 Thank you, Mike. This is Kristen Leis from Heritage Preservation. I want to thank Mike for all his help producing these. Lots happen behind the scenes that you don't see. And we really appreciate Learning Time's help with our series. As Mike said, this is caring for digital materials, preventing a digital dark age. And this is our very last course, our class in this course. And we're so pleased that you've joined us for all of these. We have almost 300 participating with us today. None of this would not have been possible without support for the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And we want to thank them for their help producing these series because this allows us to offer them free of charge to you. And we know that's been very important to many of you. So continue to say hello as you come into the chat room. And our closed captioning should be coming in shortly, we hope. I just want to give you a very brief overview of this course. And today our last class will be Partner to Preserve, Digital Preservation Networks in Collaboration. And we will be emailing you with a recording to this when we're through today. You can also find lots of great resources on our course page. We have handouts with the PowerPoint slides from all of our presentation, links to the homework assignment. We've got a wonderful set of resources that all of our speakers have pulled together, all hyperlinked off the site. And as we are compiling the additional answers to questions you've asked during these webinars, you'll be able to see those documents there as well. We won't be posting the recordings until a couple weeks from now, but we will be sending you an email later on today which will have the recording for this one. And if you've missed any of the other emails from us, you'll also get all of those links in today's email. So I hope you found that the website is helpful to you as we've gone ahead with this course. There's been a lot to learn. Again, just if you want to be working towards earning a certificate and a digital credential for this class, and this is a little image of our digital credential, just a reminder you needed to register, turn in your permission form, watch each webinar in this course, complete all homework assignments, we'll hear a little bit more about that in a second. And just make sure you get all that homework and caught up on all the webinars no later than a week from today. So that's Monday, April 22nd. And of course, if you have additional questions, join the online community. The Connecting to Collections online community is a great place, not only where you'll find the course homepage, but a great place to network with your colleagues if you have additional questions, or as you're working towards any preservation project. We hope this is a great resource for you all. So I just want to turn it over briefly to Danielle Plummer. She has been helping me coordinate this course, getting all our speakers organized, planning our entire schedule, and she wanted to give you a few little updates on the homework assignments that you've been completing. Danielle? Thank you, Kristen. So some of you have been doing the homework since we go along, just like a few people may be getting behind. I just wanted to say a brief word. Kristen mentioned that the homeworks need to be turned in by next Monday. So, Fetamele, you have a week from the last recording to finish the homework. And someone just asked a question. If I missed a webinar, do I need to let you know, or how do I get credit for it? Well, you can absolutely watch the webinars on your own. We send you the links to them after the sessions, but it's the homeworks that are really the key for us to knowing who participated in the webinars. We had over 400 people who've done the homework for the first of the sessions, and that's fantastic. That one focused on identifying some collections and information about those collections at your institutions, focusing on digital items that you already have. The second session, we've had over 300 people do the homework for that one, and that one was looking at sustainability factors for some of the formats of digital items that your institution has, as well as just some questions about adopting new formats as they become available. The third session, right now, 250 people have done the homework for that one. That was the session on metadata. And the questions for that homework were really just looking at what sorts of information do you need to record to preserve objects into the future, as well as a couple of exercises that are hopefully going to make you think about how you record information for purposes of interoperability. That is the, you know, standardizing the way you record information so that it's similar to what other people in other institutions are doing, making it easier to share in the future. And that one, I just want to reiterate something we said before, which is that this is not a test. We're not looking to see if you get the right answers. It's just meant to make you think about how you will go through, as you do metadata, and enter that information in the future. The fourth session, which was last week, we've had 224 people do the homework for, and that one was looking at levels of preservation and looking at some checksums. And some of you seem to have had fun with the checksum. If it wasn't working, don't worry about it when you tried it. Just go ahead and do it and put in a note saying that the computer you're using doesn't let you do that. We don't want you to feel frustrated or not get credit for the courses simply because of a technical problem like that. So go ahead, and even if you have to say no response, go ahead and finish the homework and submit it. And that way we know who finished the course and we can get those digital certificates out to everybody as soon as we can. Again, the deadline for that is Monday, April 22. So the sooner you get it in, the better. Kristen, you want to... Thank you so much, Danielle. And Danielle will be helping answer questions when we get going in the chat box as well and has just been a great help. So we really appreciate all of our contributions to this course. Again, up on the website is our email address info at heritagepreservation.org. We'll give you any questions and our phone number as well. And with that, I would like to introduce you to today's instructors. We have two today. Liz Bischoff is the principal partner of the Bischoff Group, a library and cultural heritage organization, consulting services. She previously was the director in preservation... director of digital and preservation services at BCR Incorporated, and she also served as vice president of digital collection services at OCLC and as the executive director of the Colorado Digitization Program. All this to say that she has led the development of collaborative best practices and metadata and digital imaging and has a wealth of experience. She helped... all her work has helped result in widely adopting of CDP metadata, Dublin Core best practices and digital imaging best practices. She holds a master in library and science from Rosary College and has postgraduate work in public administration at Roosevelt University. And Tom Clareson is a senior consultant for digital and preservation services at Lyrisis. And Lyrisis is a library service organization that was formed with a merger of Palinette, Solinette, and Nellinette. Lots of acronyms. Tom consults nationally and internationally on preservation, digitization, special collections and archives, remote storage, funding and advocacy. So like Liz has a wealth of experience in this topic. He's worked with all types and sizes of academic and public libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions, including successfully conducting over 200 site visits covering preservation, digitization, and special collections related issues. He has a master in library science degree from Kent State and an MA from Ohio State University. His BA is from Ohio, Westland. So with that, I will close my screen here and bring up Tom and Liz's PowerPoint and Tom will be getting us started today. So just give me a second, Tom, and then I'll turn it over to you. Okay, I'll let you go ahead, Tom. