Digital Archive Directions (DADs) Workshop

• Call for Participation
• Registration Form
• Invited Speakers and Accepted Position Papers
• Position Paper Requirements
• Web Submission Form
• Email Submission Format
• Standardization Project Considerations
• Registered Participants
• Draft Agenda
• Meeting and Hotel Information
• Contact Information

   

• Highlights of the Reference Model
• Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System

1. Identification of Proposed Topic [Required]

We have a new project in the UK funded by the Joint Informations Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Council. The project is funded for 3 years for a total of $500,000 approx, with a further $150,000 input from the participating institutions.

1.1 Title

CEDARS: A multi-site UK project to create exemplars in Digital Archiving

1.2 Contributor(s)

1.3 Description of Proposed Project

The project’s start date was 1st April 1998. The three lead sites have each got digial archive systems installed and running. The project is very much a collaboration between the user community (i.e. the world of libraries) and the providers (i.e. the computer centres).

The project aims to generate demonstrator projects at each of the three sites dealing with different aspects of digital preservation. However, the expectation is that this will have an element of integration so that the abstract view is of a single archive in which information happens to be stored in different locations. This will include scope for duplication of material at more than one site.

At this stage we are very much a melting pot of ideas. An early part of the work will involve generation of an abstract model. It is here that we desire maximum alignment with emerging standards (see 1.6 below). In broad terms the work divides:

collections management focussed on Cambridge,

meta-data focussed on Oxford, and

storage issues focussed at Leeds.

We would expect to have an initial version of our model to present at the workshop, and also to be able to describe the overview of the project

The providers.

The universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Oxford run different HSMs, see section 2.2 below.

The User Community

The Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) includes all the major research libraries in UK academia. In addition to the project’s lead sites it includes the British Library and the Arts and Humanities Data Service ( http://www.ahds.ac.uk/). All CURL libraries are members of RLG.

1.4 Justification

The project arises out of a recognition by the UK’s academic funding bodies and legal-deposit libraries that the indefinte storage of digital material is very haphazard in the UK, and falls far short of the standards for conventional material that has been standard practice for decades. The desire for indefinitely long time secure storage poses problems of shifting formats and shifting storage media technology.

1.5 Definitions of Concepts and Special Terms

Legal Deposit Libraries in the UK have a requirement to store all printed material published in the United Kingdom, and the publishers have a legal obligation to provide the libraries with copies. There are 3 such libraries - the British Library and the libraries of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The Joint Informations Systems Committee is a part of the UK’s university funding mechanism which has a special responsibility for the IT infrastructure of UK academia.

1.6 Expected Relationship with OAIS Reference Model

It is a condition of the project’s sponsor that maximum notice is taken of activity elsewhere on a global scale. The OAIS model is seen as embodying necessary concepts to our work.

The CEDARS project expects to produce demonstrators which largely give a vertical slice through the OAIS model, demonstrating the process through Ingest, Storage and Dissemination. It is likely that some aspects such as collection management and access control will only be covered by recommendations. The participants already have experience of long-term data storage, as exemplified by my paper to the 1996 Goddard MSS conference [Holdsworth 1996, http://esdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/msst/conf1996/A6_07Holdsworth.html]

It is intended that the outcome can be summarised as a strategy for long-term digital storage for the UK, including significant demonstrators which may be exandable to full-scale operation.

We expect that we will be addressing the folowing elements of your list:

the interfaces between OAIS type archives

the submission (ingest) of digital data sources to the archive

the delivery of digital sources from the archive

the submission of digital metadata, i.e., data about digital or physical data sources, to the archive

the identification of digital data within the archive

protocol standard(s) to search and retrieve archive metadata information

the migration of information across media and representations

recommended archival practices and accreditation of archives

2. Scope of Proposed Standard [Desired]

2.1 Recommended Scope of Standard

There is a Web site at:
http://www.curl.ac.uk/cedarsinfo.shtml
in which there is the full project proposal.

2.2 Existing Practice in Area of Proposed Standard

The Leeds University site has been using some form of hierarchical storage management since 1968. The current practice involves an in-house system the LEEDS Archive ( = Low-cost Everlasting Extensible Data Store) see:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/systems/archive/

This system and the developments which led to it is described in [Holdsworth 96]. The design explicitly includes migration to new media types, and is based on the IEEE-CS MSS model version 4. (It predates version 5).

The Cambridge system has an in-house access sytem via FTP, and uses the EPOCH HSM as the data store.

The Oxford system is IBM’s ADSM.

The Arts and Humanities Data Service already has experience in dealing with digital data in the humanities, and brings a wealth of expertise to the project.

2.3 Expected Stability of Proposed Standard with Respect to Current and Potential Technological Advances

The system at Leeds University was developed in-house (starting early 1992) because we were not confident in the long-term capabilities of commercial products available at the time. We believe that the situation today is little different, and we have 5 (and maybe soon 6) customers for our system which may indicate that others agree with us. The system’s architecture envisages the smooth integration of new technology storage hardware, and the graceful decommissioning of older equipment; all as part of normal operations. We have a rule of thumb that we look to make improvements in capacity of at least a factor of 10 in adopting new storage media.

• Call for Participation
• Registration Form
• Invited Speakers and Accepted Position Papers
• Position Paper Requirements
• Web Submission Form
• Email Submission Format
• Standardization Project Considerations
• Registered Participants
• Draft Agenda
• Meeting and Hotel Information
• Contact Information

   

• Highlights of the Reference Model
• Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System