DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

24
DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES" "DIGITAL DARK AGES" Bogdan Trifunović Digitization Centre Public Library Čačak, Serbia [email protected] Zadar, 25 May 2010 Zadar, 25 May 2010 LIDA 2010 LIDA 2010

description

Bogdan Trifunovic, DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES" presentation, LIDA 2010, Zadar, Croatia, 25 May 2010

Transcript of DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

Page 1: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES""DIGITAL DARK AGES"

Bogdan TrifunovićDigitization Centre

Public Library Čačak, [email protected]

Zadar, 25 May 2010Zadar, 25 May 2010

LIDA 2010LIDA 2010

Page 2: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

OVERVIEWOVERVIEW

• State-of-the-art report

• Support of Digital Scholarship through Digital Libraries

• Duration and Reliability of digital information

• Stability of digital objects

Page 3: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

Digital Dark Ages

The state of:

1) Too-much information

2) Non-accessible information

3) Non-reliable information

* Kuny, Terry (1997). "A Digital Dark Ages? Challenges in the Preservation of Electronic Information". 63rd International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) Council and General Conference. <http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla63/63kuny1.pdf>

Page 4: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

Digital Scholarship relies on accurate, reliable and unchanged digital information, including digital objects inside digital libraries. When scholar use digital repository, looking for the relevant literature about some old manuscript, it is natural that he or she will also use digital image of that manuscript for the research, supposing that original is preserved in some library or archive far away.

Page 5: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

That put stress on the • - quality of digital copy,• - its credibility and• - reliability to adequately represents

original in digital form for the long time.• The question should be where that source

will be in five or fifty years or will it exist at all.

Page 6: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

Nikoljsko Gospel, late XIV Century

Page 7: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

• The original is in The Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, where it is cataloged as Bosnian manuscript “Gospel-book in Serbian Church Slavonic”

• The National Library of Serbia published digital copy in its Digital Library, under the name “Nikoljsko Gospel” (the name of the monastery where it had been found in the XIX century)

• Collision of metadata?• Is it possible for the researchers to identify

digital object as authentic copy?

Page 8: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

• “Institutional repositories are firmly based within the theoretical framework of digital libraries.”

• [Wells, P. (2009). “Institutional Repositories: Investigating User Groups and Comparative Evaluation Using Link Analysis”. Bristol Institute of Technology, 2009, 13]

Page 9: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"
Page 10: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

• “In differentiating between institutional repositories, digital libraries and other repositories, the only distinction given is the institutional focus of the service or collection. However, this does not preclude institutional repositories from serving a useful purpose and being seen as one tool amongst many in the scope of the digital libraries.” [Wells, 15]

Page 11: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

• “The development of stable open source software with which to implement institutional repositories is seen as pivotal to the rapid increase in their deployment.” [Wells, 12]

• This interest in the case of digital libraries did not happen yet, so there is few stable open source solutions for digital libraries.

Page 12: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

OAI-PMH

Recognized a standard level of metadata required for digital repositories and enabled the automation of record-sharing between institutional repositories and secondary services (e. g. search engines, harvesters) to give institutional repositories a wider audience

First operational Greenstone OAI-PMH collections were created in Dec. 2009

Page 13: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

An example

• While the most popular (open source, “free”) solutions for Digital Repositories (DSpace, Fedora Commons, EPrints) are developed mostly by researchers for their needs (at MIT, Cornell University, University of Virginia, University of Southampton), Digital Libraries have not gain such attention from the academic community

Page 14: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

It is/was believed that digital objects like images, video, audio will be preserved by memory institutions (libraries, archives...) as a “digital cultural heritage”

Page 15: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

• How to provide the long-term integrity and preservation of digital objects.

• One solution suggests that one of the major aspects of digital libraries should be merging of library and publishing industry functions and direct system maintenance.

• [Atkinson, R., Library functions, scholarly communications, and the foundation of the digital library: laying claim to the control zone, Library Quarterly, 66 (3), 1996, 239-265.]

Page 16: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"
Page 17: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

The instability of digital formats and ephemeral character of the Internet (on one side), with uncertain development of technologies used to create, disseminate, store, describe, retrieve, read and present (on the other) put stress on the management of digital information and thorough re-investigation of the preservation methods and practices used in the last two decades

Page 18: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

“Link Rot”

• “The 2010 analysis reveals that nearly 28 percent of the online publications archived between March 2007 and March 2008 have now disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project’s preservation efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs.”

• [The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive]

Page 19: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

Our findings

In the course of six years (from 2003) 40% of the cited online sources in one research paper, published in respectable historical journal, are not correct any more – 33 of 84 URL addresses do not point to the cited papers or authors mentioned in the text.

Page 20: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

• “Internet Corner”, an article published annually from 2006, describing three different web sites dealing with digital libraries and digital preservation

• 10 out of 12 web sites still work (May 2010)

• One has changed URL address• One has gone through “System Crash”

(“Aging hardware and conversion issues following a system crash have taken their toll on DLIST, the University of Arizona's Digitial Library of Information Science and Technology. We are currently exploring choices and alternatives both to short term recovery and long term sustainability.”)

Page 21: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

The problemsThe problems

• URL address

• Hardware/Software changes

• Digitalna knjiga sudnjeg dana

• Primer sajtova iz Internet coska

• BBC Doomsday Project in the 1980s - an example of technology influence on digitization

Bogdan Trifunović, Digital Libraries and the challenge of a “Digital Dark Ages” | 2/12

Page 22: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

Proposals

• Digital Libraries should be built around or in accordance with established DOI and OAI-PMH systems

• Handle System and URN example

Separating the name from all associated metadata, including location

Making the URL information irrelevant

• ISO standards

Page 23: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

Proposals

• Avoiding file formats which don't have larger industry or user base (DjVu, etc.)

• There is no dilemma “size or usability” (using advanced compression technology of some less-used digital document formats to save storage resources) - storage is cheap

• The Web is digital playground, digital cultural heritage should be Web friendly

Page 24: DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF A "DIGITAL DARK AGES"

THANKS!THANKS!

QUESTIONS?QUESTIONS?

Bogdan TrifunovićDigitization CentrePublic Library Čačak, [email protected]

LIDA 2010, Zadar LIDA 2010, Zadar 24-28 May 201024-28 May 2010