KB’s e-Depot (www.kb.nl/dnp/e-depot/e-depot.html)
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek is responsible for the Dutch legal deposit library, encompassing electronic publications. The Bibliotheek, in partnership with IBM, has developed and implemented a digital archiving system for electronic publi- cations by Dutch publishers. Implemented in December 2002, the e-Depot was fully operational by March 2003. Publishers such as Elsevier Science and Kluwer Academic are participants. By April 2004 more than two million electronic publi- cations had been included in the e-Depot, and it was estimated that by the end of 2004 about 5 terabytes would be held, consisting of 3 terabytes of online journal publications and 2 terabytes of other electronic publications.
The e-Depot is based on IBM’s Digital Information and Archiving System (DIAS), which is based on the OAIS Reference Model (ISO 14721:2002) and is constructed as much as possible from off-the-shelf components. The e-Depot is designed to meet ‘large-scale and high-quality storage requirements and [to support] digital preservation functionality’ (The KB e-Depot, 2004). The Library has developed workflows for processes such as accepting materials, generating identifier numbers, searching and retrieving publications, and for authentica- tion. The e-Depot handles two kinds of digital content: offline media such as CD-ROMs, and online media such as electronic articles. Offline media are handled by copying files and the software needed to execute the files to a Reference Workstation. A snapshot of the entire workstation, including its oper- ating system, is then generated into an image which is loaded into the e-Depot.
The result is accessed by retrieving the image from the e-Depot and installing it onto a Reference Workstation. Online media are submitted accompanied by publishers’ metadata, and after checking and validating the content and meta- data are linked and the resulting package is then processed. The process is fully automatic.
The e-Depot’s preservation subsystem uses metadata to manage long-term access to the digital materials. Information about file formats and software required to view a stored document is stored. The system indicates when obso- lescence is expected so that action can be taken to convert or migrate materials.
Currently all e-publishing formats are accepted, although preferred formats may be specified in the future.
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek has been active in digital preservation research.
One of the projects in which it collaborated was NEDLIB, described above. Other projects include collaboration with IBM, as on the Universal Virtual Computer 1111
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(see Chapter 7). The Bibliotheek participates in international working groups such as PREMIS (noted above) and the Digital Repository Certification Task Force, and is active in other digital preservation collaborations. Some of these activities have been adopted elsewhere; for example, Deutsche Bibliothek’s KOPAL (Kooperativer Aufbau eines Langzeitarchivs Digitaler Informationen), a long-term archive for digital materials, is based on DIAS. (This section is based on Steenbakkers (2002, 2004a, 2004b), the brochure The KB e-Depot (2004) and the e-Depot web site (www.kb.nl/dnp/e-depot/e-depot.html).)
National Archives (UK) Digital Archive
(www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/digitalarchive)
The National Archives (UK) launched its Digital Archive in April 2003 to store, preserve and provide access to government electronic records. It complies with the UK Government’s e-government interoperability requirements and uses open source software, including XML and Java, whenever possible. The tape-based system is designed to handle a wide range of electronic records: documents, e-mails, audio and video files, databases, and web sites. Java-based accession soft- ware ensures the creation of metadata and its linking to the appropriate files, carries out quality checks, identifies file formats, scans for viruses, and so on.
Further technical details are provided on the National Archives’ web site.
The significance of the Digital Archive has already been acknowledged in winning the 2004 Pilgrim Trust Preservation Award for its innovation in the preservation of digital material. Rushbridge considers that the Digital Archive
is likely to have a positive impact among other British institutions. The success of a large-scale, high-profile archive such as this is likely to encourage others to begin their own archiving projects and it may be that such organisations will base their ideas upon those implemented here. This is not without merit: as this essential work needed to be performed for legal reasons the techniques implemented quite rightly prioritise security over innovation (Rushbridge, 2004a, p.34).
(This section is based on Brown (2003), Rushbridge (2004a) and the National Archives’ web site (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/
digitalarchive).)