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Kristen. And good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our session today on partnering to preserve digital preservation solutions, networks, and collaboration. As Kristen said, I'm Tom Clareson, senior consultant for digital and preservation services at Lyrisis. And we are a leading network for library and cultural organization training and support. So I work with all the types of organizations that are here on the phone today. My colleague and co-presenter today is Liz Bischoff. And Liz, if you wanted to just say hello, that would be great. Well, good morning to everybody. I'm really pleased to be participating in this wonderful heritage preservation set of workshops as Kirsten and Danielle indicated. I work extensively in the digital arena with libraries, museums, and archives, and most recently have done a great deal in collaboration with Tom on digital preservation readiness assessment and preservation planning. So hopefully we will have a good interaction with you today, and we welcome any specific questions you have that we might be able to respond to. Back to you, Tom. Okay, great. Well, throughout this webinar series, there have been a number of goals the instructors have had in mind. And I wanted to reiterate those before we start this afternoon. First is that participants will have a better understanding of the inherent fragility of digital objects, and they'll certainly be talking about that today. Participants are going to acquire information to help them select preservation formats, metadata, and backup systems for digital objects, and participants will be able to identify one or more actions that can be taken to improve their institution's digital preservation efforts. We will be sure to meet all of those goals during our session this afternoon. Now, you heard Kirsten talking about this, as you can see from our chart here. We are the fifth out of five sessions on the digital preservation topics, and recordings of each of the sessions will be available. Today, we may briefly touch on some of the key ideas you've heard throughout the series, so we will harken back to a couple of those things as we move through our discussion. Here is our overall session outline for today. We are going to cover information, including why we need digital preservation solutions, the collaborative approach to digital preservation, information on collaborative digital preservation services and solutions. We'll certainly have the idea that the use of multiple solutions is important because, as of now, there is no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all digital preservation solution yet. So we'll talk about the use of multiple solutions in these cases. We'll have an opportunity to talk about weighing your options and thinking about your ideas of where to go with digital preservation, and we will end with a little bit of discussion on planning for the future at your institution on digital preservation activity. Now, one of the things that we are going to try to do, and we're going to have a couple of these fairly rapid fire, is to do a couple of survey polls during today's session, and this first series will help us in getting to know you and where you are in digital preservation. So, Kristen, if you want to start pulling over the first couple of polls, please, if you could indicate, the people who are participating could indicate how many of you have less than one terabyte, one to five terabytes of data, five to 15 terabytes, more than 15, or don't know, that would be great to see that first level of information. We can see that at this point. There are a number of people responding that they have less than one, or one to five, it's about a tie there, and a number of folks who don't know, and that is certainly fine. One of the things that we will talk about as we go along during this session is to try to start inventorying your digital collections to determine how much volume you have and what type of formats you might have. So, we see that there are a number of folks, about 110, in the don't know column, and as I said, that is fine, and we have a fairly even split with less than one terabyte and one to five terabytes, from big collections of data as well at five to 15, or more than 15. Okay, great. The other question that we have is that we are taking a look at how often you back up your files. Do you do that on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? And we have so far, the biggest group is the group that is saying that they do daily backups, about 80 of our participants are doing that. Weekly is about 59. Not on a regular schedule is 61, and don't know is 65. And if, again, those of you who don't know, this is a really good question to know about how often your information technology department, your IT department, does this type of activity, or the other idea is if this is something that you are responsible for at your institution because you have a small staff, this is something that you should try to work into your activities during the week, try to work into your digital activities. So we've got things are holding pretty static on that poll. Thank you very much for your responses there. And then one of the questions that we had is how many locations do you store your copies in, your digital copies in? And we have a number of people who are responding to copies in two places. And that is, we're actually having a lot of returns here right now. And that is still the highest vote-cutter. But we have a number of people also with one copy in one place, two copies in one place. One of the things that we would be talking about and suggesting during the day today is the idea of making sure that you backup, especially content, but you can backup metadata as well in multiple places. And we're thinking about the idea of multiple copies in multiple places. And Liz will talk about how some of our digital solutions are able to assist you in working on that type of geographic distribution for digital preservation. So, with that in mind, thank you, Kristen, for running those polls. And we will hold on and have another poll in just a few minutes. But I really appreciate getting a little bit of a profile of where your institutions are as far as digital preservation is concerned. So thank you for your responses. So, to start off, I wanted to talk about why do we need digital preservation solutions and give you a quick review of some of the topics addressed earlier in this series and some new thoughts for today as well. So why is digital preservation an issue? Well, we all know that the technology issue is one of the rate of change, the quick rate of change, and the variety of technology. So there are some other issues that need to be addressed as well. In addition to the storage media and operating systems, we're also faced with file format changes and local versus distributed basis of technological projects. But that's not all. We have some organizational challenges that we need to look at, too. One of them certainly is the ever-growing amount of content, and in some cases we're dealing with that with the same amount of human resources and technical resources that we've always had. We have some new partnerships that we need to deal with. Traditionally, our partnerships have been within the library and cultural heritage community where we have some common cultures and common goals. But in the digital environment, we have new partners. We've established some campus-based partners as we steward faculty and student-created content in colleges and universities. And we have partnering with other cultural heritage organizations, locally and nationally, as we do some things, including reuniting content virtually, whether it's two collections with similar holdings that are a couple of states or provinces or countries away, or whether they might even be just a mile away in different institutions on campus. So some new partnerships that we need to deal with. We're also partnering with publishers, with content creators, with computer organizations, and even the commercial sector as we develop our digital environment. And with these partners, we don't share as much common vocabulary or common goals or common vision. So with each of these new communities, we have to establish the goals and objectives and find some of the commonalities. Finally, system architecture is part of the challenge as well. We need systems that support and use non-proprietary programs that allow the interoperability to provide the reliability that digital preservation requires. We have regular examples of some state-based or multi-state disasters, whether it's Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, that require us to consider preservation programs providing networked and distributed services, utilizing one of the several approaches we'll discuss today. We'll hear about some network-distributed multi-site, multi-state approaches as we go through the day. And then finally, digital preservation also requires us to adopt standards for content migration to assure long-term access. And so that migration of content across platforms is extremely helpful as well. So as you can see, it's not just the technology, but we can think about our organizational issues and some system architecture issues as well. Now, this is a great quote from JISC, which is the Higher Education Funding Organization in the United Kingdom. They say that disaster recovery strategies and backup systems alone are not sufficient to ensure survival of and access to authentic digital resources over time. A backup is a short-term data recovery solution following loss or corruption and is fundamentally different to an electronic preservation archive. So the idea