Archival Science Commons^™

Review: 'The Theory And Craft Of Digital Preservation', Kayla Harris

Marian Library Faculty Publications

Information about the book reviewed:

Trevor Owens. The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2018. 240 pp. $34.95 (softcover). ISBN: 9781421426976

Front Matter, Heather Oswald

Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists

Front Matter

Recovering From Hurricane Sandy: A Municipal Government Archives Role In Disaster Recovery, Bryan J. Dickerson

Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists

On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey with catastrophic results for many communities, including Brick Township. Located on the Atlantic Coast, Brick Township suffered damage to approximately 10,000 of its 26,000 residences from the hurricane. Nearly 500 of these homes were destroyed or required demolition afterwards. Since then, the Township of Brick Archives has been using its digitized Construction and Land Use records to support the community’s recovery from this devastating storm. When the Township implemented document digitization in 2006, disaster recovery was not its intended purpose. However, having these digitized records readily available has proven to be …

Journeywoman: A Lone Arranger On The Final Frontier, Laura Frizzell

Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists

The state of Alaska has no shortage of fascinating history and culture. What it does lack, however, is the presence of enough trained archivists to ensure the proper treatment and preservation of historic and cultural collections across the state’s numerous, albeit small, repositories. As such, the Alaska State Historic Records Advisory Board (ASHRAB) has developed the Journeyman Archival Processing Program, which provides an interested lone arranger the opportunity to work in an Alaska archives for six weeks. In May 2017, I ventured to the 49^th State in this very capacity. In this paper, I detail my experience working as …

Eating In The Archives? A Review Of Archival Outreach And Engagement Through Food History, Kara Flynn

Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists

For decades now, archivists have been working to make archival spaces more approachable and accessible, especially through archival outreach endeavors. Utilizing food history as archival outreach is a growing trend among archival institutions, as evidenced by the increasing numbers of events, exhibits, and online resources being offered. Food history provides the opportunity to build archival outreach and engagement opportunities by utilizing materials often already in archival collections. These materials open up dialogue and engagement with community members about something they are familiar with, even if they have never stepped foot in the archives. This article will review archival outreach events, …

Indigenous Ways Of Knowing : Mapping Resource Use In The Central Intierior Of British Columbia, Emily Wichmann

Summer Community of Scholars Posters (RCEU and HCR Combined Programs)

No abstract provided.

Reeling Backward: The Haptics Of A Medium And The Queerness Of Obsolescence, Travis L. Wagner

Student Publications

This article considers the haptics of queer activist footage shot on video, and more specifically footage shot on magnetic media. Despite ideal methods of care, magnetic media faces extreme concern from a preservation standpoint. As a format that is both subject to rampant deterioration (known colloquially as “sticky shed”) and obsolescence (with the ceasing VCR production), the queer activist videotape is an archival artefact irretrievably stuck in a liminal space. To play a tape is to contribute to its destruction, yet to not play the tape is to overlook potentially unique moments in queer history. As such, this article explores …

Teaching Through Activism: Service Learning, Community Archives, And Digital Repository Building In Mlis Classrooms, Travis L. Wagner, Elise Lewis

Student Publications

This paper reflects upon a set of Service Learning (SL) courses taught in the University of South Carolina’s Library and Information Science (LIS) program. The classes discussed helped community archives build digital repositories and provided LIS students skills demanded by potential employers, while affording students chances to experiment with technologies and information organization practices in low-risk, innovative ways. While SL is not pedagogically new to LIS instruction, this paper expands discussion on how SL courses translate between undergraduate and graduate students and within in-person and online variants. The paper concludes with an exploration of the ethical challenges of teaching a …

Gvsu Press Releases, 2018, Grand Valley State University

University Press Releases, 1961-Present

A compilation of press releases for the year 2018 submitted by University Communications (formerly News & Information Services) to news agencies concerning the people, places, and events related to Grand Valley State University.

Documenting Student Life: Using Omeka To Connect Students To The University Archives, Kayla Siddell

Faculty and Staff Publications

Many institutional archives struggle to gain and maintain student participation in documenting the student experience. The history, images, and records of students and their various organizations are fundamental to the narrative of the university. Capturing the experiences of students and campus life is a difficult task as students create organizations, plan and attend events, and maintain a social media presence, all of which are rarely documented in university archives. At this institution, the Special Collections department wanted to increase students’ use of services and resources, and increase student donations to the archives to grow student-centered collections.

