Father Najeeb Michaeel examines a manuscript

Father Najeeb Michaeel is an Iraqi Christian priest who speaks Arabic, English, French, Aramaic and Syriac, not to mention being able to read Latin and Greek. In the garden of Zaytun library, Erbil I hear this gentle man tell me how his community of friars used to live in Mosul, a traditional centre for Christianity in Iraq, having the highest proportion of Assyrian Christians of all the Iraqi cities. Father Najeeb’s community has  had to leave Mosul due to persecution.  Later on during The House of Books workshop he gives us a presentation of the magnificent early Christian manuscripts they are digitising.  Over coffee he gives us a moving rendition of the ‘Our Father’ sung in Aramaic.  I wasn’t expecting to feel so moved by a  religion I have become increasingly frustrated by, and in Iraq.

Early Christian manuscript, Centre Numerique des Manuscrits Orientaux, Mosul, Iraq.

Iraq has often compared to a mosaic in terms of the diversity of its religious diversity.  Iraq is a Shia majority country and contains the sacred Shia cities of Najaf and Karbala. Most sources estimate that around 65% of Iraqis follow Shia Islam, and around 35% follow Sunni Islam. What is not so well known is that Christians have inhabited what is modern day Iraq for about 2,000 years. The person who is supposed to be respnsible for the transmission of Christianity in Iraq is St Thomas the Apostle. Assyrians (also called Syriacs and Chaldeans) most of whom are adherents of the Chaldean Catholic Church, Syriac Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East account for most of Iraq’s Christian population, along with Armenians.  Tariq Aziz was born to an Assyrian family and is a member of the Chaldean Catholic church. There are also small populations of Mandaeans, Shabaks, Yarsan and Yezidis. The Iraqi Jewish community, numbering around 150,000 in 1941, almost entirely left the country. There are also Gnostics in the form of Mandeans and sub sects thereof, Yazidis who believe in a god but have a blue peacock angel in their pantheon, and of course the Zoroastrians which the ancient Babylonians followed.

Early Christian manuscript, Centre Numerique des Manuscrits Orientaux, Mosul, Iraq.

Despite this diversity they share some things, one being religious persecution within Iraq.  Estimates for the numbers of Christians suggest a decline from 8–10% in the mid-20th century to 5% at the turn of the century, to 3% in 2008.  About 600,000 Iraqi Christians have fled to Syria, Jordan or other countries or relocated to Iraqi Kurdistan.which is also the traditional homeland of the Assyrian people. Those who remain are very aware of their minority status and the threat to their lives. Another shared thing they have in common is a respect for their heritage, both in terms of artefacts and records.  In the aftermath of the war in Iraq where countless manuscripts where destroyed, these communities are well aware of the importance of their documentary heritage. Each group have their own manuscript collection. In addition, an attempt by Saddam Hussein to centralise private collections of archives has also made them wary of any notion of centralisation/government control. This has resulted in many collections being hidden away and lost.

 It was in this context that I met Father Najeeb in Erbil. He was there to speak about his work at the Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux (CNMO) Mosul  and their work involving the digitisation of their  Iraqi Christian manuscripts. This is a small scale project conducted by the Dominican community in Kurdistan. Their move to Iraqi Kurdistan was due to their persecution in Mosul and the government in Kurdistan ensures as much they can the community’s safety.  Father Najeeb and his community are being helped by Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk in St John’s monastery in Minnesota. Based at the the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, the library began in the cold war, hoping to retain a record of Europe’s heritage in case the Soviets came.  Father Stewart’s  goal since 2003 has been to  digitise as many Eastern Christian manuscripts in the Middle East as possible, because  these manuscripts are endangered from a variety of causes. The main danger is the ethnic genocide which has afflicted Iraq but also neglect.

CD of a collection for donor

Father Najeeb’s aim is clear, to preserve and generate awareness and interest in these ancient Iraqi Christian manuscripts and protect their heritage from disaster and cultural genocide. The Centre actively collects and digitises collections from private donors, who in turn get a copy of their manuscripts on CD (see above). I met other members of the Christian community in Iraq who had found a safe haven in Ankawa a district of Erbil which we visited. They all speak several languages including Arabic and Syriac, an ancient language closely related to Aramaic.  While Erbil is known as a safe haven withing Iraq, driving around in Father Najeeb’s car  one realises that hanging a rosary bead from a rear view mirror is not a casual gesture a brave declaration of faith as is wearing the traditional clothes of a Catholic priest.

The manuscripts which Father Najeeb is digitising are extarordinarily beautiful, and all the more so considering their provenance, age and the number of destructive forces they have endured. They have of some similarity to other e arly Christian manuscripts of the age, as the religion spread as far east as Iraq and also to the wilds of western Ireland where scribes worked on  similar texts.  In some way digitisation and the digital age has brought people together again  to protect these texts and hopefully raise awareness of this and other vulnerable communities.

Young Iraqi Christian at Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux

Flying into Erbil at night

“What you destroy, we will rebuild, only better” – Slogan of Kurdish Peshmerga.

