iPRES 2008 (slot)

Nog een paar citaten van Chris Rusbridge.

Een hart onder de riem van 'ouderwetse' archivarissen:

Christian Keitel from Ludwigsburg quoted one Chris Rusbridge as saying that digital preservation was “easy and cheap”, and then comprehensively showed that it was at least complicated and difficult. He did suggest that sensible bringing together of digital preservation and non-digital archival approaches (in both directions) could suggest some improvements in practice that do simplify things somewhat.

En een relatieverende opmerking aan het eind:

In discussion, we felt that the point of David’s remarks was that we should understand that perfection was not achievable in the digital world, as it never was in the analogue world. We have never managed to keep all we wanted to keep (or to have kept) for as long as we wanted to keep it, without any damage.

Ik heb me voorgenomen om over twee weken in Antwerpen op een zelfde manier verslag te doen van de Studiedag Digitaal Depot.

iPRES 2008

Gisteren en vandaag vond (en vindt) in de British Library voor de vijfde keer iPRES (international Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects) plaats. En het mooie van deze tijden is dat van de lezingen bijna live een verslag te volgen is. Zie bijvoorbeeld de bijdragen van Chris Rusbridge op de Digital Curation Blog.

Ik pik er nu even een paar interessante citaten uit.
Over kosten en risico's

Richard Wright talking about storage and the “cost of risk”. In early days dropping a storage device meant losing a few kilobytes, now it could be GBytes and years of work. Storage costs declining and capacity increasing exponentially roughly related to Moore’s law (doubling every 18 months). Usage is going up, too, and risk is proportionate to usage, so risk is going up too. Risk proportional to no of devices and to size and to use… plus the more commonly discussed format obsolescence, IT infrastructure obsolescence etc. So if storage gets really cheap, it gets really risky!

Reports work from Manfred Thaller of Koln: one bad byte affects only that byte of a TIFF (does this depend on selected compression?), 2% of a JPEG, and 17% of a JPEG2000. Demonstrated 5 errors on a PNG and a BMP: former illegible, latter has a few dots scattered about. Text files the best: one byte corruption affects only that byte! (...) Can’t emphasise how important this is: one of the most worrying preconceptions in digital preservation is that the bit preservation element is a solved problem. It isn’t!

Over emulatie

I’ve always had a problem with emulation; perhaps I’ve too long a memory of those early days of MS-DOS, when emulators were quite good at running well-behaved programs, but were rubbish at many common programs, which broke the rule-book and went straight into the interrupt vectors to get performance. OK, if you’re not that old, maybe emulation does work better these days, and is even getting trendy under the new name of virtualisation. My other problem is also a virtue of emulation: you will be presented with the object’s “original” interface, or look and feel. This sounds good, but in practice the world has moved on and most people don’t like old interfaces, even if historians may want them. I guess emulation can work well for objects which are “viewed”, in some sense; it’s not clear to me that one can easily interwork an emulated object with a current object.

Vooral die laatste twee opmerkingen vind ik interessant en moet ik nog eens over nadenken.

En tenslotte een presentatie van Brian Kelly over website-archivering. (Toevallig is dat nu heel actueel in mijn eigen organisatie, vandaar mijn belangstelling).

Preservation of Web Resources: The JISC PoWR Project

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ipres-2008 ukoln)