A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

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A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation Copyright © 2010 This collection is covered by the following Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License You are free to copy, distribute, and display this work under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Specifically, you must state that the work was originally published in A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation (2010), Katherine Skinner and Matt Schultz, eds., and you must attribute the individual author(s). Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights. The above is a summary of the full license, which is available at the following URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode Publication and Cataloging Information: ISBN: 978-0-9826653-0-5 Editors: Katherine Skinner Matt Schultz Copyeditor: Susan Wells Parham Publisher: Educopia Institute Atlanta, GA 30309 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... vii Road Map ....................................................................................................................ix Chapter 1: Preserving Our Collections, Preserving Our Missions ...............................1 Chapter 2: DDP Architecture .....................................................................................11 Chapter 3: Technical Considerations for PLNs..........................................................27 Chapter 4: Organizational Considerations..................................................................37 Chapter 5: Content Selection, Preparation, and Management....................................49 Chapter 6: Content Ingest, Monitoring, and Recovery for PLNs...............................73 Chapter 7: Cache and Network Administration for PLNs..........................................85 Chapter 8: Copyright Practice in the DDP: Practice makes Perfect...........................99 Appendix A: Private LOCKSS Networks ................................................................113 Glossary of Terms ....................................................................................................127 Author Biographies ..................................................................................................133 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We wish to express our appreciation to the institutions and departments that provided various kinds of support to enable this publication. These include the Library of Congress through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), which has provided financial support for the founding and development of the MetaArchive Cooperative, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), which has provided funding for the Cooperative’s transition from a successful project to a sustainable business. We are also grateful to Vicky Reich and the LOCKSS team who provided the technical framework for the Cooperative’s network and who number among the most important pioneers of our generation, not just in digital preservation technology development, but in cultivating new ways for cultural memory organizations to collaborate to preserve our digital collections as community-based, community-owned, and community-led endeavors. We would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume, first for their work in digital preservation, and second for their contributions to the substance of this book. This has been a group effort in every way and this volume depended upon the distributed knowledge and expertise of our community of contributors. Special thanks also goes to our copyeditor, Susan Wells Parham and the editorial expertise and input she has brought to this publication, and to Bill Donovan, whose fresh eyes relieved our own rather bleary ones as we finalized our work. We also greatly appreciate the efforts (and patience!) of our reviewer-editors—Vicky Reich and Tom Lipkis of the LOCKSS team, Richard Pearce-Moses of PeDALS, and Aaron Trehub of ADPNet and MetaArchive. Finally, we would like to extend a special thanks to the distributed community of readers who have assisted us along the way and to our future readership, from whom we hope to hear in later editions of this book. The distributed digital preservation field is quickly expanding and as we state repeatedly herein, other technical solutions and organizational approaches are emerging and maturing rapidly. We look forward to working with you all in the growing community of cultural stewardship that we will collectively foster. Katherine Skinner and Matt Schultz February 2010 ROAD MAP A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation is intentionally structured such that every chapter can stand on its own or be paired with other segments of the book at will, allowing readers to pick their own pathway through the guide as best suits their needs. This approach has necessitated that the authors and editors include some level of repetition of basic principles across chapters, and has also made the Glossary (included at the back of this guide) an essential reference resource for all readers. This guide is written with a broad audience in mind that includes librarians, curators, archivists, scholars, technologists, lawyers, and administrators. Any resourceful reader should be able to use this guide to gain both a philosophical and practical understanding of the emerging field of distributed digital preservation (DDP), including how to establish or join a Private LOCKSS Network (PLN). Please note that our title is “A Guide,” rather than “The Guide,” to distributed digital preservation. We are practitioners, and as such, are covering in this book the territory that we know well. While the LOCKSS software is certainly not the only approach to DDP, it has reached a high level of maturity in the library, archives, and museum communities. We have chosen here to focus some of our attention on this technological approach because we use it ourselves and because we believe that it is readily available to groups of institutions that wish to quickly begin preserving their collections in geographically distributed preservation networks. We are excited to see other promising technologies reach similar levels of maturity, and we hope that similar documentation of these methodologies and approaches will be offered to the extended community in the future, either through other books and articles or through future editions of this guide. The Chapters Chapter 1: Preserving Our Collections, Preserving Our Missions Martin Halbert and Katherine Skinner provide a philosophical base for cultural memory organizations’ need to participate in distributed digital preservation solutions as community-owned and community-led initiatives. This chapter will be useful for all readers, particularly those with questions about the value of collaborative engagement in the digital arena for cultural memory organizations. Chapter 2: DDP Architecture Katherine Skinner and Monika Mevenkamp explore the architecture of DDP networks, focusing primarily on the Private LOCKSS Network (PLN) and its central elements. This chapter provides a foundation for all of the chapters that follow and as such, is highly recommended for all readers. Chapter 3: Technical Considerations for PLNs Beth Nicol focuses on some of the core technical decisions that different PLNs have made based on the needs of their members. This chapter will be most useful to administrators and technologists who are thinking about producing or joining a DDP, especially one that uses the LOCKSS software. Chapter 4: Organizational Considerations Tyler O. Walters provides an overview of the administrative and organizational apparatuses that are available to DDP networks and uses a series of case studies to explore the operational decisions made by existing PLNs. Administrators who are considering hosting or joining a DDP network of any type will find this chapter a helpful guide. Chapter 5: Content Selection, Preparation, and Management Gail McMillan and Rachel Howard offer a set of best practices for policies regarding the selection, preparation, and management of digital content for preservation purposes. Though they draw upon PLNs in their featured examples, the chapter may be applied more broadly to many DDP initiatives. As such, it will be of great use to librarians, curators, and archivists, as well as administrators, who are seeking to ready their collections for preservation. Chapter 6: Content Ingest, Monitoring, and Recovery for PLNs Katherine Skinner, Matt Schultz, and Monika Mevenkamp describe the central elements of the PLN-based strategy: content ingest, monitoring, and recovery. This detailed chapter will be most useful to librarians, archivists, curators, and technologists who are participating as content contributors and as a preservation site for a PLN. Chapter 7: Cache and Network Administration for PLNs Matt Schultz and Bill Robbins provide an overview of the different network responsibilities incurred through two different approaches to
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