that we have to have a little bit more complex and planned activity for digital preservation over just a general backup is certainly true. We're looking at the combination of technical resources, human resources, and financial resources in order to work on our digital preservation activities. Now, you can certainly see a risk on the right-hand side of this slide with the lightning strike. And when we discuss digital preservation risks, what immediately comes to mind for most people are the risks associated with technology, the hardware and software failures, and then acts of God, like damage associated with fires, major weather events, and the resulting chaos and damage after that. Those are actions that we really can't control. But there are a lot of other risks to digital collections, and some of them we can anticipate or maybe control. A few are outside of our control, but let's look at a couple of these challenges, a couple of these risks as we move through. Organizational changes can have a major impact on our digital program and put the digital collections at risk. Administrative supporters who are at our museum, library, archive may come and go, and that might result in changes in resourcing for our digital programs. Does the cultural views on the importance of cultural heritage have a direct and indirect impact on our digital collections? This risk is directly related to political risk. The governor who might be supportive of museums and libraries directs funding to these initiatives. The governor and the legislator that isn't in end funding for digital preservation programs and leave our repository high and dry. So we have to be ready to weather the ups and downs of political challenges as well. Many libraries, archives, and museums have a legislative mandate to provide long-term access to digital collections. And understanding that mandate is critical in prioritizing the overall rationale for preservation and the designated community and developing the financial structure for the digital materials that we have available. And you've probably heard this term before, but the designated community is the audience, in some ways the target audience who we are directing toward our digital resources. Failure to create a sustainable business plan for the preservation program may be one of the major risks for the program. Legislators frequently develop unfunded programs and require a library or museum to implement a program without adequate new funding. So we want to see if we can move this from something that might be supported by grants to something that is supported by our internal budgeting and a budget line, a dedicated budget line. Understanding the contract associated with content ingested into a repository, as well as the commitments to depositors who put materials in there are also examples of areas of risk. And finally, a force majeure is a set of unforeseeable circumstances that may overpower an organization, and that can be the kind of disaster that we have heard about with Katrina, with Hurricane Sandy, and others, and that it can bring along some of these other risks and challenges as we go along. So here are the risks, as I've outlined, but I wanted to talk with you also about what the risk impact on the digital collections might be. When a collection is at risk, our first thoughts are of damage to or loss of digital assets. However, there are additional impacts beyond the actual collections. Depending on the seriousness of the failure, the reputation of the staff managing the repository could be damaged as well. Lack of availability of the content might result in a statutory breach. If the institution has an obligation to make the collection available and the collection is either damaged or lost, the organization might be in breach. The public well-being is at risk because content and the library or the organization might now be liable as well. The ripple effect is that the library's reputation can be damaged in this case as well. While there may be no direct financial liability, there may be significant financial impact in the attempt to recover data. So that is something that we can look at with damage to financial liability. In a few cases, the organization may have to consider environmental damage if, for a reason, there were leaks of chemicals which were not tracked because collections or monitors were offline or failing. And there's, of course, the problem of the institution not meeting the obligation of ensuring the authenticity and understandability of the digital resources. And that is really the purpose, as we've learned over this whole series of digital preservation, ensuring the authenticity and understandability of our digital resources and making sure that our users are able to work with those materials. What you're doing through risk assessment in general to sort of wrap up this area is determining the likelihood of any of these conditions occurring. Is it a high risk, a medium risk, or a low risk? If you don't have a legislative or statutory mandate to retain a particular collection, then you might have a lower risk associated with any loss of data. If the content that's created doesn't use any commercial software to create the content, then you have a lower risk or lower level of contractual liability. So think about how the way you are offering your digital preservation services might be able to lower your risk. And that is certainly something when we have an opportunity to talk about all of the different types of digital preservation solutions that are out there during Liz's part of the presentation that we will be able to utilize to talk about how some of these tools help us share the risk. One of the things that I talk about quite a bit in all of the types of workshops that I run, especially in digital preservation, is the idea of policies and documentation. Digital preservation policies can demonstrate commitment to providing long-term access to your digital materials. So I want you to think about this. What commitments have your organizations made? Does your mission statement for your institution include preservation of digital collections? Have you included digital resources in your collection development policy? Does your emergency plan, your disaster plan, some of those which you've started to work on during these Connecting to Collections courses, does that incorporate digital collection? Does your deed of gift, your gift information and documentation include the rights to allow modifications and does it support digital preservation? And how long do you intend to make your digital collections available? Especially if there's a certain retention period, or do you want to keep them as far into the future as possible? Think about that as you are trying to determine how long you need to keep your materials and is there any kind of legal or institutional ruling on what needs to be done as far as the length of your retention time. So with that in mind, I'm going to ask Kristen to help us with our last poll of the day, and that is where our digital holdings are incorporated as far as some of our main policy documents in our institution. So now that we have you thinking about policies, let's take another poll. Let us know if your digital holdings are incorporated into your mission statement, your long-range plan, your collection development plan, emergency or disaster plan, and exhibits as well, and how many of you have a digital preservation policy including the features we've talked through during this webinar series. So let's take a look at this. We have mission and long range. The collection plan is doing very well. A number of people have materials there. Your disaster plan, I'm going to be lagging just a little bit. Exhibits. How many of you are putting together virtual exhibits? That's important to think about. Do you have virtual and digital exhibits included in there? So let's take a look. I think the numbers seem to be evening out fairly well, and okay. So a number of you might want to consider putting your digital holdings into your mission statement as you go forward. I'm pleased to see that really close to a third of us have 44% of the people who are including information in their long-range plan. Right now the collection plan, the collection development plan, including digital holdings, is far and away the winner here for where that is done. So I'm really glad to see that. Our emergency plan, let's think about building our digital holdings into our disaster plans in the future. Exhibits, again, another area that we might want to do some work in in order to expand that and have digital holdings considered as well. And finally, we have a number of people who are incorporating digital holdings into their preservation policies or developing digital preservation policies in general. So this is actually a set of very good findings. When Liz and I started to do many of these surveys, both on-site and some web surveys in general, we were not seeing this good level of