Digital Curation Centre (www.dcc.ac.uk/ )
Funding of £1.3 million a year for three years was announced in February 2004 to establish a Digital Curation Centre in the UK. The funding, provided by JISC and the eScience Core Programme of the UK Government, is to establish a consortium led by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with HATII (at the University of Glasgow), UKOLN (formerly the UK Office for Library Networking), and the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils.
Digital curation is a new phrase coined to encompass data archiving, digital preservation, and the active management and appraisal of data over all of its life cycle. The Digital Curation Centre will, according to press releases (5 February and 7 April 2004), ‘provide a national focus for research into curation
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issues and . . . promote expertise and good practice, both national and inter- national, for the management of all research outputs in digital format’. The
‘overriding purpose’ of the Digital Curation Centre is ‘continuing improvement in the quality of data curation and digital preservation’. It is important to note that the Digital Curation Centre will not act as a data repository. Specifically, it will lead a research programme addressing digital curation issues, create a network to bring together and support curators, and provide services such as evaluation of tools.
A report was commissioned by JISC to establish the current state of, and future requirements for, the curation of research data in the UK (Lord and Macdonald, 2003). The report was in part prompted by the increasing use of large and dynamic datasets in scientific research. Its findings feed into the Digital Curation Centre and endorse the need for it, and suggest an agenda for research for the Digital Curation Centre. Funding was provided for three years, begin- ning in April 2004, and the Digital Curation Centre was officially launched in November 2004.
The activities of the Digital Curation Centre will be watched with consider- able interest throughout the world. It has the potential to significantly advance understanding of digital preservation practice by indicating viable large-scale solutions. (This section is based on Lord and Macdonald (2003), Ross et al. (2004) and the Digital Curation Centre’s web site (www.dcc.ac.uk).)
AHDS (ahds.ac.uk)
The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) is a federation of five data archive services: AHDS Archaeology, AHDS History, AHDS Literature, Language and Linguistics, AHDS Performing, and AHDS Visual Arts. The five AHDS centres ‘collect, preserve, catalogue, and distribute digital resources which are relevant to their subject areas, facilitate good practice in their creation and use, and offer some user services’ (ahds.ac.uk/about/index.htm). The AHDS was established in 1996 as an outcome of a JISC feasibility study which recommended and funded a centrally managed distributed service. Its aims were to ‘preserve the rapidly growing unpublished primary digital research materials being generated within the higher education arts and humanities community and beyond’ (Beagrie, 2001, p.222). It was based on the already existing Oxford Text Archive (established in 1976 at the University of Oxford) and the History Data Service (established in 1993 at the University of Essex), plus three newly-established data archives: the Archaeology Data Service (at the University of York), the Performing Arts Data Service (at the University of Glasgow), and the Visual Arts Data Service (at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design).
The holdings of the AHDS include electronic texts, databases, still images, audio, GIS data, geophysics data, and metadata sets. At September 2004 it held approximately one terabyte of data, projected to rise to four terabytes by the end of 2004. A new data repository was planning for a capacity of 10 terabytes.
The AHDS sets and guides the overall policy for the management of each of its component services, provides outreach services, sets standards, and encourages best practice. One example is its web-based guides to best practice, such as Digitising History: A Guide to Creating Digital Resources from Historical Documents (Townsend, Chappell and Struijvé, 1999).
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The AHDS is significant for digital preservation as an early example of collab- oration in data archiving, that is, a centrally managed distributed model. (This section is based on Beagrie (2001) and information from the AHDS web site (ahds.ac.uk)).
UK Web Archiving Consortium (www.webarchive.org.uk)
The UK Web Archiving Consortium was launched in June 2004 as one of the key outcomes of a web archiving feasibility study commissioned in 2002 by JISC and the Wellcome Library. A coalition of the British Library as the lead partner, JISC, the National Archives (UK), the Wellcome Trust, and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Web Archiving Consortium has the goal of investi- gating archiving solutions for UK web materials. Each institution will focus on a particular subject area, for instance the Wellcome Library on medical sites.
The National Library of Australia’s PANDAS software, further developed to match UK requirements, and software based on the open source web crawler HTTrack will be used. The project is planned to run for two years and has an initial target of 6000 sites. (This section is based on information from the Web Archiving Consortium’s web site (www.webarchive.org.uk)).