series, or collections, that are produced by the department. It also sets a retention schedule and a final disposition for each collection. Some schedules call for records to be destroyed as soon as their active life is over. Others require the records to be kept for a number of years in order to satisfy legal and government compliance requirements. On average, less than 10% of the collections are given a final disposition of “archive,” which means the collection should be preserved for future generations because of its enduring value. The records management plan also identifies which collections should be digitized, if they are not born-digital, for easier access and for digital preservation. An Appraisal Advisory Committee, composed of experienced archivists, reviews the department’s records management plan and helps with appraising records for preservation value before giving final approval to the plan. Because of this outreaching, cooperative approach to records management, each Church department has a records management plan in place today that meets the needs of the department as well as the Church.
- Developed in 2009, a Collections Development Policy provides the following criteria for Church History Department acquisition of records—First is applicability of the collection to the Church History Department’s purpose—which is to keep and share a record of the Church and its people.Next is a favorable review of the collection’s origin, authenticity, and history of ownership.The collection is then appraised for historical significance . . .. . . and also usefulness, which sometimes relates to expected frequency of access.Value of the collection relative to existing Church History Department holdings is also considered.Another criterion is anticipated costs of acquiring, processing, providing access to, and preserving the collection.If the collection is not born-digital, physical condition of the materials and prospects of long term viability are also considered. And finally, legality of title is absolutely essential. As may be inferred from these acquisition criteria, virtually all the records that are acquired by the Church History Department are candidates for preservation because the criteria ensure that only records of historical value—and thus enduring value—are accepted.
- One point that is important to understand about our outreaching, cooperative approach to digital preservation is stewardship of the preserved records. When the Church History Department acquires records . . .. . . whether they are donated . . . or created by Church organizations, the Church History Department takes over stewardship of those records. In effect, the donors and Church organizations transfer responsibility for preserving their records to the Church History Department.
- I mentioned earlier that several teams are involved in cooperative digital preservation. Records and artifacts may be donated to the Church History Library. If they are accepted, the Acquisitions team is responsible to process the records for digital preservation. For example, the historical novel shown here was written by a member of my team. When he donated a copy to the Library, it was accepted because it satisfied the acquisition criteria I just covered. Now the Acquisitions team will be responsible to assemble the digital version of his book so it can be preserved in DRPS.Processing of archival records that originate with the Church’s ecclesiastical leaders and within the various Church departments is performed by the Archival Processing team. Processing steps for digital preservation include digitizing (if needed), digital curation, and cataloging. In many cases, the Church History Department performs the digitization work for the department.Also, the Integration and Access team sets metadata standards for preservation and specifies how the department’s records are to be organized before they are ingested into DRPS.These activities that support cooperative digital preservation apply to records that meet Church History Department acceptance criteria. However, some records that receive a final disposition of “archive” in a department’s records management plan do not meet the acceptance criteria. What happens to these records?
- This brings us to the third major factor in the success of the preservation program at the LDS Church; the cooperative efforts between the Church History Department, the technology arm of the LDS Church and the several producers of the assets. The Church History team which owns the preservation tasks, the Information and Communication Systems team which brings technology know-how and the owner and creator of the asset to be preserved. This is not a trivial cooperative relationship. Let me give you an example. The Media Services Department has many projects that fit this category, so it provides a good example to illustrate the type of cooperation we offer at the Church History Department to preserve archival records for which we will not assume stewardship.I mentioned earlier that Media Services expects to produce more than 100 petabytes of production data within a decade. Their systems do not provide sufficient capacity to store this much audiovisual data for long term access, so they have turned to DRPS for help. In effect, they would like to use DRPS as a repository to support ongoing production. The nature of Media Services’ work tends to be cascading, meaning that something created today will likely be used many times in the future to augment other projects. When these audiovisual works are stored in DRPS, the Media Services Department has requested that the files be stored in production format (DNxHD) rather than our preferred preservation format, which is Motion JPEG 2000. Obviously, if we stored their files in MJ2, they would have to transform them back to DNxHD every time they are accessed, which would be extremely resource intensive for Media Services.And by the way, these Media Services needs apply to projects that meet Church History acceptance criteria as well as those that don’t.
- The solution we have developed for Media Services is called the DRPS Service Model.Using this model, the Church History Department does not take over stewardship of audiovisual projects that do not meet Church History acceptance criteria. However the DRPS Operations Team will manage these projects while they are preserved in DRPS.In return for this cooperation, Media Services is responsible for creating and maintaining the master catalog of the projects to be ingested into DRPS. This means that the Church History Department does not have to catalog these projects. Media Services will also provide the metadata that the Integration and Access Team has stipulated for preservation. Further, Media Services will assist the DRPS Operations Team with file format transformations in the future that may be required to ensure that Media Services can always access and utilize these projects.The DRPS Service Model is being successfully used by several organizations today, and is available as needed for all Church organizations.
- We have encountered another challenge with the Media Services Department that has to do with their born-digital projects. With state-of-the-art digital audiovisual capabilities, all Media Services projects have been born-digital for many years now.For those projects which do meet Church History acquisition criteria, they must have long term accessibility from DRPS to support ongoing production work, as described previously. Since the Church History Department takes over stewardship for this subset of born-digital archival projects, the DRPS Operations Team wants to minimize the risk of preserving them. One significant risk arises from transforming file formats. The goal is to minimize such transformations.To meet the needs of both departments, Church History has agreed to ingest the projects into DRPS in their production format rather than MJ2. In the future, when the projects are no longer likely to be accessed—that is, in a decade or so—the DRPS Operations Team will transform the file formats into MJ2 with assistance from Media Services. This way, only one format transformation will be required in the foreseeable future.Clearly, this is another example of a cooperative solution that has been formulated between two departments in order to accommodate the needs of both.
