Cataloging and Metadata Commons^™

Hashes Are Not Suitable To Verify Fixity Of The Public Archived Web, Mohamed Aturban, Martin Klein, Herbert Van De Sompel, Sawood Alam, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Web archives, such as the Internet Archive, preserve the web and allow access to prior states of web pages. We implicitly trust their versions of archived pages, but as their role moves from preserving curios of the past to facilitating present day adjudication, we are concerned with verifying the fixity of archived web pages, or mementos, to ensure they have always remained unaltered. A widely used technique in digital preservation to verify the fixity of an archived resource is to periodically compute a cryptographic hash value on a resource and then compare it with a previous hash value. If the …

Conference Roundup: Smart Cataloging - Beginning The Move From Batch Processing To Automated Classification, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

This article reviewed the Amigos Online Conference titled “Work Smarter, Not Harder: Innovating Technical Services Workflows” keynote session delivered by Dr. Terry Reese on February 13, 2020. Excerpt:

"As the developer of MarcEdit, a popular metadata suite used widely across the library community, Reese’s current work is focused on the ways in which libraries might leverage semantic web techniques in order to transform legacy library metadata into something new. So many sessions related to using new technologies in libraries or academia, although exciting, are not practical enough to put into everyday use by most librarians. Reese’s keynote, titled Smart Cataloging: …

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 …

Practical Guidance For Integrating Data Management Into Long-Term Ecological Monitoring Projects, Robert D. Sutter, Susan Wainscott, John R. Boetsch, Craig Palmer, David J. Rugg

Library Faculty Publications

Long-term monitoring and research projects are essential to understand ecological change and the effectiveness of management activities. An inherent characteristic of long-term projects is the need for consistent data collection over time, requiring rigorous attention to data management and quality assurance. Recent papers have provided broad recommendations for data management; however, practitioners need more detailed guidance and examples. We present general yet detailed guidance for the development of comprehensive, concise, and effective data management for monitoring projects. The guidance is presented as a graded approach, matching the scale of data management to the needs of the organization and the complexity …