Archival quality and long-term preservation: a research framework for validating the usefulness of digital surrogates

Abstract

Digital archives accept and preserve digital content for long-term use. Increasingly, stakeholders are creating large-scale digital repositories to ingest surrogates of archival resources or digitized books whose intellectual value as surrogates may exceed that of the original sources themselves. Although digital repository developers have expended significant effort to establish the trustworthiness of repository procedures and infrastructures, relatively little attention has been paid to the quality and usefulness of the preserved content itself. In situations where digital content has been created by third-party firms, content quality (or its absence in the form of unacceptable error) may directly influence repository trustworthiness. This article establishes a conceptual foundation for the association of archival quality and information quality research. It outlines a research project that is designed to develop and test measures of quality for digital content preserved in HathiTrust, a large-scale preservation repository. The research establishes methods of measuring error in digitized books at the data, page, and volume level and applies the measures to statistically valid samples of digitized books, adjusting for inter-coder inconsistencies and the effects of sampling strategies. The research findings are then validated with users who conform to one of four use-case scenarios: reading online, printing on demand, data mining, and print collection management. The paper concludes with comments on the implications of assessing archival quality within a digital preservation context.

Research project tasks, data, and perceptions of data quality in a condensed matter physics community

“…() studied article creation and quality control processes in the English Wikipedia, whereas Sheppard and Terveen () discussed data quality assurance in a citizen science community and the impact of data quality assurance work on science education. There is also a significant body of research on data quality issues in large‐scale library digitization projects (e.g., Conway, , ; Rieger, ). Arazy, Nov, Patterson, and Yeo (), Hinnant et al.…”

Selection for Preservation

“…His first publication on the subject-a conference paper from the 2010 iPres conference-presents the research framework and method and is followed up by a more thorough presentation of his research plan and implications of the potential findings in Archival Quality and Long-Term Preservation: A Research Framework for Validating the Usefulness of Digital Surrogates. 3 This project, which concluded in 2013, has yet to release its formal findings, but the implications of the trustworthiness of digital surrogacy weigh heavily on how much faith preservation can place in third-party digitized content.…”

Erdvės užkariavimas: 3D technologijos taikymo galimybės ir problemos Lietuvos archeologijoje

“…3D nuskaitymo prietaisai, taikytini archeologijoje .txt formatas yra stabilus, ilgalaikis, iš esmės priklausomas tik nuo ženklų koduotės. Be to, .txt bylos yra santykinai nedidelės apimties, o tai reiškia santykinai nedidelę ilgalaikio saugojimo kainą, .txt bylos taip pat gali būti suglaudinamos, neprarandant duomenų (Tanner, 2006;Wright ir kt., 2008;Hammond, Davies, 2009;Bia ir kt., 2011;Conway, 2011;Preservation..., 2011;Niven, 2012). Pagrindinis .txt bylų trukūmas -kad jos priklauso nuo ženklų koduotės (ASCII, UTF-8 ir t. t.).…”