The garden I am standing in is so beautiful that I find it difficult to imagine that it was a former detention centre  operated by Saddam Hussain’s Ba’ath party, a place  of imprisonment and torture.  It is now a garden full of  flowers  and trees and in its centre rises the impressive Zaytun Library of Erbil.  This is no accident, the Kurdish Peshmerga vowed that all these sites would be rebuilt this way once Saddam’s regime ended and the people would reclaim such poisoned land for purposes such as libraries and gardens. Erbil or or Hawler as it is called by locals like much of Iraq has seen a lot of history pass its way, Alexander the Great sorted out the Persian King Darius near here and the citadel of Erbil is the oldest inhabited city in the world and a soon to be UNESCO heritage site.

Erbil citadel

But let’s take a step back. What is a London based Corkonian doing in the middle of former detention centre/ garden in Iraqi Kurdistan? This  region in the north is the ancestral homelands of the Kurds – the oft persecuted minority in Iraq.  The Kurds constitute the largest minority without a homeland. I was at the library as part of the third House of Books workshop funded by the EU and UNESCO and run by a Humanitarian NGO called Un Ponte Per…. You can read more about their involvement here. It is the last in a series of workshops which has been looking at digitisation of texts and their preservation and its main partner is the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA). Many institutes from Iraq joined us including the National Museum of Iraq, Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux and other projects. From the Middle East the  National Library of Jordan and the  American University of Beirut also took part. My story with the INLA goes back to 2004 when I managed after some effort to persuade Dr Saad Eskander to write his  diary about his day to day life reconstructing the destroyed library in Baghdad.

Iraq National Library and Archives

The INLA was destroyed during and post war in 2003.  Of its 417,000 books, 2,618 periodicals dating from the late Ottoman era to modern times, and a collection of 4,412 rare books and manuscripts, an estimated 60 percent of its total archival materials, 25 percent of its books, newspapers, rare books, and most of its historical photographs and maps were destroyed in various ways. This was not just a loss for Iraq, it was a catastrophe for the world on many levels.

In 2011, Dr Eskander has built up a library few could ever have imagined possible. The INLA now leads the way in much best practise in librarianship for both traditional and digital material in Iraq.  There are also many digitisation projects being hatched in Iraq and around the Middle East, big and small and the drive to join up previously physically separated collections of journals, manuscripts, photographs is strong. The potential of the digital has long been recognised as a powerful means of disseminating information in the Middle East. The workshop  is trying to make projects understand that digitisation has a catch, and that is preservation or how to ensure that access is maintained over time. This idea was well introduced in Jordan during sessions such as ”Digitisation is not preservation’ and other catchy titles, and the event this time saw progression and developments since Jordan. In fact it seemed that projects had reassessed their approach to digitisation. Some would admit that where previously they were just scanning, (blogs passim) they revisited their projects in light of what they had learned in Jordan. Some  added technical metadata which they had not done at point of digitisation, others looked at having master copies as well as access copies of their digitised content and kept in different locations.  Policies were reconsidered. Storage solutions were considered. All steps in the right direction. The value of having 2 workshops in a year with a lot of the same people in both proved useful  as there seemed to be a lot of consolidation and desire to demonstrate improvements between one meeting and the next.

Workshop overview

The workshop was kicked off by UPP, and some short contributions by the EU’s representative in Kurdistan, Hala Al Sharifa , followed by the UNESCO programme officer for Kurdistan, Sami Al Khoji who is clearly dedicated to his role and the revitalisation and distribution by digital means of information about Iraq’s cultural assets. Kanan Mufti who is  director general for antiquities in the western Kurdish region in Erbil and who resided in the ancient citadel reflected on the importance of documentary heritage for Kurdistan and declared the protection of documents as a priority for them.  Presentations the INLA showed us they have been digitising and accessioning digital content since 2008 and we heard about their  plan to develop an Iraq digital library making its materials available to all Iraqis online.  The material will cover all aspects of Iraqi life and society and all forms of document. The INLA sees as vital its contribution to intellectual and scientific research in Iraq and also endeavours to support programmes which will end illiteracy in Iraq. The INLA has embarked on training programmes in many aspects of digital library management. They have even managed to send 2 people to attend the Digital Preservation Training Programme, thanks to the British Council and BISI.

The National Library of Jordan spoke about the need for standardisation in the region in relation to cataloguing and indexing. The  American University of Beirut ‘s presentation lead on nicely as Basma Chebani reflected  on Arabic ontologies and the need for authority files in the Arabic speaking world. My 2nd session on metadata fitted in well here and we did a nice hands on exercise, working with the group of 30 through Arabic and Kurdish, it seemed to hit the mark and the right level. The translator also did a great job helping me, he is now a metadata expert!

Father Najeeb of the Dominican Order in Iraq who spoke movingly about their ancient texts and manuscripts and their ongoing digitisation. A small project with great ambitions from a community constantly under threat. I plan to write more about this in another blog.

Early Christian manuscript, Centre Numerique des Manuscrits Orientaux, Mosul, Iraq.

Many copyright issues arose, in particular that of forgeries in the traditional manuscript environment. It seems that a lot of illegal copying takes place and it is difficult to contain. Issues such as translation were interesting. During my session on digitisation and preservation the Iraqi born but Aberystwyth-reared translator ran out of his booth proclaiming, ‘What is a plug in?!’ To which everyone loudly  had an opinion in return.