response that people had digital included in their plans. So I'm very pleased to see this information. Thank you, everyone, for that level of activity. Now, if we can move forward, let us take a moment here to see if there are any questions from the audience. Hi, Tom. This is Danielle. We had one question. I think it's a fairly general question. So we had someone who asked about online vendors, basically, people who are selling backups. They're not necessarily selling them as preservation services, but they're selling them on a range of levels from personal digital backup services to institutional backup services. And the one that was specifically mentioned was Carbonite. Can you talk a little bit more, and I know you'll get to this later, but how does a service like that differ from a preservation solution? Well, one of the things that Liz will especially talk about as we move forward in our discussion is the fact that many of the preservation solutions that we're looking at are actually multi-site and multi-institutional. So we are having a number of organizations just like us who are working to preserve the material. And in some cases, with the materials that we have in cultural heritage institutions, it's a little bit different kind of digital object than maybe something we would see in a business type of situation, business solution, whether it is high-quality artwork that's been digitized or whether it is a 450-page volume with all sorts of maps and other materials as well. So in some cases, we would, I would say, the capacity, the reliability, and the idea that we have, again, multi-site and multi-geographic location type of backup is a very important aspect of what might separate the backup for your personal computing and your, maybe, personal business from what you would see in a library setting or a cultural heritage setting. This is Liz. I think that one of the major differences is if we look back at that definition from JISC on the difference between backup and preservation. Preservation, by its definition, is assuring the integrity of the bits going forward, where backup restores you to the last available, reliable copy of the files. So I'm sure in your early sessions you were given definitions of preservation. So when you're looking at something like carbonite or glacier, bring those definitions up and review them for the functionality that the service is offering. I'll talk a little bit more about them later, but there's a big difference between preservation and backup. Yes, thank you, Liz, and Tom, for your answers. I think we do want to stress to everybody again we want you to have backups, and cloud or online backups are a great way to have a copy that's not at your institution, but it might not be the same as your preservation system solution. We had another question, actually a couple questions about metadata and how you should treat metadata. So in the metadata session I talked about embedding metadata into the digital object so that it can never be separated, but someone is wanting to know is for preservation purposes should we attempt to separate the metadata and keep them separately somehow with links? That is really some different practices in different cases. I think the idea of having embedded metadata or metadata that is packaged with the digital object itself is the direction that most organizations are looking to go with their digital preservation activities. And I also see that we have one more question here. When you say included in the mission statement you mean specifically stating digital materials as far as having that included in your documentation. And I would say yes. Is there a mention of digital collections or digital materials, whether it is in your mission statement, your collections plan or your emergency plan? The idea that we have collections that are not just analog anymore, but we have digital collections that may be growing even faster than our analog collections. So this is something that a number of organizations are starting to revise and update many of their policies to include. Great. Well, I think that was it for the question. So if you'd like to move on, we'll continue monitoring the questions. And if you ask them, we'll go ahead and move them over and we can get to them in the next break. Okay. Great. All right. So now we've said up front in the title of our session that collaboration on digital preservation is important. So we wanted to talk about why you would want to collaborate in this area. And there are certainly many reasons for this. And what I'm going to do is sort of go counter-clockwise to talk about some of the important reasons to collaborate for digital activity. First of all, the pooling of financial and human resources to deal with the issues is extremely important. It might be that if you work with other institutions in your state or in your type of organization across the field, that you'll be able to have more people thinking about this and potentially a little bit more funding to deal with some of the solutions in the situation. Sharing of expertise and perspective between institutions is always important. And this is for collaboration on any level, whether it's collaborative digitization or digital creation, all the way over to collaborative digital preservation. You can gain greater credibility working with other expert cultural heritage institutions. In some cases, we see statewide digital preservation projects or regional preservation projects where you have a sort of the idea of safety in numbers and greater credibility in numbers when you're working with a larger group. You'll certainly increase efficiency and funding opportunities. From what we see, funders are very interested in both collaborative digitization and digital preservation programs that are collaborative in nature. So that idea of a buzzword for funders of collaboration still exists and is very important. You can share skills in navigating departmental culture and policies. That is always a help. The idea that someone in another institution may have tried something that pushed forward funding for or policymaking for digital preservation, and you can utilize that too as part of a collaborative group. It's a shared responsibility, both sharing the pain and the gain, financially, human resources-wise, et cetera. So take a look at that as one of the best benefits of collaboration. And certainly to answer research questions from a wider pool of experienced resources. So we have a number of reasons that we would move forward in collaborating in general, but also specifically for digital preservation. And I wanted to take us out of our diagram a bit and talk with you specifically about some of the areas that digital preservation and collaboration have been making for benefits for cultural heritage institutions. So to meet the needs of our users, libraries, and other cultural heritage organizations have been collaborating for decades sharing human, financial, and technical resources and sharing collections. Digital preservation solutions are undertaken at the international, national, state, and local level, and development of standards, undertaking research, creation of collections, and attention to institutional mandates are something that occur on all levels as well. To realize the level of sustainability we need and the security we need for our digital collections, geographic distribution is key. Geographically distributed digital preservation is one of the topics that Liz will discuss at length in her part of the session. And a collaborative approach to digital preservation allows us to both share the risk and reduce the overall risk. We can manage our own institutional risk by sharing the cost, sharing technology infrastructure, and expertise, and we can reduce the risk through distribution of collections to be preserved. And that idea of distributed collections is again something that is important in our digital preservation systems and may take a step beyond some of the backup systems that have been mentioned before. Very few organizations are of the size and the scale that they can or need to build their own digital preservation systems. So expanding our capacity and actually not having to have a huge budget, but being able to work with others collaboratively is important as well. There are certainly two core principles in the survivability and preservation of digital collections. The first is the more copies, the better. And the second is the more locations, the better. So that idea of geographic multi-copy distribution for digital preservation is very important. And the more heterogeneous, the better as well. And Liz will talk about all of those areas as she goes forward in her discussion. So I'd like to turn things over to Liz to talk about our next section of the workshop. Tom, I think we have another poll. Kristen, would you like to move that in? Okay. We do have another poll. Do you participate in collaborative digital initiative either regional, statewide, or