Long-term preservation costs - some figures

Since the end of core funding for the UK’S Arts and Humanities Data Service, its constituent services have had do a bit more thinking about the costs of disseminating and preserving digital data.

The Archaeology Data Service has recently published a revised charging policy, which puts figures against the various tasks in undertakes on behalf of its user community - liasing with those with digital data, undertaking ingest procedures, creating dissemination mechanisms and undertaking long-term storage and migration of digital objects.

Sensibly, the service is now charging future depositors a one-off cost at the point of ingest; asking researchers who work on fixed term projects to pay annual costs for storage is just not feasible

As one would expect the costs raise with the complexity and the size of the digital data created. More staff time and more storage is required for a complex GIS-based deposit. The cost of disseminating a database can be up to £10,000 ($20,000), while storage is charged at £0.30 per megabyte.

Drawing on their figures here is a small, very hypothetical case study - a project wishing to deposit 2000 tiff images (6000MB in total) and disseminate 2000 derived jpeg images (500MB in total) would have to pay 6 days of staff time for management (around £2000), perhaps around £3000 for image costs and £1950 in storage costs (6,500 MB * £0.30).

This would make a total of £6,950.

If the entire project funding had been around £200,000k, the dissemination and preservation costs would only be 3.5% of the total funds. Not bad going at all.

JPEG2000 Ready for Use

From a message sent by the Digital Preservation Coalition

The Digital Preservation Coalition has examined JPEG 2000 in a report published today. The report concludes that JPEG 2000 represents a great stride forward for the archival community. The format now allows for greater compression rates and a recompression rate that is visually lossless.

The findings come as the Digital Preservation Coalition launch its latest ‘Technology Watch Report’ written by Dr. Robert Buckley, a Research Fellow with Xerox, ‘JPEG 2000 – a practical digital preservation standard?’. The report looks in-depth at the new format and the challenges it has to cope with. JPEG 2000 is widely used to collect and distribute a variety of images from geospatial, medical imaging, digital cinema, and image repositories to networked images. Interest in JPEG 2000 is now growing in the archival and library sectors, as institutions look for more efficient formats to store the results of major digitisation programmes.

The report is aimed at organisations involved in the management and storage of digital information. The in-depth report will help archives, libraries and other institutions make informed decisions about JPEG 2000 format and their future storage needs.

JPEG 2000 can reduce storage requirements by an order of magnitude compared to an uncompressed TIFF file. Dr. Buckley says, “This new format has come at a time of heightened awareness about the access to digital documents. Any format that can assist archives and libraries to do this is welcome.”

The format will also enable users to open as much of the file as they need at that time. This means a viewer, for example, could open a gigapixel image almost instantly. This is achieved by retrieving a decompressed low–resolution display sized image from the JPEG 2000 codestream. Coupled with this, the users’ ability to zoom, pan and rotate an image have been enhanced.

Adrian Brown, head of digital preservation, The National Archives said: “This is a very timely addition to the DPC’s Technology Watch Report series as many organisations are themselves reviewing the JPEG2000 format. This concise, comprehensive and clear guide will be of interest to practitioners across the digital preservation community.”

The report concludes that JPEG 2000 offers much more flexibility and features than JPEG, but at the cost of greater complexity. It is however a great stride forward, and of major significance for the information management community.

To download a pdf of the report please go to: www.dpconline.org/graphics/reports/index.html#twr0801

Workshop on the curation and preservation of audiovisual collections

TAPE workshop on the curation and preservation of audiovisual collections

University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, Monday 12th – Friday 16th May 2008

This five-day workshop will provide an intensive grounding in the theory and practice of audiovisual archiving, enabling curators to develop strategies to safeguard their collections. The training will be led by a range of expert film, video and audio curators from across Europe. They will address issues such as the handling and storage of analogue originals, digitisation and restoration, managing digital assets and enabling access and reuse …

Full details are available from the University of Glasgow website.

Mimicing Touch as well as Sight - Microsoft at the British Library

The British Library have, in association with various other cultural heritage institutions in the UK, added to their impressive Turning the Pages application.