Reliquaires Pervertis. Inscriptions Du Deuil Chez Maupassant, Mirbeau Et Rodenbach, Elizabeth Emery

Department of World Languages and Cultures Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Dans cette étude il est question de la fascination pour les tombes, reliquaires et épitaphes à travers leur représentation dans des textes naturalistes et décadents de la fin du XIXe siècle. Alors qu’on commande de plus en plus de monuments funéraires, surtout dans les années 1880 et 1890, les écrivains tels que Maupassant, Mirbeau et Rodenbach se moquent de leurs inscriptions ; ils privilégient une vision moins historique (celle de l’Histoire, avec un grand H) et plus intime (celle de l’histoire, avec un petit h) de l’épitaphe, la dotant ainsi d’une fonction de moins en moins matérielle et de plus …

Digital Humanities As Community Engagement: The Digital Watts Project, Melanie Hubbard, Dermot Ryan

Librarian Publications & Presentations

The Digital Watts Project was a graduate-level English class taught in summer of 2016 that focused on the 1965 Watts “Uprising” or “Riots.” The class worked with the Southern California Library (SCL) to make available, through a digital public humanities project, primary sources intended to expand the narrative around the events of 1965, and to situate them in a broader context of the history of race and racism in Los Angeles. Exploring the ways in which our background in the humanities could positively enrich our work with the SCL, Melanie Hubbard, a Digital Scholarship Librarian at Loyola Marymount University, and …

Establishing Processing Priorities: Recommendations From A 2017 Study Of Practices In Us Repositories, Amy Cooper Cary, Pam Hackbart-Dean

Library Faculty Research and Publications

Building upon archival scholarship and previous solutions addressing backlog collections, this study seeks to identify a comprehensive, integrated, and effective strategy to establish and maintain processing priorities. This study is based on supporting research, which includes the results of a survey of archivists and the findings of five focus group discussions about processing priorities. Using these findings, the authors (a) consider whether this focus on an old problem has motivated archivists to find innovative solutions; (b) determine whether archivists are using these tools; (c) consider whether and how archivists have changed processing priority practices and policies; and (d) seek to …

Articulating Digital Archival Practice Within Writing Program Administration: A Theoretical Framework, Amanda Girard

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Throughout Writing Program Administration scholarship there has been a clear call for archivization and archival work. This dissertation project takes an interdisciplinary approach to digital archival practices for Writing Program Administrators to consider and employ in their home institutions. While I recognize that WPAs are not typically identified as “archivists,” I situate the digital archive within the digital humanities as an interdisciplinary, collaborative project and offer suggestions that lead to recommendations for making an institutional archive. I review archival practice in order to justify the digital archive as an appropriate vehicle for WPAs’ work. Further, I argue that the digital …

Introducing Genealogy To The Academic Library In The 21st Century, Tom Mcfarland, Joan Barnes

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

This case study examines the development of a new program to foster genealogical research in an academic library that did not encourage or promote genealogical research. In early 2014, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries set a strategic initiative of increased outreach. As one way to reach the goal, the staff development officer and the community engagement librarian proposed a genealogical program with three objectives: • to reach out to campus faculty, staff, and students • to involve library faculty and staff • to bring community users into the academic library The staff development officer and the community engagement librarian became …

The Role Of Institutional Repositories In Making Lost Or Hidden Cultures Accessible, A Study Across Four African University Libraries, Andrew Watson Malekani, George Kavishe

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study was undertaken to uncover the potential role that Institutional Repositories (IR) can offer to preserve in the long term the special collections (especially cultural heritage materials) so as to reap the advantages that these collections offer in terms of intellectual development in Africa.

The study involved use of scoping review which involves five stages: research question, identifying the relevant study, selecting the study, developing a narrative review (charting data), summarizing (collating) data and an optional consultation step. The study also involved a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) involving participants in the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme at the University …

Gvsu Undergraduate And Graduate Catalog, 2018-2019, Grand Valley State University

Course Catalogs, 1963 - Current

Grand Valley State University 2018-2019 undergraduate and/or graduate course catalog published annually to provide students with information and guidance for enrollment.

Off Topic Memento Toolkit, Shawn M. Jones, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Web archive collections are created with a particular purpose in mind. A curator selects seeds, or original resources, which are then captured by an archiving system and stored as archived web pages, or mementos. The systems that build web archive collections are often configured to revisit the same original resource multiple times. This is incredibly useful for understanding an unfolding news story or the evolution of an organization. Unfortunately, over time, some of these original resources can go off-topic and no longer suit the purpose for which the collection was originally created. They can go off-topic due to web site …

205.3 The Many Shapes Of Archive-It, Shawn Jones, Michael L. Nelson, Alexander Nwala, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Web archives, a key area of digital preservation, meet the needs of journalists, social scientists, historians, and government organizations. The use cases for these groups often require that they guide the archiving process themselves, selecting their own original resources, or seeds, and creating their own web archive collections. We focus on the collections within Archive-It, a subscription service started by the Internet Archive in 2005 for the purpose of allowing organizations to create their own collections of archived web pages, or mementos. Understanding these collections could be done via their user-supplied metadata or via text analysis, but the metadata is …

Swimming In A Sea Of Javascript Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love High-Fidelity Replay, John A. Berlin, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