national? And we have yes, no, don't know, and not applicable. So we'd like to see if this is something that folks are participating in. And we have a couple of samples for what people are participating in. It could be solutions like Portico, Locke's, or the Hathi Trust. And so if there are a number of people who are saying yes, they do participate in a collaborative digital initiative. We can go forward and take a look at that. We have about 105 people who are saying yes, and about 127, 230 who say no. And just a couple of people reporting in that Portico has about four users among our groups, Locke's, and we'll hear about that in Liz's session, has about 11. Hathi Trust has eight users. So those are some of the activities that are being used by a number of folks. And finally, we talk a little bit about the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. Are you a member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance? And so far, I think we need to... and Liz, maybe this is something that we can talk about when we do our wrap-up at the end, talk a little bit about the National Digital Stewardship Alliance and how it is an organization that helps you really keep abreast of a lot of the developments in digital preservation. So that is an area where people might want to go take a look at the NDSA site and publications. So with those activities in mind, we have a couple more things to help us figure out more about where our users are and where you are in your digital preservation planning. So I appreciate that information from those polls as well. And Liz, why don't we go ahead with your part of the session. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, good. Well, good morning again. During this section, or this unit of the webinar, we're going to be looking at specific services and software, particularly those that support collaborative digital preservation programs. And as Tom said, we're looking at the collaborative programs mostly because this is not an activity that is for the faint of heart. We do this much more effectively. We can meet our goals, our policies, our plans when we work together. Unlike a decade ago today, we have a wide range of digital preservation services and solutions. There are different ways to think about these services and the categories they fit in. So you can see the MetaArchive, DuraSpaces, DuraCloud, ArchiveMatica, HathiTrust, Ex Libris, Rosetta are just a few of these. You can look at them by the technology that they use. So services such as locks, the COPA, which is a cooperative in Canada, the MetaArchive Pedals, which is a program out of several state archives, they all use a geographically distributed approach to digital preservation based on the locks software. You can look at them by philosophy, the HathiTrust, the Florida Center for Library Automation Dates, locks, Chronopolis, all have embedded infrastructure and knowledge in libraries and other cultural heritage organizations where other services may be offered by external third parties such as the OCLC Digital Archive and Portico. You can also look at them by methodologies. Some of these are centralized box-based solutions. Some are centralized and off-site, such as OCLC and Portico. And some are distributed and on-site where the local institutions run a locks box. Some of these programs offer open access. In other words, they're the means not only for preservation of the digital collections, but also end user access. And HathiTrust is one that comes to mind. And some can be a mix of open and closed, such as locks and copal. And finally, we have subscription-based services such as the OCLC Digital Archive and Portico. Some preserve whatever format you give them, such as the MetaArchive, and some of them work better for one format than the other, such as the HathiTrust. Other services may normalize the content as it comes in through the ingest process, while others require you to do the normalization in advance. Others have software that migrate content as file formats become obsolete, while other programs require an external review and plan for migration. So you can see that there's already a wide range of options and understanding what your institution's goals are and understanding the file formats that you have, whether it's reformatted content or born digital, will all help you make a decision on how to move forward. As Tom said earlier, not all options are equal, and we don't have a silver bullet solution. In other words, you go out, you talk with a vendor, you look at open source software, and you say, this is the perfect solution for us. It will handle all of our needs. In reality, there's none of these services that handle all formats of material with equal level of reliability, flexibility, veracity, et cetera. We had hoped when we began thinking about digital preservation in the mid-1990s that a single solution would be available. In reality, there's a wide array of services and solutions, and then understanding that options, some options, are not appropriate to all formats. That means that we need to have a plan that will detail the strategy for different formats, whether it's born digital or reformatted, whether it's images, audio, video, data sets. Flexibility is key to assuring the long-term access to digital collections, so you need to build in that flexibility from the very start. Our colleague and friend, Catherine Skinner, who's the Executive Director of Educopia Institute, and Educopia Institute is the organization that manages the meta-archive, has long said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. And because of the fragile nature of our digital collections, we really need to move forward. We cannot wait. We need to bring these collections under preservation management, even if it's not the perfect solution. We've created several categories of who does what, and this is a quick overview of which of the services in software are preservation services and which are digital or institutional repository content management software. Back in the probably the mid-90s, Cliff Lynch had done a benchmark paper that talked about institutional repositories with the promise that development of these repositories would assure the long-term access and preservation of these materials. In reality, as we've moved into 2010, 2013, we've realized again that one repository, set of repository software cannot do everything. So if you see in the right-hand column, we list dSpace, Fedora, Islandora, Content DM as just an example of digital content software. They do not have preservation, integrated preservation services all in one package. You really need to look to the list that's on the left-hand side of the preservation services. Some of these have come out of the archival community such as Archivematica and Tisella's Preservica and Tisella's FRB. Others have come out of the research community such as Chronopolis and then others have come out of the library community. Several of these such as the OCLC Digital Archive, it integrates with Content DM. DuraCloud from DuraSpace integrates with Content DM, dSpace and Fedora. And you can integrate Content DM and some of these other repositories such as Fedora with a LOX private network. We see that the name of the game is integration rather than a single solution. As you move forward with managing your collections, there are a variety of services that are available. And this is the summary slide, so I'll go into more detail in other slides. Often these are combined or integrated by the same service provider. In other words, data preparation may be integrated in with the preservation services. It is really critical for you to understand what data preparation you will need to do and what data preparation, I'm sorry, what data preparation can be done by your vendor or by your third party provider. The data will need to be prepared for ingest and that can include moving digital files to a server that supports harvesting and ingesting. Many organizations are storing files on offline media such as CDs or external hard drives. So you're going to have to move your content to a server before it's ingested into the preservation repository. You may also need to do some normalization of your metadata. Structure for dates frequently is a problem that needs to be addressed, consistency, and following the protocol of the preservation repository. There are some additional data preparation services that will be put into place on the ingest phase. Many of the open source software and commercial services have integrated tools such as Jove and Droid that will help you manage the data. Jove, as many of you know, is the JSTOR and Harvard University Library project to develop an extensible framework for object validation. This application will indicate and validate the format type as it is important for all digital repositories to have this basic level of information. It will also manage the identification, validation, and characteristics of the digital objects. Such actions