Various documents from the 12th to the 19th centuries, selected via a national competition, are now online.

The striking concept about the Turning the Pages it that is does not digitise the individual images of a book, but goes further in imitating the process of actually leafing through a book or manuscript - the software attempts to mimic not just visual appearance, but tactile appearance as well. The machines installed in the BL itself where one touches and drags the pages by pressing the actual screen are even more impressive than the online versions, a fact amplified by the larger and clearer monitor

The original Turning the Pages was developed using Shockwave, but the updated software is based on collaboration with Microsoft. I expect to see more such tools as the BL further establishes its Microsoft partnership

Funding long-term digitisation projects

The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online and the Darwin Correspondence Project are two of the longest running digitisation projects in the UK.

The International Dunhuang Project is a “ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.”. It is international project running since 1994, hosted at the BL and has over 140,000 relevant images online.

The Darwin Correspondence project aims to document and add scholarly apparatus to over 14,000 of Darwin’s letters (both received and sent). Hosted at Cambridge University, the project is a mixed media one, with both digital and print outputs.

Both are huge projects and are need of continued assistance to digitise all the items within its orbit - the Darwin project aims to have 30 printed volumes, and complete around 2025. (!)

But of course the difficult thing is to find continued funding for such projects. For funding bodies or charities there are diminishing returns in funding something which already has had some academic impact. The gains are less tanglible if one funds something which is not trying to innovate and is already established in the academic blood stream. Equally, a funder will have less say in the project if it is jostling against many other donors who have already funded it.

I’m not quite sure how this is solved! Potential fund raising needs to get that much innovative in order for the projects to reach their natural conclusion.

Digitisation Services

TASI has recently produced a list of some Digitisation Services based in the UK, along with their respective capabilities in terms of special services

The list is available from the TASI website..

Historical GIS 2008

Call For Papers is now open for Historical GIS 2008, a two-day conference on all aspects of using GIS in historical
research to be held at the University of Essex, UK on the 21-22nd August
2008.

For more information please see:

http://www.hgis.org.uk/HGIS_conference/index.htm

or contact Ian Gregory at: I.Gregory@lancaster.ac.uk.

Bringing together content from different museums

Digitisation has so far created plenty of related collections sitting in distinct websites on the Internet, but it can be a frustrating experience trying to navigate multiple websites with similar content.

The University of Glasgow’s National Inventory Research Project has done the opposite in bringing together European paintings from distinct UK museum collections. It contains detailed records, and an increasing number of digital images, of nearly 8,000 paintings, principally in smaller regional collections in the UK.

There a different ways of trying to bring such info together - automated metadata creation, vocabulary mapping, federated searching. This project has followed a traditional method, focussing the metadata on shared research approaches towards hand-crafted scholarly evidence.

The inventory can be searched via the Visual Arts Data Service website

Commercialising Digitised Content & Interface Design

Both the British Library and the British Museum have set up websites which allow them to licence rights to their digitised images. According to British Museum Images website: “British Museum Images is the on-line digital image website of the British Museum catering primarily for the image-buying professional”. The British Library version says much the same.

Rather then embed the sites within their institutional sites for delivering collections, providing information for visitors etc. etc Both the websites are clean, efficient and aesthetically pleasing. They are easier to navigate than the main institutional site.

I think there are two main reasons for this navigation.

1) The ‘commerical’ sites have one clear purpose rather than sometimes conflicting purposes the main sites have.

2) With a ‘commercial’ site there is a even greater imperative to have a properly usable site - poor usability damages revenue. The same pressures do not exist on the main institutional site. Perhaps they should?

Advertising a Digital Resource

It’s often remarked upon that there is not enough focussed marketing on digital resources.

UCL’s (University College London) resource, Imagestore, for the use of the students and teachers on the campus, has somewhat bucked the trend. This huge poster is erected on around 25 metres of scaffolding in the middle of London’s Bloomsbury district.

The web address is plain for all to see - unfortunately, there’s no access for anyone who does not have a UCL password