Hand in Hand: Analog and Digital Preservation

Sometimes people are surprised to find out that I have an interest in digital preservation.  I find their surprise surprising.  It’s as if they assume that, because I am a book and paper conservator, I must labor away in an ivory tower filled with moldering books while the modern trappings of technology hold no sway over me, if, indeed, I realize that “digital technology” exists at all.

Image from Lisa Gregory’s ASERL-sponsored webinar “Preservation Planning and PREMIS,” held on April 2, 2013, 11 am EST.

While it is true that my profession entails a love affair with history (i.e. “the past”), and the literal tools of my trade are mechanical devices and hand tools designed centuries ago, my passion for preserving the cultural record crosses the boundary of analog versus digital.  As time ticks relentlessly on, the culture of the present day slips ever backwards into history, and preserving born-digital works becomes just as important as preserving centuries-old manuscripts.  In truth, I see little difference in the mission.  In my day-today activities, I may deal more with the chemical deterioration processes of cellulose than I do with corrupted bitstreams, but I still consider it a significant part of my profession to stay informed about advances in all aspects of library and archives preservation.

I’m lucky to have a supervisor who shares my sentiments.  Our Head of Preservation includes me on the “Digital Team,” which is made up of our Head of Preservation, the Digital Initiatives staff, the Digital Repository Coordinator, the University Archivist and Assistant Archivist, and — when the position is filled later this spring — our Cataloging and Metadata Management Librarian.  This also means that I am invited to educational webinars like the one we all attended today, the ASERL-sponsored webinar “Preservation Planning and PREMIS,” presented by Lisa Gregory, the Digital Collections Manager at the State Library of North Carolina.  The webinar is the first in a series of four about digital preservation.  I enjoy thinking over the theories and practicalities of digital preservation while I’m at the bench, repairing and mending books and documents centuries older than I am.

 

E-Journal Preservation Registry

The PARS Forum held in Seattle during the 2013 ALA Midwinter meeting focused on e-journal preservation and in particular the Keepers Registry which is a database of e-journals and the entities that are caring for their long-term access.  Ann Marie Willer from MIT hosted the session, appropriately so since last year, she presented on a project that identified e-journal stewards for MIT’s holdings before this database was available. Winston Atkins from Duke University and Robert Wolven from Columbia University presented some of their findings when they ran their journal holdings against the Keepers Registry.

The Keepers Registry is currently in Beta and was developed by EDINA, a national data center at the University of Edinburgh with the assistance of the ISSN International Center. Bibliographic information is provided by the ISSN Register. The Keepers Registry basically keeps track of  e-journals that are being archived by at least one of the following repositories:  British Library, CLOCKSS Archive, e-Depot, Global LOCKSS Network, HathiTrust, National Science Library (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and Portico.

 

Some of the current limitations of the database were touched on by the presenters. Because the Keepers Registry is based on the ISSN Register, only journals with well formed ISSNs are included in the database. Wolven reported that half of the Cornell & Columbia project titles did not have ISSNs and for those titles that did have ISSNs, roughly 25% were included in the registry. Atkins also experienced roughly a 22% hit rate with the 61,682 serial titles at Duke. It was also reported that among the titles archived by these agencies there was a lot of overlap or redundancy among the agencies especially for major titles. Some titles do not have complete runs within a single repository and some of these segments are scattered across multiple repositories. This creates a reliance on multiple archiving agencies to guarantee preservation of complete runs of e-journal titles. To address these gaps, the identification of other archiving agencies is underway.

Participating agencies are required to share their metadata with the Registry. This information is linked to the authoritative bibliographic information obtained from the ISSN Register. These agencies also provide Keepers with a description of their organization and their approach to the preservation of and access to their digital content. Keepers is still finalizing the requirements for agency participation.

Keepers is a step toward global collaboration in preserving e-journals. It also provides the tool to identify titles that are not being preserved by trusted agencies and most at risk.

 

Reformatting at ISU Library

The process of reformatting brittle books and publications which we wish to retain long term has grown over the past several years.  When books are determined to be brittle, they are referred to our faculty selectors for decisions on which issues to reformat.  We have a form which is used to relay information to the selectors along with the publication.  This form is a way for us to give basic information to them and for them to respond with their decision.

Once we have been notified of the decision to reformat a publication, the volumes are  checked for pages to be repaired, cleaned or replaced.  Minor repairs are done in Preservation Services, while more complex repairs are sent to our Conservation Laboratory.

