Engineering Commons^™

Access Update For Gvsu, Matt Schultz, Kyle Felker

Matt Schultz

Maa & Mmdp: Fall Workshop 2016 With Mid-Michigan Digital Practitioners, Matt Schultz, Annie Benefiel

Matt Schultz

Quick-Start Guide To Digital Preservation For Audio, Sandy Rodriguez

Central Plains Network for Digital Asset Management

This presentation focuses on practical strategies and use of open-source tools in order to establish “good enough” preservation management practices for digital audio files. Using her experience at the Marr Sound Archives, University of Missouri—Kansas City, the presenter will discuss assessing current practices, identifying gaps, prioritizing, making recommendations, and selecting and implementing a suite of open-source tools to improve the preservation process. Tools demonstrated in the presentation are AVPreserve’s BWF MetaEdit, MDQC, and Fixity.

Digital Preservation Efforts At Usm, Elizabeth La Beaud

Central Plains Network for Digital Asset Management

The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) has steadily been working to improve its digital preservation infrastructure over the past four years. In 2013, with funding from a NEH Preservation Assistance Grant, consultants Tom Clareson and Liz Bishoff conducted a digital preservation readiness assessment and jump started USM’s education on the topic. Since then, USM has added geographically distributed backups, manual fixity checks, manual metadata logs, and manual file format migrations to its arsenal with varying degrees of success. The influx in needed manpower and technical infrastructure precipitated a financial commitment from the university and the purchase of a robust digital …

A Framework For Web Object Self-Preservation, Charles L. Cartledge

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

We propose and develop a framework based on emergent behavior principles for the long-term preservation of digital data using the web infrastructure. We present the development of the framework called unsupervised small-world (USW) which is at the nexus of emergent behavior, graph theory, and digital preservation. The USW algorithm creates graph based structures on the Web used for preservation of web objects (WOs). Emergent behavior activities, based on Craig Reynolds’ “boids” concept, are used to preserve WOs without the need for a central archiving authority. Graph theory is extended by developing an algorithm that incrementally creates small-world graphs. Graph theory …

Digital Content Preservation Across Domain Verticals, Soha Maad, Borislav Dimitrov

Borislav D Dimitrov

The authors present a novel approach to develop scalable systems and services for preserving digital content generated from various application domains. The aim is to deliver an integrative scalable approach for digital content preservation across domain verticals. This would involve consolidating approaches for modeling document workflow, preserving the integrity of heterogeneous data, and developing robust and scalable tools for digital preservation ensuring interoperability across domains verticals. The authors consider various application domains including: healthcare, public, business and finance, media and performing art, and education. The authors focus on specific case studies of digital content preservation across the considered domain verticals. …

Using The Web Infrastructure For Real Time Recovery Of Missing Web Pages, Martin Klein

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Given the dynamic nature of the World Wide Web, missing web pages, or "404 Page not Found" responses, are part of our web browsing experience. It is our intuition that information on the web is rarely completely lost, it is just missing. In whole or in part, content often moves from one URI to another and hence it just needs to be (re-)discovered. We evaluate several methods for a \justin- time" approach to web page preservation. We investigate the suitability of lexical signatures and web page titles to rediscover missing content. It is understood that web pages change over time …

Integrating Preservation Functions Into The Web Server, Joan A. Smith

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Digital preservation of theWorldWideWeb poses unique challenges, different fromthe preservation issues facing professional Digital Libraries. The complete list of a website’s resources cannot be cited with confidence, and the descriptive metadata available for the resources is so minimal that it is sometimes insufficient for a browser to recognize. In short, the Web suffers from a counting problem and a representation problem. Refreshing the bits, migrating from an obsolete file format to a newer format, and other classic digital preservation problems also affect the Web. As digital collections devise solutions to these problems, the Web will also benefit. But the core …

Lazy Preservation: Reconstructing Websites From The Web Infrastructure, Frank Mccown

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Backup or preservation of websites is often not considered until after a catastrophic event has occurred. In the face of complete website loss, webmasters or concerned third parties have attempted to recover some of their websites from the Internet Archive. Still others have sought to retrieve missing resources from the caches of commercial search engines. Inspired by these post hoc reconstruction attempts, this dissertation introduces the concept of lazy preservation{ digital preservation performed as a result of the normal operations of the Web Infrastructure (web archives, search engines and caches). First, the Web Infrastructure (WI) is characterized by its preservation …

Observed Web Robot Behavior On Decaying Web Subsites, Joan A. Smith, Frank Mccown, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We describe the observed crawling patterns of various search engines (including Google, Yahoo and MSN) as they traverse a series of web subsites whose contents decay at predetermined rates. We plot the progress of the crawlers through the subsites, and their behaviors regarding the various file types included in the web subsites. We chose decaying subsites because we were originally interested in tracking the implication of using search engine caches for digital preservation. However, some of the crawling behaviors themselves proved to be interesting and have implications on using a search engine as an interface to a digital library.

Opal: In Vivo Based Preservation Framework For Locating Lost Web Pages, Terry L. Harrison

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

We present Opal, a framework for interactively locating missing web pages (http status code 404). Opal is an example of "in vivo" preservation: harnessing the collective behavior of web archives, commercial search engines, and research projects for the purpose of preservation. Opal servers learn from their experiences and are able to share their knowledge with other Opal servers using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Using cached copies that can be found on the web, Opal creates lexical signatures which are then used to search for similar versions of the web page. Using the OAI-PMH to facilitate …