are formed by modules. It's an automated process for various format types, and the output from the process is controlled by output handlers using a plugin architecture. Jove is a format-specific digital object validation application written in Java, and it can be downloaded for local implementation if needed. Droid, which stands for the Digital Record Object Identification, is an automated file format identification tool that was developed by the National Archives of the UK. It's used in conjunction with PRONOM, an online registry of technical information. The technical information about the structure of the file formats and the software and hardware requirements to support them is included in PRONOM. It's a matter of using both Droid and PRONOM. You should be talking with any vendor or investigating the tools that are used for open source software so you're sure to do these set of activities on ingest. As I indicated earlier, we will be looking at different services and solutions from different angles, but there are three basic approaches. Locally managed, centralized, hosted solutions, or third-party solutions, and then distributed services. Locally managed is a solution that would be installed in your local environment. Your local IT department would manage and administer the software. There are both open source, locally managed solutions, as well as commercial, and some of the commercial include Tesella's SRB and Ex Libris' Rosetta. Very few people today are developing their own preservation solution, but if you did, then it would be a locally managed solution. Centralized, hosted solutions or third-party solutions are services that are housed in one location but can be used by multiple partners, clients, or members. Frequently, these are subscription services with an annual subscription fee that is based on the volume of data that you will be storing. In a few cases, there's also a membership fee. So the OCLC digital archives, Portico, Tesella's Preservica, DuraSpaces, DuraCloud, and the HathiTrust are all examples of centralized, hosted solutions. And then there's distributed solutions. And this is the one that we're really going to look at further. Under distributed solutions, you can be looking at just a backup service. As we said earlier, a backup is not preservation. However, a quality, thorough backup plan needs to be in place by all organizations that wish to assure long-term access to their digital collections. As I mentioned earlier, Tom and I do a lot of digital preservation readiness assessments. And frequently, when we're on-site talking with libraries and archives, they report that they are doing multiple backups. However, the multiple backups are all located in the same geographic area, frequently in two different buildings on campus. Or if it's a public library or a museum, there's one backup copy in the museum. And another one, let's say, at the police department. Today, when we look at backups, not only should they be done regularly, preferably incremental backups and full backups are done on a weekly basis. But we're also looking at storing at multiple geographically distributed locations. Today's cloud service offers us the ability to realize that geographic distribution. A good practice is that there be at least two copies in three copies in two different media. That allows us, when we have the three copies, if there is not agreement between two of the copies, we can look to that third copy as a tiebreaker. Many organizations will not have exactly the same data in all of their backups. So, for example, they have one backup in the library, and then two days or three days later, they ship that copy to another location on campus. But it is not the same data as the one that's in the library. And then they may participate in a third-party off-site storage, such as Iron Mountain, and that can be further different. That's not the practice we want to see. We want to see the establishment of the same copies in three different locations. So that the bullet point here says, keeping these backups synced is of utmost importance. As we look at some providers, Glacier and DuraCloud do provide backup. Actually, DuraCloud has the option of one, two, or three cloud-based services. Carbonite is another one of these cloud-based backup services. Again, they don't guarantee the long-term viability of the content. They're merely backup. There are several types of preservation services. There was a project that... Let me back up. One of the hallmarks of OAIS and trusted digital repositories is that you would be able to replicate your preservation service on other software. So that you would be able to migrate your content from one system to the other. To test this, the Florida Center for Library Automation, Cornell University, and NYU received an IMLS grant in the mid... early to mid-2000s. Rather than just using one storage mechanism, they placed their archival information packages, or their apes, in multiple preservation repositories. As a result of this project, which they called Tipper, they found that keeping the copies synchronized was a major challenge. And we haven't seen a great deal of this heterogeneous storage of the apes move forward. However, it is something that's really critical to the long-term viability of programs. Then there's the distributed approach overall. This was initially developed out of Stanford University. The concept of distributed approaches came through Stanford. And lots of copies keep stuff safe initiative, the LOX initiative. And this is an application where there are multiple copies redundant, perfectly mirrored copies that are updated and compared on a regular basis to ensure that there's no file degradation. The LOX box, which was developed initially out of Stanford, uses the Internet infrastructure to do this verification on an ongoing basis. In the around 2003, an NDIP-funded project was undertaken by the folks at Emory University, and it became the Meta Archive, where they tested the use of LOX in creating private LOX networks. In this case, a minimum of six to seven redundant copies are used to assure the reliability and preservation of the content. Another distributed approach was undertaken by the folks at San Diego State University in the Cronopolis project. How this differs from LOX is that Cronopolis looked at very large data sets. And they worked with the Supercomputing Center, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Maryland, and the Data Center at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. There are some very similar types of strategies that have been implemented a bit differently. So we see that today we have multiple solutions available to us. Some of them are commercial, some of them are not-for-profit, some of them are open source. We need to look at what the specific formats of materials are that may require one or more of these different solutions. How are you going to manage born digital materials versus reformatted or digitized materials? Do you need the same level of reliability for those digitized photographs that you may need for a born digital thesis or a new born digital only audio or video? You need to look about whether there'll be open access or whether there'll be restricted access. In other words, is this a dark archive or is this a light archive? You need to see how unique these materials are. Are you the only owning organization, as might be the case in audio or video or images? Or are they commonly held items such as e-journals, e-books, data sets? So it's really critical for you to think about the materials, the differences, the requirements, the uses of these different materials over the long term in picking your solution. At this point, I think we have a number of questions. So let's pause, Danielle. Yes, Liz, questions have kind of been pouring in. So I'm going to just basically suggest that, because we only have about 15 minutes left, we're going to do the same thing with a lot of your questions that we've done with other questions in this series, which is to say we will go back and we will put up a document with the question and answers after we've had a chance to review them and look up some of the information we might need to answer them fully. So you can't always answer information about specific systems that you are interested in, but I will do as much as we can in that document. Does that sound okay, Liz? Yeah, and I know that we're running out of time, and I do want to make sure that I cover some of these solutions and then give Tom time to get to what you should do next. Okay, so I want to just basically take one question right now, and that was, so as you're looking at a service, and it can be anything, what are some of the key questions you should be asking yourself and asking the vendor or the institution if you're partnering with another institution? What are some of the key things that you need to focus on as you're doing what would be called in business, due diligence? Sure, sure. So we actually