ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Preservation News

Jane Hedberg is preservation program officer at Harvard University, e-mail: jane@hulmail.harvard.edu;fax: (617) 496-8344

Emulation investigation report

An Experiment in Using Emulation to Preserve Digital Publicationsby Jeff Rothenberg of the RAND Corporation is now available at the Networked European Deposit Library (NEDLIB) Web site. This report describes a preliminary investigation into the feasibility of emulation as a digital preservation technique. It includes proposed data, metadata, and procedural models based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and the Deposit System for Electronic Publications (DSEP), a NEDLIB adaptation of the OAIS. The results of this study show emulation has potential and the report includes suggestions for further research.

The report is available at http://www.kb.nl/ nedlib/results/emulationpreservationreport.pdf.

DLF report

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) has published Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries: Beyond Traditional Authority Files by Gail Hodge. The report considers the role of knowledge organization systems, such as term lists, classification schemes, and relationship lists, in providing access to digital resources. These systems perform an essential function as the link between users’ inquiries and collection content. The report covers how to design, evaluate, plan, implement, and maintain knowledge organization systems and provides examples of how use of these sys-. tems enhances access to digital collections.

The report is available free at http:// www. clir. org/ pubs/ abstract/pub91 abst. html. Printed copies are available for $15, prepaid, from CLIR Publication Orders, 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 500, Washington, D.C., 20036-2124; phone: (202) 939-4750; fax: (202) 939-4765; e-mail: info@clir.org.

D-Lib article on persistent archives

D-Lib Magazinehas published a two-part article, Collection-Based Persistent Digital Archives, by Reagan Moore, Chaitan Baru, Arcot Rajasekar, Bertram Ludaescher, Richard Marciano, Michael Wan, Wayne Schroeder, and Amarnath Gupta. Part I of this article proposes that long-term preservation of digital information is becoming feasible as the expertise of various communities is shared. Technology to store very large amounts of data is being developed by the computer science community, information models are being developed by the digital library community, and preservation models are being developed by the archives community. Integration of all these developments can produce the environment necessary to preserve large digital collections for hundreds of years. Part II of this article describes the creation of a 1 million message e-mail collection. It covers the four major components of a persistent archive collection: acceptance of incoming data, archival storage, retrieval, and presentation.

D-Lib Magazineis available at http:// www.dlib.org. Part I is in the March 2000 issue and Part II is in the April 2000 issue.

RIT photograph workshop

The Rochester Institute of Technology will hold “Preserving Photographs in a Digital World” at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, on August 12-17, 2000. The week-long workshop will cover the history and technology of photographs, color processes, chemistry of deterioration, organization and preservation of collections, and digital imaging projects. Jim Reilly of the Image Permanence Institute and Grant Römer of George Eastman House are the program chairs. Other presenters include Jean-Louis Bigourdan, Franziska Frey, Douglas Nishimura, Debbie Norris, Steven Puglia, and David Wooters.

Cost for the program and instructional materials is $1,195. Travel and lodging costs are not included. For more information, contact the Rochester Institute of Technology, CET Registration, 67 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, New York 14623-5603; phone: (800) 724-2536 or outside the continental US: (716) 475-7090; http://www.rit.edu/IPI. ■