Translator in action

The translator explains metadata

I led the concluding session, working with the group about recommendations for next steps arising from the workshop. This proved interesting, considering I was again working with a translator with a group who spoke Kurdish, Arabic and Syriac, not to mention an Arabic English keyboard! Getting individuals to think by themselves and for themselves about what they would accomplish on their return to work is good in a big group. They then worked as teams of 4 to consider what the next steps would be in Iraq for libraries and archives.  The key issues were networking, the establishment of a national network or syndicate of librarians and archivists and information specialists involved in libraries and archives is deemed of great importance. The group also want to consolidate the information from the workshops and ensure that people are not reinventing the wheel in terms of developing best practise. The establishment of education and training programmes in all aspects of librarianship and archives is also vital.

Metadata matters but other things do too.

What was also key and hidden beneath the discussion of texts and metadata and the like was that this was a   moment or space away from the day to day. These people work in circumstances which we cannot begin to comprehend. Just to come to the workshop involved endless checkpoints and danger. Life is unsafe and violent. Civil society as we know it here in the UK is almost non existent in most of Iraq. Electricity cuts are regular, resulting in me being stuck in a lift fo 5 minutes. This is not the same for Erbil on the whole but most colleagues came from Baghdad, Mosul and other regions which are the news for tragic reasons.

The value of this little group of archivists and librarians from different ethnic and religious groups is more than just about metadata and file formats (as important as they are) but about bringing disparate groups of people together with a view to the flowering of a new nation where religious and ethnic difference no longer matter, where censorship doesn;t exist, where ideas flow freely once again. This is the vision of the INLA director Dr Saad Eskander.  It is not an easy vision in a divided society where sectarianism is rife. However it is not so unusual to consider the power of libraries as a social phenomenom and yet we seem to treat them purely as an informational phenomenon. The House of Books demonstrates that it works on at least 2 levels

Iraq as everyone knows has  a violent history of occupation and war, however during periods of serenity, the emergence of civilisations who have made numerous extraordinary contributions to the history of civilisation, these include  writing, and the concept of zero or  sifr to name but a few.  Original texts survive from the era of Babylonian mathematics. On day 1 of archives school baby archivists learn that the Babylonians wrote on tablets of unbaked clay, using cuneiform writing. The symbols were pressed into soft clay tablets with the slanted edge of a stylus and so had a wedge-shaped appearance (and hence the name cuneiform). Experts studying these learned that the Babylonians had developed the concept of sifr or zero.

Cunieform from Babylonian times: Top: 64 (1 sixty + 4 ones) bottom: 3604 (1 sixty2 + 0 sixty + 4 ones)

Sifr is also used in Arabic to denote a clean slate, a blank page. In Iraq hard work has begun of the rebuilding from scratch  of a rich cultural heritage of Iraq for the future.  I am glad that the preservation of digital heritage of Iraq is a part of this.  More later!

For a naïve non-tech archivist like me, this felt like a new way of looking at and thinking about digital data. The principle seems to be that it’s possible to capture an image of an entire disk, and then perform stepped analysis on all the data contained within that image. Most models of digital preservation, management or curation that I’m familiar with tend to focus on the file as the unit which we must identify, migrate, catalogue or preserve; here the target is different, and we’re dealing with a whole wodge of related digital spew that includes files, technical metadata, automated logs, and lots of system elements from the registry.

Digital forensics is often applied to “personal archives”, such as the disk image of a single author / researcher; or is used by commercial organisations seeking to prove something in a court of law; or in extreme cases in tracking down evidence of a crime. As presented by Leighton John, a number of characteristics of the forensic approach struck me as being quite resonant with the aims of digital preservation and/or electronic records management:

• No change: you have to capture information without changing it; demonstrate you have not changed it; and analyse it without changing it.
• Audit trail: forensics requires working out what happened in the past from traces of information, then having to defend it in a public place.
• It looks at everything: context is provided by examination of all data, records, files and system components in a case.
• It tells a story: forensics is the creation of a narrative, with lots of details and evidence.

This struck me as overlapping with aspects of records management, and descriptive of many features of what we’d expect an EDRMS to deliver. The “No Change” dimension is a crucial part of records management when it comes to the authenticity of the record, and also aligns with the requirements of BIP 0008 on legal admissibility of digital documents. EDRMS systems offer audit trailing as standard, but it’s mainly the audit trail of what happens to file objects once in the EDRMS itself. I wondered if digital forensics could indeed build this detailed technical “narrative” of record creation activity through analysis of an individual user’s disk image, and I asked a bemused question along these lines.

Naturally, forensics alone wouldn’t satisfy all the MOREQ requirements for records management, and we’d still need our mechanisms for managing retention and disposal. Some of the more obvious barriers to success would include:

• Privacy and rights: what member of staff working anywhere would welcome having their entire profile analysed? At the very least they’d feel pretty sensitive about it! But maybe it need not be all or nothing; there’s plenty of “rich data” in any given system and a lot of it could be associated with individual files without capturing the entire data image.
• The costs of doing it: I’m not sure but I get the impression it’s neither cheap nor trivial to carry out a forensic analysis of a disc image; it requires specialist technical skills, a dedicated environment, there are numerous steps to the process, and it takes a long time to complete.
• Potential loss of context, a problem which may be partially resolved by a specialist form of search and analysis, which can be used as means of indexing one’s forensics findings.