[First paragraph] Preserving and replaying modern web pages in high-fidelity has become an increasingly difficult task due to the increased usage of JavaScript. Reliance on server-side rewriting alone results in live-leakage and or the inability to replay a page due to the preserved JavaScript performing an action not permissible from the archive. The current state-of-the-art high fidelity archival preservation and replay solutions rely on handcrafted client-side URL rewriting libraries specifically tailored for the archive, namely Webrecoder's and Pywb's wombat.js [12]. Web archives not utilizing client-side rewriting rely on server-side rewriting that misses URLs used in a manner not accounted for …

Client-Assisted Memento Aggregation Using The Prefer Header, Mat Kelly, Sawood Alam, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

[First paragraph] Preservation of the Web ensures that future generations have a picture of how the web was. Web archives like Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, WebCite, and archive.is allow individuals to submit URIs to be archived, but the captures they preserve then reside at the archives. Traversing these captures in time as preserved by multiple archive sources (using Memento [8]) provides a more comprehensive picture of the past Web than relying on a single archive. Some content on the Web, such as content behind authentication, may be unsuitable or inaccessible for preservation by these organizations. Furthermore, this content may be …

It Is Hard To Compute Fixity On Archived Web Pages, Mohamed Aturban, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Checking fixity in web archives is performed to ensure archived resources, or mementos (denoted by URI-M) have remained unaltered since when they were captured. The final report of the PREMIS Working Group [2] defines information used for fixity as "information used to verify whether an object has been altered in an undocumented or unauthorized way." The common technique for checking fixity is to generate a current hash value (i.e., a message digest or a checksum) for a file using a cryptographic hash function (e.g., SHA-256) and compare it to the hash value generated originally. If they have different hash …

Digitalcommons@Lesley Quarterly Report & Impact Infographic - December 2017, Philip M. Siblo-Landsman

Library Reports

Lesley University's institutional repository (IR) continues to grow since it's launch in May 2017. This report discusses the addition of new collections including the migration of an academic journal, and the addition of two conferences. It also discusses the outreach efforts of the digital team and comments on the download metrics and how they indicate the demographics of users accessing Lesley scholarly and creative works. An infographic is included to provide a visual report of these metrics and to highlight the impact of Lesley scholarship.

Archives Annual Report, 2016-2017, Meg Miner

Administrative Reports

No abstract provided.

Safeguarding For The Future: Managing Born-Digital Collections In Museums, Kimberly Kruse

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Over the past few decades, advancements in technology have changed society entirely. Every bit of information about world news, popular culture, and art is just a tap of a touchscreen away. So many aspects of the contemporary world have become digitized so that it was only a matter of time before museums would have to face the issue of born-digital media in their collections. From videos to web-based art, museums have to tackle how to save this new form of cultural heritage. Museums have to do so now before it gets lost forever. The challenge of born-digital objects lies in …

Grand Valley Forum, Volume 042, Number 09, December 18, 2017, Grand Valley State University

2017-2018, Volume 42

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State's faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present.

The Value And Problems Of Digital Preservation For Historical Documents In China, Yongsheng Chen, Huanning Su

Proceedings from the Document Academy

China has been taking on large-scale digitization of historical documents. This paper summarizes four advantages of the digital preservation of historical documents from the practice of Chinese archives. First, it is good for protecting the originals; second, it makes the historical documents more convenient to use; third, it lays a resource foundation for the construction of digital archives; last, it is beneficial for utilizing historical documents. This paper also points out problems in China's approach to the digital preservation of historical documents. First, it has been proceeding without a plan. Such a plan should be created by following the Value …

Lanthorn, Vol. 52, No. 31, December 11, 2017, Grand Valley State University

Volume 52, July 10, 2017 - April 23, 2018

Lanthorn is Grand Valley State's student newspaper, published from 1968 to the present.

Ethical Issues In Digitization Of Cultural Heritage, Zinaida Manžuch

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The growing number of case studies on the ethical issues faced in cultural heritage digitization calls for a discussion of this generally neglected dimension of digitization. The importance of the ethical dimension is also supported by implicit and explicit assumptions that well-established approaches to ethics in archives, libraries, and museums do not work with digitization. The aim of this paper is to determine what ethical issues arise in cultural heritage digitization and how they affect methods of decision-making and organizing digitization. The paper identifies and discusses several areas of concern that have caused ethical issues in digitization. They include contextual …

Our Digital Legacy: An Archival Perspective, Michael S. Moss, Tim J. Gollins

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Our digital memories are threatened by archival hubris, technical misdirection, and simplistic application of rules to protect privacy rights. The obsession with the technical challenge of digital preservation has blinded much of the archival community to the challenges, created by the digital transition, to the other core principles of archival science - namely, appraisal (what to keep), sensitivity review (identifying material that cannot yet be disclosed for ethical or legal reasons) and access. The essay will draw on the considerations of appraisal and sensitivity review to project a vision of some aspects of access to the Digital Archive. This essay …