Transcript An Update on Digital Preservation at The British Library

An Update on Digital Preservation at
The British Library
Helen Shenton
Head of Collection Care, British Library
IFLA Durban 22 August 2007
An Update on Digital Preservation at the British Library
1. The story so far
2. LIFE project
3. Planets project
4. Risk Assessment of Digital Material in the BL
1. THE STORY SO FAR
1. The story so far

Digital Object Management Programme
 www.bl.uk/about/policies/dom/homepage

Voluntary Legal Deposit of Electronic Material 2000-2003
 2003 Primary Legislation for Legal Deposit of Electronic Material

Digital Preservation Strategy Revised
 Digital Preservation Plans
 e-journals & Microsoft digitisation project C19th literature
 www.bl.uk/about/collectioncare/

Web Archiving Consortium
 www.webarchive.org.uk

Cross-functional Digital Preservation Team
2. LIFE
Lifecycle Information for E-Literature
LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature)

University College London and British Library, funded by JISC

LIFE has developed a Lifecycle model with an emphasis on estimating
the cost for digital preservation activities.

Starts to answer the question:
What is the long term cost of preserving digital material?

LIFE can calculate the costs of preserving digital information for the next
5, 10 or 100 years

Builds on work that defined the different stages in a collection item’s life
for a physical monograph and serial

6 stages in the LIFE have been defined Acquisition, Ingest, Metadata,
Access, Storage and Preservation

3 case studies used; e-journals, web archiving and voluntarily deposited
legal deposit
An Example - Hand-held Monograph
£0.00 + £4.50 + £2.25 + £0.00 + £3.15 + £0.33
Example (Year 5):
Hand-held Monograph
Total Cost in Year 5 = £10.23
LIFE Website & Blog
Website
www.life.ac.uk
LIFE Blog
www.life.ac.uk/blog
3. PLANETS
Planets overview

4-year research and technology development project co-funded by the
European Union to address core digital preservation challenges

Started June 2006 with €15m budget

Co-ordinated by the British Library

16 partners including national libraries and archives, leading technology
companies and research universities

Aims
 improve decision-making about long term preservation
 ensure long-term access to valued digital content
 control the costs of preservation actions through increased
automation, scaleable infrastructure
 ensure wide adoption across the user community & establish market
place for preservation services & tools
http://www.planets-project.eu/
The British Library
National Library, Netherlands
Austrian National Library
State and University Library,
Denmark
Royal Library, Denmark
National Archives, UK
Swiss Federal Archives
National Archives,
Netherlands
http://www.planets-project.eu/
Tessella Plc
IBM Netherlands
Microsoft Research, Cambridge
ARC Seibersdorf research
Hatii at University of Glasgow
University of Freiburg
Technical University of Vienna
University at Cologne
Planets Architecture
Next 18 months

Planets Preservation Planning tools PLATO® (August 2008)

Integrated preservation planning services (September 2008)

A descriptive language for generic description of preservation action tools (Aug 08)

Next generation migration tools for digital objects (demonstration November 2008)

Emulation tools for specific environments (November 2008)

Characterisation description & a characterisation extraction language (May 2008)

Characterisation tools to extract significant properties from digital objects (Nov 08)

Characterisation registry and registry for preservation action tools

A Testbed for service to organisations outside Planet (November 2008)

Planets Interoperability Framework (May 2008)

A dissemination & take-up programme
4. Risk Assessment of Digital Material at the British
Library
4. Risk Assessment of Digital Material at the British Library

Quantification
 Used 2006 content analysis for UK-wide survey of the Digital
Preservation Coalition “Mind the Gap”
 By 2007 at the BL
 300 terabytes of data
 Growing by over 50 terabytes a year
 e-manuscripts, maps, STM, digitised masters, websites
 Wide variety of formats
 Most common formats are found
 Smaller amounts of rare and proprietary data

Method
 2003 Risk analysis
 DRAMBORA and AS/NZ 4360:2004 risk standard
Risk Assessment of Digital Material - Analysis and Results

6 Direct Risks
 Media Degradation
 Media Obsolescence
 File format obsolescence
 Hardware obsolescence
 Operating system + file system
 Software obsolescence

2 Indirect Risks
 Policy (Cataloguing, Metadata)
 Policy (Handling, Training)

Virtually all were highest category of risk (media degradation)
 3% failure rate for disks

Value system to prioritise into Digital Object Management Programme
 Proposed priorities
 Newspaper pdfs, elements of legal deposit, digitised masters
THANK YOU
[email protected]
Acknowledgments
Adam Farquhar
Rory Mcleod
Helen Hockx-Yu
Richard Davies
Peter Bright
Paul Wheatley