This is all just speculation of course, but I do like the mental exercise of thinking about digital data in ways that don’t involve mapping to paper analogues, a place where I think we have been trapped for too long.

Fáilte go Sráid na Banrighinn

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris

Football and digital preservation seem an unlikely combination but on May 15th Ed and I arrived to a slightly damp Glasgow celebrating en masse the end of the football season, to deliver our DPTP north of the border.  There, I am afraid the comparison between football and digital curation ends but it is worth noting that on Monday our students did not consist, in the main of bleary eyed Scots.  As I am myself half Scottish I was looking forward to hearing about the digital state of play in my mother’s country but curiously we had a very international group, many had travelled far from places such as the European Central Bank,  European Commission, PRONI,  and near  such as from the National Records Scotland (who clearly cannot get enough of a good thing as we were with them 4 weeks previous).  The group was very creative who seemed to work well together. I know  I know, we say this a lot but this group seemed to shine for many reasons.  They were keen to work together and shout out about their ideas right from the start. And though being a disparate international group they managed to work together very neatly and develop some great case studies for us.

Internationally (and sometimes nationally!) language has always been a barrier  for communication, but  it is also an enabler  and this is again where we see something such as the OAIS being a useful way of empowering people to be able to communicate with each other, and other professionals.  The DPTP rarely (and rightly so) has students just from the traditional information management world (libraries/archives/etc).  Many people now being redeployed from different parts of their organisation and as such are often unfamilair with the idea/concept of an archive or indeed of the traditional notion of the lifecycle of a document/record. This is where OAIS is very valuable due to the way it which it expresses the way a digital object should be ideally kept and uses a language describe this.

In many of our case studies with OAIS, we often find that many organisations are actually mapping very well to the OAIS which indicates that it reflects  good and real practise when it comes to managing our digital repository. Our job in the DPTP is to take someone who has never heard of the OAIS (suprisingly more often than not) and by the end of the three days have them fluent in the OAIS concepts both through listening and through application to their own environments.  Our feedback from the course has proven that this is a job well done….DPTP abú!

Our brief was to introduce digital preservation topics to traditional archivists. Among other things I was asked to deliver a module on BIP0008 and the legal admissibility of electronic records. In preparing this I discovered that the standard is very comprehensive, requiring written policies for classes of records that are in scope, a stated “duty of care” and written procedures for what staff should be doing, an extremely meticulous and well-documented methodology for the production of scanned versions of records, plus a reliable IT framework in which this can work. And of course, an audit trail marked with date and timestamps generated at every possible link in the chain of custody. That’s a lot of boxes to tick, but the payoff is a scanned document (or born-digital record) which is regarded in the eyes of the law as an authentic unaltered copy, hence legally admissible.

My personal take on the standard it goes a long way to satisfying the requirements of auditors who seem to take legal admissibility to rather extreme lengths; to my mind, any good EDRMS or records management system ought to be providing enough audit trails to keep them happy. Nonetheless the archivists at Scotland seem to have a requirement not only to observe this standard, but also to ensure they continue the chain of custody from current records management into archival storage. In other words, legally admissible records must also be legally admissible archives; and any preservation actions performed on these objects while in digital custody must not compromise that authenticity.

This may also have been reflected in their IT manager’s interest in use of the checksum and file format validation tools which can be used in the repository; he seemed to be wondering if such tools could verify authenticity, perhaps by indicating whether a file had been tampered with at any stage between leaving the EDRM system and entering the archival repository. It’s an interesting line of thought, and an approach that would probably involve a heightened degree of audit trailing for any organisation that wanted to work this way. My off-the-cuff contribution to this discussion on the day involved something about providing evidence that “best effort” had been made, but I suppose the real proof would be in a court of law and a legal precedent.

William Kilbride from the DPC asked the audience what were their main concerns and some of the answers were: obsolescence and migration issues; partners links; storage requirements; business cases and funding development. He explained the challenges for preserving digital data; the value and opportunities that preservation creates and the key approaches to achieve digital preservation (migration; emulation; hardware preservation and exhumation) as well as the risk management approach.

Our own Patricia Sleeman from ULCC explained clearly and with a very interesting example how to use the OAIS model for preserving our personal archive of photos, giving us some light on how to start and how to avoid losing crucial data.

She described the OAIS model as a tool that develops consensus from different sectors providing shared vocabulary, bringing everybody together. We were shown how an information package (digital object, metadata, packaging information which related digital object and metadata) travels through the OAIS model using a photographic archive example for the SIP, AIP and DIP stages. We had the opportunity to see other models from Portico and DCC

Bram Van Der Werf from Open PLANETS Foundation presented and demonstrated the Plato tool . He raised the need for more technical background connected to archival training paths. He welcomed the attendees to participate on the content community at Open Planets Foundation.

Caroline Peach from BLPAC gave us the opportunity to use a preservation plan. We spent time with a working example to identify the plan, its status and triggers, description of the institutional setting and the collection, requirements for preservation, evidence of decision for a preservation strategy, costs, roles and responsibilities. We had to think about what is important about the digital access we want to preserve. We used the PLATO tool to assess the preservation plan and its collection.