If replacement pages are needed, our Interlibrary Loan Department is asked to obtain another copy of the volume and, when it is received, the needed pages are scanned and printed by staff in the Conservation Lab.  Upon completion of the repairs, a price estimate is completed using the pricing list from our vendor.  The volumes are then packed and shipped to the vendor with the required paperwork for the vendor and copies of the necessary records for our files.  When the completed work is returned from the vendor, we do a page-by-page comparison of the old copy and the new copy.

To complete the reformatting process, both the reformatted and original paper copies are forwarded to our Cataloging Department to add the new volume to our holdings and withdraw the old copy.  If the reformatting was paper copy to CD, the CD is forwarded to Digital Initiatives to be processed and added to our web site.

Taking a brittle copy of a volume and reformatting it to an acid-free paper copy is a traditional way of reformatting here at Iowa State University.  We also have been reformatting a select number of newspaper-type publications to microfilm.  Once the process is started for a title, we have microfilmed all available back volumes and continued to convert to film on an annual basis.

More recently, we have been reformatting the paper copy of a publication to a digital copy, either by sending it to our vendors or by having the scanning done in-house.  Recently, there has been an upturn in the number of publications which sometimes publish a single serial issue in digital format.  If it is a title which we bind, we have the digital copy reformatted to a paper copy, allowing us to bind the complete volume.

Available processes and formats have continued to change over the years.  It is important to continue to be aware of the new processes and how the patrons prefer to use the publications.  Knowing your audience makes the decisions for reformatting an easier task.

 

Reality Bytes

Last week, our Collections Librarian brought us four floppies (yes, 3.5” diskettes) that contained a copy of Iowa in the Past: A Bibliography of Materials Published Before 1952 compiled by David Hudson. This title was never actually published and there are only two known print copies in Iowa, one at the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) in Des Moines and one at SHSI in Iowa City. The author gave us permission to print and bind copies for the ISU library. He even brought us the disks from Iowa City fearing they might get lost in the mail; this was his only copy.

Various computer storage devices.

Luckily, my CPU still has a 3.5” drive (our Collections Librarian’s did not), and the files were in Word (97-2000) and saved in 1999 to the disks. Three of the four disks copied perfectly and the latest version of Word was able to open the documents without causing any page formatting problems. Unfortunately, the first disk was corrupted and all I was able to access was the title page. I had IT try to run various salvage programs, but it was too far gone. Thankfully, SHSI in Des Moines has graciously offered to copy the missing sections for us so there will be at least three libraries maintaining a print copy.

As a preservation librarian, these are the concerns that I have and am always trying to educate individuals on how to store and manage electronic files. Anytime I present helpful hints such as keeping multiple  copies in different locations and migrating to more current storage devices and file formats, I think everyone already knows all of this and I’m just wasting their time. From now on, I will think back to this experience as a reminder that everyone does not know what our profession knows and that we need to continue talking about the basics.  In this case, the basics include storage devices, hardware/software changes, standard formats, the cloud, and how digital actually complicates saving things for the future.

Does anyone have creative ideas on ways to teach the public about storing and managing their electronic files?  Or proven tricks used to extract information from corrupted storage media?

 

BookDrive Pro

We were pretty happy this year when we realized that our budget would allow us to purchase a pretty piece of equipment for our photo doc room. Seeing the ATIZ BookDrive Pro online is one thing – seeing it in person is a whole different story. This thing is a beast as far as size goes but a very smart beast in terms of what it is capable of doing. This beautiful piece of equipment is able to take high quality photos (using 2 angled cameras) of items (books, papers, newspapers, etc.) which we can then process for our digital collections.

Atiz’s rep Mary teaching us about the BookDrive Pro

Are you wondering why we didn’t save a few pennies and just use the couple of scanners we already have? First off, taking a high-resolution photo of the item is SO much faster than waiting for a scanner to scan a page at a high resolution. Also, with the BookDrive Pro we are able to capture an image of the book pages without having to flip the book over and press it open on the glass scanner bed to get a good image (which isn’t good for any book, and is especially bad for some fragile books).  You know how you can sometimes get that glare or bend in the page near the gutter of a book when scanning? Well, we don’t have to worry about that either! Our books will rest safe & secure in a cradle and a v-shaped piece of platen will gently sandwich the book to hold the pages open & flat.  The BookDrive Pro and cameras are  hooked up to a computer so that you can see the captured image of the pages as soon as you take the picture.  You can also view the pages in “live mode” if you so wish, which makes it easy to make small adjustments before taking the picture. The two cameras are mounted in place but are easy to maneuver if you need to do so.  The cradle is also on a sliding track, so adjustments are quite easy to make.

The BookDrive Pro is very new to us (as in, not even a week old) so we are all still learning its ins-and-outs, but we see this being a very useful tool in the near future.