- But the cooperation between Church History and Media Services does not stop there. Because of the enormous capacity of Media Services projects to be ingested into DRPS, the Church History Department, along with Church Information and Communication Services (or ICS), collaborated with the Media Services Department in order to automate the DRPS ingest process.Many considerations were involved to make the automation seamless. At the top of the list were issues with cataloging and discovery. The Church History Library catalogs its holdings at the collection level. Ex Libris Aleph is the catalog software, and collections are discovered with Ex Libris Primo.On the other hand, the Media Services Department catalogs its projects at the item level. A Visual Resources Library was developed by ICS for catalog software, and discovery was also custom developed.In order to bridge these differences, ICS, in response to Church History Department direction, implemented an instance of Aleph for Media Services that can be discovered using Primo. Media Services was responsible for migrating its catalog to this instance of Aleph, which they were willing to do because of anticipated DRPS benefits.Another challenge of automated ingest was automation of metadata extraction for digitized projects. To meet this challenge, ICS developed a tool that automatically extracts metadata from Aleph.The next step was to integrate DRPS with Media Services’ systems. This required that DRPS persistent identifiers (or PIDs) be passed back to Aleph as well as the Media Asset Management System—so a project can be requested for delivery from DRPS using the PID that DRPS created for that project.This is a major success of cooperative digital preservation.
- To enhance the DRPS Service Model, the DRPS Working Group developed a policy that specifies the number of copies that should kept in the DRPS archive. We call it the DRPS Version Copies Policy.A key element of this policy specifies that the number of DRPS copies is to be determined on a collections basis. Like the Church, I’m sure that your organization values certain records collections more highly that others. It only makes sense that these highly valued collections should receive preferential preservation care. One way to do this is by preserving more copies of those collections. In the case of DRPS, this Policy gives us latitude in determining the number of copies to make for collections preserved under the DRPS Service Model. It also provides critical guidance regarding copies of records for which Church History has taken stewardship.The DRPS Version Copies Policy also covers what is to happen when a file format transformation takes place. It provides direction regarding the number of current version and previous version copies that should be stored, and also provides guidance about de-accessioning previous version copies.Furthermore, the Policy takes into account physical copies. In some cases, physical records may be desirable to preserve for a variety of reasons. If a physical copy is being preserved, then DRPS may not require as many digital copies to be preserved.For your information, this policy is included in the white paper I mentioned earlier.
- An enhancement of the DRPS Service Model involves the use of Memos of Understanding.Last year, we reached out to the Church’s institutions of higher learning. Each of these institutions has a records management plan that identifies collections the institution desires to preserve. Most of them do not meet Church History acquisition criteria, however, so DRPS was offered to these institutions using the Service Model.Since these institutions do not have the same kind of working relationship with the Church History Department as other Church departments . . .. . . we developed a customized Memo of Understanding for each institution that provides guidelines for working together in a cooperative manner. Each Memo of Understanding covers the following topics— Glossary of Digital Preservation Terms DRPS and Service Model Overview Responsibilities Service Level Agreements Cost AgreementsUsing these Memos, the DRPS Operations Team is currently working with three of these institutions to ingest the initial collections they have targeted for digital preservation.
- A final example of the Church History Department’s cooperative approach to digital preservation is related to fixity information that is required to ensure DRPS data integrity.In order to implement fixity information as early as possible in the preservation process, and thus minimize data errors . . . . . . the DRPS Operations Team runs tools developed by ICS that create fixity information for producer files before they are transferred to DRPS for ingest. Therefore, producer departments need not worry about generating fixity information to preserve their records.This is another cooperative solution that has helped to make our outreaching, cooperative approach to digital preservation remarkably effective.
- Looking to the future . . .Last year we reached out to the University of Utah Library and offered to help them preserve records relating to Church history. The University of Utah is a secular university in Salt Lake City. Its Library has collected many records over the years about Utah history. Since the State of Utah was founded by pioneer members of the Church in 1847, these records are of interest to the Church History Department. The University of Utah Library has expressed interest in our offer, so we will be working with them in the future to assure that these valuable historical records are preserved digitally with DRPS.Also, some businesses owned by the Deseret Management Corporation have recently expressed interest in DRPS, so we have begun discussions with them.The Church History Department will continue to extend its DRPS cooperative reach until all Church organizations have had an opportunity to participate in DRPS benefits.
- In summary, the three major factors that have contributed to our success are:Top down executive support and commitment to preservationInternal cooperation between Church History Department divisions including Records Management, Library and circulation, Archives and Museum.External cooperation between the Church History Department, ICS, the technology arm and the several producing departments.
- Now let me summarize what we consider to be our secrets of success.We have learned that all teams involved in digital preservation must . . . . . . Be willing to learn and understand the needs of others,. . . Recognize and utilize the strengths and expertise of others,. . . And be willing to adopt best practices from each professional discipline.In other words, our success hinges on each individual following these principles.