Ed Fay from LSE explained in detail how they got to preserve the born digital and digitized collections; and how they maintain the Institutional Repository. Initially, they established user requirements and security analysis to establish where they were in the digital preservation process. They had to investigate all the formats and their backups at the LSE data centre and he praised the robust service and infrastructure from the LSE Information Services Department to maintain their secure digital library. He briefly explained the use of checksum creation and verification with MD5. In conclusion, we saw that the LSE digital Library is flexible extensible and modular. They have a transparent process for decision making so if any changes in the technical infrastructure, everything is well documented and there is an excellent engagement throughout the institution for the purpose of digital preservation.

Other Resources and Training:
DPC events
AIDA
DPTP
PRONOM
National Library of New Zealand metadata extraction tool
BagIt
JHOVE
DPC
PADI
Library of Congress
Gloucestershire Archives
Archivematica
UKLON
ULCC
Repositories Support Project
#starting_dp at Twitter

Following up his excellent interview with William Kilbride at DPTP in May, this time Frank Steiner conducted video interviews with some of the DPC students and scholarship winners – hopefully you can see them below:

Frank Steiner: I understand you’ve just recently taken on the post at DPC. What is your background in the field of digital preservation and how did you end up at the DPC?
William Kilbride: After my archaeology studies at Glasgow University and an MSc in computer applications I worked for the Archaeology Data Service at University of York. I started there in 1999 – which were early days in digital preservation – at least within archaeology. Part of our work involved raising awareness as well as ensuring long-term provision and access to archaeological research data. Because fieldwork can be very destructive, archaeologists have always had a close relationship with and respect for archives. The DPC came into existence at that time – also based in York. We had a lot of shared interests and quickly developed a close working relationship.

FS: So you basically switched camps and went to the other part of town to get into work in the mornings. (N.B.: DPC is based in York)
WK: No, I actually took a slight detour. For family reasons and because of some interesting work they were doing I moved to Glasgow in 2006 to work in Glasgow Museums as Research Manager.

FS: This sounds like there is more than one?
WK: Indeed, most people don’t know it, but the city of Glasgow owns one of the largest and most impressive civic collections in Europe, displayed in 13 museums across the Glasgow. Glasgow has a real love affair with its museums and although only about 2 percent of the collection is on display, a new research centre will soon provide access to the whole lot – like a massive reference library or public archive.It’s really innovative and shows a real commitment to access.

FS: So you went back to your archaeological roots, so to speak?
WK: Yes – but computing projects and the issue of digital preservation caught up with me once more. We developed online access to collections as well as trying to ‘make sense’ of the ever growing pool of native digital items which the collection contained. But the Executive job at the DPC became available and considering the history I had with DPC it was very attractive. I decided to apply, and now have an office in Glasgow University where I was already an honorary lecturer. So although DPC is based in York, my office is in ‘HATII’ – the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute in Glasgow – which has an impressive track record in research and development with digital preservation. It’s a good place to work.

FS: I have spoken to both of your scholarship winners, who seemed very pleased to be given the opportunity to be funded to attend the most recent DPTP course. What other activities is DPC involved in to raise awareness of the importance of the preservation of digital material?
WK: You already mentioned part of our mission statement there. We are an agenda setting and enabling body with the ultimate goal to make our digital memory accessible in the future.

FS: I gathered from the competition, which you ran for the scholarships, that you are member’s only club. Is that right?
WK: Not really, we are a not-for-profit membership organisation, but by no means exclusive. Our members benefit through early bird rates at events, special discounts and preferred access to reports and such. Ultimately we share our reports and training with anyone who needs it. Members are able to share their work through the DPC and also able to set the agenda – to point us at issues they need resolved. Digital preservation is a topic for everyone from large commercial organisations, small charities down to each and every one of us. So it makes sense economically and intellectually if we work together.

FS: Interesting you should mention that. I realised there were a wide spread of backgrounds at the last DPTP.
WK: And I think that is one of the many benefits for people attending the course. Every time I present there is this sense of mutual problem solving, regardless which organisation the participants are from or what their background is. The chance for DPTP students to establish peer contacts and network with people trying to solve similar problems is something I like to see happening and it is also something we at DPC try to achieve.

FS: Can you shed some more light on the DPC’s involvement with the DPTP course?
WK: We helped ULCC develop the course with Cornell University, ADS, JISC and others, based on the general need within the community for training in digital preservation. I find it very satisfying to see some of the first students (in 2005) who went from looking for solutions to resolving their digital preservation issues to becoming significant leaders in the field – developing and applying solutions and sharing their experience with the community.

FS:Looking into the future, do you think there will be further scholarships by DPC?
WK: There’s no question about it, yes. There is a persistent need for digital preservation training and there are also growing expectations of what digital assets can do for organisations and individuals.

FS: Do you think the course itself has to change to stay relevant?
WK: Of course it does and it certainly has over the past 3 years. The field has developed quickly and I’m confident Patricia and the guys from ULCC will ensure the latest changes are reflected in the course syllabus. I think maybe there will be or could be a variation or targeting of DPTP, like ‘DPTP for Museums’, ‘DPTP for Publishers’ and so on. Although basic concepts and principles of digital preservation remain the same there is a trend of more specialised requirements which could be addressed by a more customised DPTP offering.

