Claire Stewart
Head, Digital Collections and Scholarly Communication Services
Northwestern University

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has funded a three-year project from 2011-2014, led by the libraries at Indiana University Bloomington and Northwestern University in collaboration with ten other institutional partners, to develop an open source system that will enable libraries and archives to easily curate, distribute, and provide online access to their audio and video collections. This project, known as the Avalon Media System, follows from extensive prior investigation into the needs of academic libraries for ingest, management, and access to digital audio and video collections to support teaching, learning, and research. Version 1.0 of Avalon will be released in Spring 2013. This presentation will include discussion of: 1) motivations for the development of Avalon; 2) current and planned system functionality; 3) collaboration with other open source software communities (including the Hydra Project and Opencast Matterhorn); 4) issues of community building for ongoing sustainability; and 5) how Avalon fits into the larger landscape of media content management in higher education. Time for general discussion of issues related to media content management and open source software sustainability will follow.

 http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/

James Simon
System Architect
Stanford University

The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) is a nationwide initiative to create a preservation backbone for digital information of interest to the academy. DPN comprises a handful of large-scale preservation repositories, which together form a heterogeneous network of secure, trustworthy digital archives, each operated under diverse geographical, organizational, financial, and technical regimes. Robust (bit) auditing and repair functions ensure the integrity and security of content over time. Intellectual property agreements among depositors, repositories and the university members of the Network ensure succession of rights to use content in the event of the dissolution of the original depositor or archive. Since late 2012, a technical team from the five initial nodes has been working on an initial implementation of the network. This presentation will present that group’s work, which includes basic design principles, functional requirements and system specifications; the Network’s high level architecture and protocols for content replication and auditing; and framing of detailed service and policy questions that will drive the Network’s overall design and operation. DPN members and digital preservation experts are especially encouraged to attend and participate in this interactive session.

http://www.dpn.org

Presentation

Kent State University Libraries has developed a local digital storage system that provides high-volume, medium-term storage of digital items. The system uses very inexpensive hardware and locally-developed (soon to be open source) software. Technically not a DAM nor a dark archive, this system provides for the distributed redundant storage of three validated (fixity checked) copies of digital files, some of which could then move to DAM or dark archive based on retention schedule and/or significance. The system supports upload via batch, zip, and drag and drop, and it supports a wide array of standard file types. Items are assigned an expiration date based on a retention period, which is based, in turn, on an assigned retention group. System-assigned and user-supplied metadata support a search mechanism. Stored content is organized by Workgroup, Project, and Item. Three servers (pods) distributed throughout campus each support 36TB of storage. The servers synchronize all files daily and nightly between themselves when all checksums are valid. The system runs on CentOS, and uses RAID6. There is no strict 7/24/365 up-time expectation; the primary concern is data preservation.

End-users, staff in various campus divisions, contribute their own data for storage, and the data in question includes data that is the responsibility of University Libraries, Special Collections, and University Archives. The system stores master files like tiffs; there is no need to store derivative files, which can be easily regenerated on the fly. At the current capacity of 36TB per each pod, the total cost is $ 0.58 per GB. The current hardware configuration can support up to 108TB per pod, at a total cost of $0.30 per GB. This system is envisioned as a middle-layer storage system that can provide massive storage at very low cost, and it can provide a central workspace where data can be stored before it is moved to other systems like a DAM system, a dark archive, an institutional repository, a public digital gallery, etc., or before it is disposed of based on a retention schedule. This session will offer more detail on the system’s hardware and software functionality.

http://www.backblaze.com/
http://www.protocase.com/products/index.php?e=Backblaze

Presentation

Katherine Akers
Council on Library and Information Resources Fellow
Emory University

Lori Jahnke
Anthropology Librarian and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Emory University

Elliott Shore
Executive Director
Association of Research Libraries

Rachel Frick
Director, Digital Library Federation Program
Council on Library and Information Resources

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is in its ninth year, and with the coming cohort, CLIR and more recently the Digital Library Federation (DLF) have helped to prepare more than 90 fellows who have worked at various intersections of the academic world. In recent years, more and more of the fellows’ work concerns data curation, spurred on by support from the Sloan and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations. The Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is now using the deep subject preparation of scholars and scientists from across the disciplines in order to help rethink how academia will approach this issue. This session will sketch out the ways in which the program is changing its approach to the curriculum for the fellows and engage the attendees in a conversation about how that can be most successful.

http://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc
http://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc/applicants/dc-science

David Rosenthal
LOCKSS Program
Stanford University

Although parts of the Web, such as e-journals and e-books, largely retain the Web’s original document model, the newer parts of the Web, including social media, scientific workflows and Web services, have evolved into a programming environment, whose primary language is Javascript. This briefing will report on the results of a workshop held at the Library of Congress under the auspices of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. There, practitioners of Web archiving reviewed the practical and theoretical problems posed by this evolution of the Web. The practical problems include the need to execute the collected content, rather than simply record it, and then re-execute the preserved content in a way that recapitulates the original. The theoretical problems include the fact that every reader’s every visit to most Web pages is now a different experience. What does “the original” mean in this context?

 http://netpreserve.org/resources/iipc-future-web-workshop-%E2%80%93-introduction-overview
http://blog.dshr.org/2013/04/talk-at-spring-2013-cni.html

Presentation (Rosenthal)
Presentation (Negulescu)

Michele Kimpton
Chief Executive Officer
DuraSpace

Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) is a consortium of academic institutions committed to the creation and management of academic and research content for multiple institutions. As a member of APTrust, the University of Virginia in partnership with DuraSpace is implementing a cloud based repository service to aggregate curated content from consortium institutions upon which rich access services may be built. The implementation will further provide long term preservation for selected content through the implementation of a repository within the Digital Preservation Network (DPN).

The aggregate repository is being implemented to collect many forms of content, offer utility to support administrative and simple access, augment individual institution preservation strategies as well as provide a firm foundation for exploring future access services. Consortium members believe they can achieve these goals more fully together than they can alone.

http://academicpreservationtrust.org/
Presentation

This presentation summarizes the lessons learned from trial audits of a several production distributed digital preservation networks. These audits were conducted using the open source SafeArchive system, which enables automated auditing of a selection of TRAC criteria related to replication and storage. An analysis of the trial audits demonstrates both the complexities of auditing modern replicated storage networks, and reveals common gaps between archival policy and practice. Recommendations for closing these gaps are discussed, as are extensions that have been added to the SafeArchive system to mitigate risks in distributed digital preservation (DDP).

Presentation Slides

http://www.safearchive.org

Steven Morales
Program Director
Digital Preservation Network

This session will address the progress that has been made in the six months since the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) was announced. With almost 60 institutional members, DPN builds upon the higher education community’s current preservation efforts by creating a federated preservation network, owned by and for the academy, which will provide secure digital archiving of the scholarly and cultural record. At the heart of DPN is a commitment to replicate the data and metadata of research and scholarship across diverse software architectures, organizational structures, geographic regions, and political environments. Replication diversity, combined with succession rights management, will ensure that future generations have access to today’s discoveries and insights.

http://www.dpn.org/