have a slide on that called Central Questions to Ask of Any Model or Service. Certainly, you want to know if the repository is open. Is it a light archive, or is it a closed or dark archive? You need to understand whether you're going to be using this for access, for end users, or only for preservation. So that's the first thing you need to know. That question will then, that answer to that question will then lead you down a path. So for example, we know that there are significant costs associated with downloading content from a cloud service. So an open access or one that is available to end users and has heavy use, we probably don't want to use a cloud-based service because of the fees. You're going to want to understand what the functionality of the service is. You're going to want to know whether they are OAIS compliant and what aspects of OAIS do they follow. You're going to want to know whether they have a preservation plan. As we get to more specifics, is it bit level? Are there strategies for preservation and bit level? Almost all of the services today do offer the bit level. Others of them tend to waffle a bit when we talk about the ability to migrate formats and what they actually, the software they have to diagnose when an object has become obsolete, et cetera. And emulation, while it is one of the strategies, we don't see it widely implemented within the cultural heritage community. We already talked about identifying data preparation and what you will do and what the vendor will do. What formats they're supporting. The DuraCloud service was developed initially to support audio and video because many of our existing services didn't do a very effective job at that. So you're going to want to look at that. Metadata, understand what you need to provide and what the service will automatically create. What your organization's role will be. If you are purchasing a service, then that's one thing. And if you are joining a collaborative such as Pedals or KOPL or the MetaArchive or the HathiTrust, you will need to be actively engaged. So what technical expertise is required and what will your role be in governance? How you're going to address the issue of geographic distribution is really critical. So finding out how is OCLC dealing with geographic distribution? Is there another copy? And finally, and maybe most important, what is the exit strategy? What happens if you want your content out of that service because you're going to another service? Or maybe more critically, how will you get your content out and in what format if that service that you're using shuts down? So those are some of the decision-making factors. So it looks to me like, well, I know all of you have access to the slides. And for the sake of time, I think maybe you can look at the different solutions that are up there and email us any questions that you might have on the different services, the pros and cons, et cetera. Does that make sense, Kristen and Danielle? I think that sounds like a great plan, Liz. So I think it now gets turned back over to Tom. Okay. And one of the things that Liz was just talking about, the idea of making sure you evaluate a number of different areas with each of the vendors is extremely important. The idea of is the system working and has it been evaluated for safety and security? Is the system flexible, extensible and sustainable? And have they built that into their business plan? Does it accept the formats you need to store? All of these areas are extremely important. And you also need to assess the technical infrastructure of the different services as well. Is this something that you can work on in-house or is it something from a third-party vendor? One of the things that we talk about in all areas of digitization, especially digital preservation, is inventorying your technical skills and being able to make sure to get training if you need to in order to understand some of the aspects of the work that needs to be done to get materials ready for digital preservation. So the final idea here on this slide, understand your ability to meet your long-term commitment. It is a long-term commitment if you're going to either save your materials for 10 years or as far into the future as are needed. And again, we wrap all the way back around to what we said at the very beginning that it is a commitment of technical resources, human resources, and financial resources as well. So I think this is a good slide. When you take a look at all the things that Liz talked about so far and all the services that she's profiled in her slides, this is a nice little scorecard to use when you are thinking about those different solutions. I'm going to actually skip over this so that we can take some questions at the very end of the session because I wanted to have you think about a couple more things, especially the next steps for collaboration on digital preservation. And so what I would say is that so many of these digital preservation solutions rely on collaboration that it might be good for you to think about in your digital activities what is happening and who you might be able to work with to face these challenges. So identify potential partners in your state, among your institution types, say historical societies in your state or region, or institutions with similar collections. Establish the long-term commitment to digital collections. And that is something that is, I think, very basic, the idea of keeping documentation and including digital preservation in your policies. Even if you are just starting to digitize now, working toward digital preservation and doing many of the things that Liz has suggested and I have suggested in the discussion today is very important so that you can have preservation-ready digital materials. Establish a planning team within your organization or with partners to look at digital preservation activities. Determine the roles and responsibilities, who is going to do what, and especially in a collaboration, it's important to know these folks are really good at doing the budgeting and grant writing. Others are great at doing some of the technical work, so maybe we can split some of the roles and responsibilities up that way. Leadership and governance, is it central or distributed as far as your digital preservation solution might go? Well, for the commercial, it's certainly something where you probably don't have to think about it that much, but if you are looking at a shared or distributed digital preservation service, as some of those that we've talked about, such as the MetaArchive, you'll want to take a look at how they work as far as pricing, governance, and level of activity. Determine funding strategies. Maybe some of your digital work and your digital preservation work can start with grants, but I want you to look at building up to having a dedicated budget line for digital preservation at some point in the future. It may be that you start exploring and getting some pricing information now, and then you can work toward funding strategies that include building a budget line in the future. Explore the technology options. Another thing I'd say for you to do as a starting activity after this set of webinars is to take a look at some of the solutions that Liz has named and see what the pricing levels are, and also see if there is the ability to pilot some of these solutions that you've heard about and put a certain small amount of data into those different types of solutions, those different types of archives. Define the digital content to be preserved. That is very important in the fact that you want to know what formats need to be preserved, how much of each format there is, and what do you want the materials to do. Do you want your data sets to be able to work together in the future, and you want to preserve that dynamic aspect of the material. Identify the metadata requirements, as Danielle discussed in her session, that are needed for digital preservation. And finally, start to develop a digital preservation plan for your institution and potentially for your collaborating group. I'll tell you that I was just working with a library in North Carolina last week, and they wrote, as their first level of their digital preservation plan, it was almost a white paper wish list, what we're going to explore. They had written that in May 2012, and it had six major points they wanted to cover. They were doing very well. They have actually, that was a long-term plan, and they've covered about three and a half of their six points by investigating the services that are out there between last year and now. So I think that you have a number of questions, a number of activities you can look at, both from a single institution level, as well as from a level of what you might do on a collaborative project. I do want to answer one question that's in the parking lot here from Cheryl McClellan. I talked about joining a regional indexing project and enter indexing info directly into their collection. We assume that they're