FS: William, thank you for your time and I hope to see you at the next DPTP course.
WK: Thanks for having me.

The magic bullet holes the French made in Alicante

Well, as many of us know it doesn’t exist! This was part of my opening speech for the XV Jornadas de la Conferencia de Archiveros de las Universidades Españolas. This is the annual meeting of all Spanish university archivists. I spoke about “El perfil del archivero en el entorno digital”, or “the profile of the archivist in the digital world”. Most universities in Spain have an archivist, who also performs the role of records manager. Records manager as a profession doesn’t exist in Spain. Repositories existed in almost all universities but were on the whole in the libraries and not within the archives. There is a big divide between librarians and archivists in Spain also so not a great deal of exchange goes on between these sectors. Many questions concerned costs as well as approaches to preservation. An excellent book has been written in Spanish about digital preservation by Jordi Serra of the University of Barcelona, “Gestión de los documentos digitales: estrategias para su conservación” =” Electronic records management: strategies for long term preservation”.

A lot of discussion revolved around the struggle to convince the superiors in the organization of the importance of digial preservation; a lot of discussion about how access drives so much of what is going on, also the big problem of engaging our techy friends in the area of digital preservation and making them aware of the issue. The biggest universities such as Complutense and UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.) were of course represented. UNED is the UK equivalent of the Open University with braches all over the world and is based in Madrid. A lot of discussion also took place about the involvement of non-anglo saxon countries in international fora such as ISO panels and ICA. While all these endeavours are important a certain amount of frustration is evident in relation to decision making and power!

Much talk and walking through the historical centre of Alicante, and in the interests of professional scholarship and in keeping with traditional Spanish culture I stayed awake until 3am catching the plane home the next day to rainy London.

Japanese Zen garden at Brunei gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies.

So another DPTP over! As presenters we felt it went really well. We again had a great group of people. The level of knowledge was very high and even so it seems the course really does help consolidate many levels of knowledge about digital preservation. For many it was OAIS and the class project seems to have helped put the theory into practice. One quote from the feedback:

‘Things really fell into place for me during this exercise and models started to make proper sense. Moved things from theory to practice.’

Overall the level of satisfaction with what we are providing is high.

‘Overall an excellent course. Bringing together so many disparate ideas and concepts and making sense of the muddle! Just hope we can move forward using the models. Excellent group too, good interaction and discussion – I got as much out of this element as from the taught content. Thank you so much all!’

We are now looking to developing links with the DCC as well as moving on to another stage of the DPTP. We will keep providing these 3 day courses with readjustments and updates but we are also looking at developing the modules into e-learning objects. Now all we need is funding!

Chiptunes are typically created using early personal computers or videogames and/or their soundchips. In that respect, they depend on technology preservation – the museum approach to digital preservation. Chiptune composers either use the systems as designed, programming them directly to create their music, or alter them in some way using techniques collectively known as ‘circuit-bending’, which makes the machines capable of producing sounds that they could not have originally produced. Some aspects of the chiptune scene utilise more modern synthetic techniques to recreate the sounds produced by these early chips – these are, in a loose sense, emulating the original systems, although not in a way that would allow you to use original software to create your sounds. But some adherents of the chiptune genre are going further, using the sounds of the systems themselves in their compositions.

The article which set my train of thought going covered Matthew Applegate’s (aka Pixelh8) concert in late March 2009 at the National Museum of Computing, which amongst other things used the electro-mechanical sounds produced by the Colossus and by hand-cranked adding machines. Now in this respect, as in many others, digital isn’t different to the analogue world. One could argue that found sounds have a long tradition in Western music, from Tchaikovsky’s use of cannon in the 1812 overture through to Leroy Anderson’s typewriter symphony and the work of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra, who eschew traditional instruments entirely and concentrate solely on percussive typewriter music, interleaved with the odd end-of-line bell.

But pixelh8′s work reminded me of some earlier, and unlikely, uses of computers to create music which I fear is already lost – although discerning listeners might well argue that we are all much the better for it being lost. One depended on the noise-making abilities of computer peripherals such as line and chain printers, the fiercest of which were capable of noise levels that drowned out conversation their vicinity. Devious users could create files which generated recognisable rhythms when printed on a specific printer. I’ve seen reference both to the “William Tell Overture” and “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain” being produced by this method, which demanded detailed knowledge of the printer’s workings (but no programming knowledge – the effect was produced merely by printing a carefully-crafted file.) It seems that at least one recording of this exists, from the mid-1960s. Good ideas like this don’t die, or are reimagined by later generations, and 1999 brought us the Symphony for dot matrix printers.

These examples, in common with some of pixelh8′s work, are dependent on the relevant hardware still existing and being in working order in order to allow us to continue to perform them, or to create new compositions. That’s certainly a challenge for things like line printers, and I imagine the same is true of mechanical typewriters. These, however, are relatively simple mechanical devices and, so long as someone is still interested in maintaining them, they will be repairable for many generations to come, even if they are no longer being manufactured.

