Speaker(s):
Nicholas Taylor
Alexandra Ohlson
Nicholas Taylor will participate in the DLF Forum and Alexandra Ohlson will participate in NDSA Digital Preservation. We look forward to connecting with any LOCKSS partners who may also be attending!
Nicholas will present Recentering Community for Decentralized Digital Preservation: LOCKSS Community and Technical Strategy, as part of the session, "Digitization: Pedagogy and Practice".
Here is the abstract:
Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe, Lots of Communities Keep Stuff Safe; the situation of digital preservation in a community with a shared stake in designated content has always been a close and logical complement to the LOCKSS technical architecture for distributed, peer-to-peer digital preservation. This model has been reasonably successful: collectively, hundreds of organizations participate in a dozen networks dedicated to preserving not just subscription e-resources but also government information, web archives, digitized special collections, theses and dissertations, and more arbitrary repository content. We have a notion, though, that LOCKSS is not doing as much good for digital preservation as it could be, and getting there will require changes both to how we engage communities and how the the technology works.
Our coupled community and technical strategy is to make LOCKSS more accessible and interoperable for broader use in general digital preservation workflows by cross-pollinating with allied open-source software communities; engaging the LOCKSS community in collaborative software and solutions development; documenting LOCKSS technologies and more actively fostering an integrator community; elaborating shared and distinct competitive strengths in partnership with other community-based digital preservation service providers; and creating a structured forum for partners to guide the evolution of the LOCKSS Program itself.
This session will provide an opportunity to share and receive feedback on the new ways that LOCKSS could support digital preservation broadly, as well as reflect on the important intersections of community and technical strategy for a long-running digital preservation initiative.
Alexandra will present The Workflows that Make Robust Digital Preservation Possible: LOCKSS Archive Case Studies, as part of the session, "Distributed Digital Preservation".
Here is the abstract:
This talk will describe the workflow, challenges, trade-offs, and practical solutions that are the often hidden realities of preserving digital content. The LOCKSS software supports digital preservation in compelling ways. It provides an array of intake methods for a variety of content types, it can parse and extract descriptive metadata from arbitrary structured sources, provide seamless failover access to preserved content through a proxy server, and assure the integrity of content over time through polling and repair operations between mutually-distrusting peers in a distributed network. Like any digital preservation system, though, these technologies are necessary but not sufficient. LOCKSS can’t do any of this good if the content isn’t carefully analyzed, organized, and accessioned. The rapidly changing nature both of the web and the digital preservation community requires finding practical solutions to unanticipated issues and adapting existing processes to meet new needs. Increased awareness of security concerns, the use of cloud-based storage, the proliferation and size of video, audio and supporting data sets as important aspects of the content stream affect how we ingest and store content. The high relative cost of ingest in the overall costs of digital preservation increase the need for scalable automation but require thoughtful balance with tools to validate holdings to better ensure that the content you need will be preserved for future access. We will discuss how digital content is processed for two specific archives that leverage the LOCKSS technology with generalizable observations and insights about digital preservation workflows.