taking proper care of all the data they receive from all their partners, but what should we be asking them? And I'd say that either for a collaborative project like this, or for a work that you might be doing even with some commercial solutions, ask them what they are doing for digital preservation, get some documentation from them, and you'll be able to determine a little bit more if it compares to what Liz has been talking about and what I have been talking about during the day today. So with those activities in mind, I'd like to move on to our last slide that gives you some very good information on being able to contact us, and you can certainly do that after the fact. But I know one of the other things is that Danielle is going to try to develop a list of the questions from today, and potentially she and Liz and I are going to be able to work together on answering many of your questions. So with that in mind, Danielle, I'll pass things back over to you, and we can go from there in addressing some of the key questions or sort of transcend questions that you've seen come up today. Sure. Well, first off, I think we're going to start asking the question, if you need to log off now, the question about whether you're watching by yourselves or part of the group, you don't need to respond if you're alone, but if you have other people at the site with you, go ahead and type all of their names in the box that's just come up. I also want to make a quick note for people who need to get off about the homework for today. Kristen mentioned this in the Q&A box, but your homework for today is really easy. We're just going to ask you to evaluate the series and get us some ideas about what worked and what didn't work for you. And if you have any ideas for future things in the series, you can include that in the evaluation or email heritage preservation. So we're always happy to hear from you about those sorts of things. Okay, so we do have a lot of questions, and we've been told we can stay online for about 10 more minutes before the service providers need to kick us off. So let's see if we can kind of skim through. There were a couple things about sample documents, and I think that's a very valuable question to ask. I know Liz just sent me some samples, and we will get those posted. Another sample that someone asked was model requests for proposals from these vendors. Liz and Tom, are you aware of any model RFPs out there? Actually, I think, and this might be a couple of years old now, but there used to be an RFP, maybe it's at the NDSA site. That would be a good one to look into. I do think that there is a model RFP on that site. Maybe post a question to the NDSA listserv. And with the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, I did want to mention for sure that Jenny had posted the web link to that organization, which we talked about earlier today. So you can get to that from the Q&A chat area. Great, and again, as we find samples and things, we'll go ahead and post those so you can get to it from the course website. Somebody asked about a digital plan template. It's actually harder to find that because people are just now getting into developing overall digital plans. The best one that I know is publicly available is from the University of Maryland, and you can just Google that. Great, and I'll put the link up. I'll look for it. I think for people from smaller institutions, there was a good question, and Tom alluded to this a bit. Janine asked, for repository with a limited budget, eager but unpaid staff and a need to literally begin digitizing for the first time, what are the baseline things that must be done and done first to follow basic preservation requirements so that you're ready then for more preservation in the future? I can jump in very quickly on that. I had mentioned previously the idea of keeping documentation, keeping metadata that is as good and complete as possible when you're developing your digital and creating your digital collection, including digital in your policies. Everything from your collection development and emergency plan policies to writing a digital preservation policy and seeing some of these samples and starting to see what you can take from those. I would say that you can check for any local or regional collaboration, and this is particularly important. I think that the question came from someone in New York State, and a number of the New York 3Rs cooperatives have local and regional digital creation and digital preservation activities that they're doing, so I would investigate those as well. And then I would also suggest something that Liz has mentioned and I have as well, looking at potentially piloting one of these solutions that is available. Doing some exploration and seeing if you can explore and have some of your materials loaded into that and see how the pricing works, how the access to the material works, and those type of areas. And Liz, I know you probably have some other things that people should do to start off. Yeah, I certainly would reinforce what Tom said about looking at established standards and best practices for the creation of metadata and for digital imaging. We want to make sure that you capture the technical metadata. That includes the software and hardware that was used to create the digital object, the format information, the size of the files, the date that it was created, etc. All that is really key for preservation. You also want to make sure that you're describing in your metadata the digital object. Many organizations that have been doing digitization for a long time are actually describing the original. And while that's helpful for the end user, it's not particularly useful when we're trying to preserve it. So we need to know the file format of the digital book, not that it's one book. So just some helpful hints there. Create quality metadata and create quality digital objects. Very good. And then for the last question that I'd like to consider, we got lots of questions about very specific tools, very different systems and all that. I wanted to answer some of that online. But April Anderson asked the question saying her library is moving forward with an institutional repository. But she's finding it hard to explain to faculty that it's not really a digital archive because it's about access and not really about proper preservation. So she's asking about thoughts on the rise of the institutional repository and how to really integrate that into a total digital preservation solution. So Liz and Tom, your thoughts? Tom, go ahead. In this area, one of the things that we are looking at is that, again, this is an area where one solution may not work for everything yet. What we are seeing is that institutional repositories are great in many cases for deposit and access activities. But if you want to make sure that you're digitally preserving these materials, check and see if the IR has preservation capabilities along with the kind that we have talked about through all five of these courses. Or if they have some type of a relationship with one of the digital preservation solutions that Liz mentioned. When she was talking about the different kind of types that were available of digital preservation archives, she mentioned the fact that some of them have relationships with other type of digital asset management software with institutional repository software. So take a look at either capabilities of the IR software itself or do they have a relationship with an established digital preservation solution? And Liz, you might have other things you want to add on that as well. Yeah, for those of you that are in academic institutions, there's an increasing awareness among faculty, particularly the STEM faculty, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty about data curation. And there are some pretty good basic websites, articles, actually annual meetings about data curation. And data curation incorporates both the access and the preservation. So I think in terms of looking at educational materials, workshops, things like that, there may be something available under that subject term and some of the work that's done there. But it's bottom line, it's an educational process, developing a team or a task force so that you educate them and then they go out and they educate the faculty. So this is something we run across all the time when we're doing our readiness assessments. Well, thank you all. Thank you, Liz and Tom, and thank you to all of the attendees who joined and stuck with us today. That's really all we have time for, so we will go ahead and sign off, stop the recording, but look online for more information to come. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Kirsten and Danielle. Thank you for participating and thanks, Tom. Yes, thank you. And we will be back in touch with more information related to your questions for certain. Danielle, do you want us to just log off or just hold on for a second? Okay. Hold on, please. Recording has paused.