But other forms of of computer music aren’t so easily re-created. At about the same time as people were creating line printer music, others realised that the computer’s own electronics generated sound in an unplanned-for way. Almost all computers of the 1960s generated substantial amounts of radio frequency interference of a type that’s now illegal. The clock speeds of those computers meant that the interference fell mainly in the medium wave band, between 500 Khz and just over 1Mhz, exactly the right spot for any consumer AM radio to pick it up. (Present-day systems, if not shielded, would be generating interference for microwaves and mobile phones, not AM radios.) Enterprising programmers with time on their hands and dedicated systems to play with wrote programs which generated RF interference which approximated a tune, since the exact nature of the interference depended on the instructions being processed, the data being fetched, and probably the addresses from which it was being fetched, as well as the properties of the CPU circuitry.

I encountered one version of this, using one of DEC’s PDP10 processors (probably a KI10, although I can’t be sure) and the DECUS program library also contains a similar program for the PDP8. I’ve come across one reference to a recording being made, this time of the same technique on an IBM 1401, but the available example uses samples from a recording to make tunes rather than the original recording itself being musical.

All these examples illustrate, to different degrees, the digital preservation problem that pixelh8′s work brought to mind. The RFI music was exquisitely sensitive to properties of the original electronics. It wasn’t enough that the computer ran the same instruction set. DEC’s PDP10 series had four generations of processor – the KA10, KI10, KL10 and KS10 – each of which could have run the music program without error. But since each was entirely different at the circuit level, only one of those machines would produce the right sort of radio interference to generate the desired effect. Emulators of these systems now exist, and a number of manufacturers have produced hardware-level recreations such as the Toad 1, Foonly and Systems Concepts machines. But neither the software nor the hardware emulators will have the same radio interference properties, so again, although they will run the original program without errors, it won’t produce the desired effects.

In fact, it would be extremely difficult to produce an electronic equivalent of those systems again, and as technology moves on such problems will only get more difficult. The early systems, which used primarily discrete components (transistors, capacitors, etc) could be built again by sufficiently dedicated enthusiasts. But chip fabrication is another thing entirely. The music that those programs and systems produced is essentially unpreservable except by recording it at the time. The significant properties that emerge from the combination of software and hardware are extremely difficult to characterise, and no environment that allows the software to run will emulate the one property of the original environment that really matters.

Some stuff really, really can’t be digitally preserved. It’s good to remember that sometimes.

(And if you are aware of any other recordings of computer ‘music’ of this type, I and others would very much like to hear of them.)

[Updated to remove an embedded YouTube video which causes problems with the Iphone. Instead, you'll have to follow the link to see and hear some hardware-based chiptune hacking.]

DPTP is of value to anyone with responsibility for digital preservation in an institutional context – its aim is to equip you with the knowledge to effect change in the organisation to allow the right things to happen. (If your primary responsibility is scientific data curation, you may find the DCC’s DC 101 course more applicable.)

Applications need to be in by May 5th – it’s not an onerous process, so don’t delay.

Firstly, we don’t want to gather absolutely everything that’s presented as a web page in the wiki, since the wiki contains not only the user-input content but also a large number of automatically generated pages (versioning, indexing, admin and login forms, etc). This stems from the underlying assumption about doing digital preservation, mainly that it costs money to capture and store digital content, and it goes on costing money to keep on storing it. (Managing this could be seen as good housekeeping. The British Library Life and Life2 projects have devised ingenious and elaborate formulae for costing digital preservation, taking all the factors into account to enable you to figure out if you can really afford to do it.) In my case, there are two pressing concerns: (a) I don’t want to waste time and resource in the shared gather queue while Web Curator Tool gathers hundreds of pages from DigiRep, and (b) I don’t want to commit the JISC to paying for expensive server space, storing a bloated gather which they don’t really want.

Secondly, the above assumptions have led to me making a form of selection decision, i.e. to exclude from capture those parts of the wiki I don’t want to preserve. The parts I don’t want are the edit history and the discussion pages. The reason I don’t want them is because UKWAC users, the target audience for the archived copy – or the designated user community, as OAIS calls it – probably don’t want to see them either. All they will want is to look at the finished content, the abiding record of what it was that DigiRep actually did.

This selection aspect led to Maureen Pennock’s reply, which is a very valid point – there are some instances where people would want to look at the edit history. Who wrote what, when…and why did it change? If that change-history is retrievable from the wiki, should we not archive it? My thinking is that yes, it is valuable, but only to a certain audience. I would think the change history is massively important to the current owner-operators of DigiRep, and that as its administrators they would certainly want to access that data. But then I put on my Institutional records management hat, and start to ask them how long they really want to have access to that change history, and whether they really need to commit the Institution to its long-term (or even permanent) preservation. Indeed, could their access requirement be satisfied merely by allowing the wiki (presuming it is reasonably secure, backed-up etc.) to go on operating the way it is, as a self-documenting collaborative editing tool?

All of the above raises some interesting questions which you may want to consider if undertaking to archive a wiki in your own Institution. Who needs it, how long for, do we need to keep every bit of it, and if not then which bits can we exclude? Note that they are principally questions of policy and decision-making, and don’t involve a technology-driven solution; the technology comes in later, when you want to implement the decisions.

