Week 6 Readings

Thoughts on:
"Research Challenges in Digital Archives and Long-term Preservation" by Margaret Hedstrom
"Actualized Preservation Threats: Practical Lessons from Chronicling America" by Justin Littman
"Technology Watch Report: the Open Archival Information System Reference Model: Introductory Guide" by Brian F. Lavoie

Margaret Hedstrom's article on the challenges that people face when creating and maintaining digital libraries are very interesting because they come from a preservationist's point of view. While many people think of digitizing materials as a bonus because it creates access for a larger group of people, Hedstrom eloquently points out that preservation is also considered to be a reason for digitization. While digitizing can make it easier on rare or old documents and images, it does not necessarily lead to guaranteed accessibility forever.

What's Needed for Maintenance:

• Tools for analysis
  
• Tools for preservation
• Security against attacks
• A system that can withstand chance in an electronic environment

While Hedstrom points out all these facts about the difficulties in preserving for a long period of time, Brian F. Lavoie uses some of these negatives to discuss how open access can create a stable and more secure digital environment for preservation.

Lavoie gives a detailed and interesting summation of the OAIS and how it works. Many different Designated Communities are involved with many different archived content. It appears that Designated Communities determine the types of archived content that is added to the OAIS and from there the materials are accessible to that Designated Community. While making sure the documents and images are digitized properly and archived properly is important, the OAIS deems the designation of the community to be even more important from a preservation standpoint.
In order for the information that has been archived to be understood by users it has to be used and set up by users that are familiar with it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be accessible. This is a very interesting way to look at preservation that I had not previously thought of. It occurred to me that a lack of appropriate technology could hinder the use of a digitized object, but not the lack of a person who understands what the digitized object means or why it is there.

"Actualized Preservation Threats" provides another take on the preservation front. Media failure, hardware failure, software failures and operation failures make up the 4 aspects that pose a constant threat to digital preservation. While this article has a lot more technical language in it, it is harder for me to absorb the information with my computer-illiterate mind. But even though it took longer to digest, the information was more clearly spelled out about the types of threats that one who is creating a digital library would have to watch for.

While all three authors brought very specific and relevant points to the table, Littman did so with much more detail to the types of threats that digitization can cause in the name of preservation.
While all of the threats are of great concern, the most threatening, in my opinion, would be those related to hardware failures. The thought of losing all trace of a digitized item because the hardware fails just reinforces the fact that one should always have a backup storage system and very often should have multiple backup storage systems. One of them should be fireproof.

Overall I think I learned a lot about the long-term goals of digitization and how it can be used to help preserve the past- if it is done correctly.

Muddiest Points for Week 5 Lecture
How well does Javascript relate to XML?