In the Handbook we’ve tried to cover a huge, and sometimes controversial, area in as accessible a way as possible. The workshops, attended by both web-management and records-management professionals from HE institutions, brought  a wide range of concerns and issues to light. It’s been quite a job fitting it all in.

Even as the project progressed, we became aware of new developments in thinking about how to approach the special issues of managing web resources, including everybody’s favourite new fast automatic Web 2.0 applications. We saw the publication of Steve Bailey’s Records Management 2.0 book, TNA’s Web Continuity project, and further web archiving developments at UKWAC. We’ve even heard it whispered in some quarters that approaches to preservation may need a more profound reassessment in the context of the Web and the Cloud. Many of these issues were recorded on the PoWR blog, and we tried to reflect as much of this in the Handbook as possible.

Another recent JISC publication, The Digital Preservation Policies Study by Charles Beagrie Ltd, published at the same time, is complementary in many ways, and reassured us that many of the conclusions we groped towards in the Handbook were not so wide of the mark! Like PoWR, the  Digital Preservation Policies Study identified the necessity of high-level policy engagement as the sine qua non of effective digital preservation.

Digital preservation solutions are undoubtedly partly technical, and the tools being created will enhance digital longevity, but these solutions are also equally dependent on organisational issues. It is important to remember that digital preservation relies on the interaction between the digital preservation environment and wider organisational objectives and procedural issues. These could be financial and staffing issues, collection management, legal obligations, auditing requirements, and other strategies and policies. In this respect, recognition by organisational divisions that digital data is important and key to the successful running of an organisation is crucial.

The Digital Preservation Policies Study, p.11

Among the other recommendations the Study shares with PoWR include:

• Analysis of existing policies and strategies, and how our work can support them even if said polices don’t explicitly refer to preservation or digital assets
• Taking a phased approach – nothing happens all at once. (PoWR recommends pilot projects and working with supportive departments.)
• Careful scoping of preservation requirements. (With regard to web resources, PoWR suggests not everything, not every version, and not forever.)
• Identifying if and where existing systems will do the job
• Consideration of lifecycle, publication, and retention schedules.

The Charles Beagrie survey is a very concise and accessible contribution to the field, and we hope the PoWR Handbook, with its specific focus on established and emerging Web issues, and attention to the detailed and everyday concerns of our many contributors and correspondents, will be similarly useful. We also hope that the work of PoWR will continue in some form, on the blog and perhaps in the form of new projects and workshops, to fill in the gaps we left, and deal with the constantly emerging Web developments. Anyone for PoWR 2.0?

Without going into too much detail and re-living every single presentation, there clearly is a lot more to digital archiving than meets the eye. Five stages, three legs, “the two documents”, OAIS were the main methods and models discussed, all during the first day of the three day programme. Even though my head was spinning and I had trouble remembering my own name, thanks to the information overload, my interest was sparked.

The methods and models mentioned above can be used by any organisation to find out where they are in the greater scheme of things, so to speak. Cornell’s five stages help determine at which ‘knowledge’ stage of digital preservation an organisation is; the OAIS reference model and TDR (Trusted Digital Repositories) help analyse technological and organisational infrastructure respectively. Once these methods and approaches have been used to decide on the “right” approach to digital preservation we looked at the next step: preservation approaches and legal issues. Not surprisingly the latter could have been extended to a week-long workshop itself.Day 2 was filled with a good mix of case studies, presentations and workshops, which focused on the use and necessity of metadata in preservation, and a big group exercise putting the recently acquired knowledge to the test.

Despite the fact that I missed the last day, I personally found it a more than worthwhile and helpful workshop to attend. Patricia, Ed, Rory and Kevin did a great job “on stage”; as I’m sure did all the unnamed heroes in the background, organising and supporting this fantastic event.

As Richard noted in Part I, digital preservation is a “series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary.” But what sort of digital materials might be in scope for the PoWR project?

We think it extremely likely that institutional web resources are going to include digital materials such as “records created during the day-to-day business of an organisation” and “born-digital materials created for a specific purpose”.

What we want is to “maintain access to these digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological change”. This leads us to consider the longevity of certain file formats, the changes undergone by proprietary software, technological obsolescence, and the migration or emulation strategies we’ll use to overcome these problems.

By migration we mean “a means of overcoming technological obsolescence by transferring digital resources from one hardware/software generation to the next.” In contrast, emulation is “a means of overcoming technological obsolescence of hardware and software by developing techniques for imitating obsolete systems on future generations of computers.”

Note also that when we talk about preserving anything, “for as long as necessary” doesn’t always mean “forever”. For the purposes of the PoWR project, it may be worth us considering medium-term preservation for example, which allows “continued access to digital materials beyond changes in technology for a defined period of time, but not indefinitely.”

We also hope to consider the idea of life-cycle management. According to DPC, “The major implications for life-cycle management of digital resources is the need actively to manage the resource at each stage of its life-cycle and to recognise the inter-dependencies between each stage and commence preservation activities as early as practicable.”

From these definitions alone, it should be apparent that success in the preservation of web resources will potentially involve the participation and co-operation of a wide range of experts: information managers, asset managers, webmasters, IT specialists, system administrators, records managers, and archivists.

(All the quotations and definitions above are taken from the DPC’s online handbook.)