Digital Preservation at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 28Th IEEE Mass Storage Systems and Technology Conference April 2012 — Gary T
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Digital Preservation at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 28th IEEE Mass Storage Systems and Technology Conference April 2012 — Gary T. Wright Introduction to the Church of Jesus Church Audiovisual Capabilities Christ of Latter-day Saints Over the last two decades, the Church The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day has developed state-of-the-art digital Saints is a worldwide Christian church with audiovisual capabilities to support its vast, more than 14.4 million members and 28,784 worldwide communications needs. To congregations. With headquarters in Salt illustrate one such need, twice a year the Lake City, Utah (USA), the Church operates Church holds General Conference in its three universities, a business college, 136 remarkable Conference Center, which seats temples, and thousands of seminaries and 21,000. institutes of religion around the world that Church members from all over the world enroll more than 700,000 students in travel to attend these conferences in order religious training. to hear timely, relevant counsel from The Church has a scriptural mandate to inspired ecclesiastical leaders. keep records of its proceedings and However, since the majority of the preserve them for future generations. members are unable to attend in person, the World-famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir Accordingly, the Church has been creating meetings are broadcast in high definition and Orchestra at Temple Square and keeping records since 1830, when it video via satellite to more than 7,400 was organized. A Church Historian’s Office Church buildings in 102 countries. The was formed in the 1840s, and in 1972 it was broadcasts are simultaneously translated renamed the Church History Department. into 32 languages. In addition, the meetings Today, the Church History Department are streamed live on the Church’s website has ultimate responsibility for preserving (lds.org) and on the Mormon Channel records of enduring value that originate (radio.lds.org). from its ecclesiastical leaders and within the Ultimately, surround sound digital various Church departments, the Church’s audio tracks for 96 languages are created educational institutions, and its affiliations. (comprising 1.75 TB of audio content) to With such a broad range of record augment the digital video taping of each sources, the array of digital record types meeting—making the Church of Jesus requiring preservation is also extensive. Christ of Latter-day Saints the world’s However, the vast majority of storage largest language broadcaster. capacity in the Church History Because of their exalting and enduring Department’s digital preservation archive is value, all General Conference meeting allocated to audiovisual records. videos, along with associated audio tracks, Salt Lake Temple are preserved digitally. photographed by Henok Montoya 1 The Church’s advanced audiovisual Typically, about 40% is targeted for capabilities are also used to support weekly preservation. In addition, a multi-petabyte broadcasts of Music and the Spoken Word— backlog is currently being ingested into the the world’s longest continuous network digital preservation system. broadcast (now in its 83rd year). In just ten years, the Media Services Each broadcast features an inspirational Department anticipates that it will have message and music performed by the generated a cumulative archival capacity of Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the more than 100 petabytes for a single copy. Orchestra at Temple Square. The broadcast This means that the Church History is aired live by certain radio and television Department’s digital preservation archive for stations and is distributed to approximately audiovisual data will become one of the largest 2000 other stations for delayed broadcast. in the world within a decade. And all the other The Mormon Tabernacle Choir was Church records of enduring value will add to named “America’s Choir” by President the total capacity of this world-class digital Ronald Reagan and was awarded the archive. National Medal of Arts (the United States’ highest honor for artistic excellence) by The Family History Department President George W. Bush. And in 2010, the In 1894, the Church of Jesus Christ of Music and the Spoken Word broadcast was Latter-day Saints established the inducted into the National Radio Hall of Genealogical Society of Utah as a nonprofit, Fame. It is no wonder that the Church of educational institution. The Society began Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers to gather family history records from broadcasts of Music and the Spoken Word archives around the world, and then started worthy of digital preservation. to microfilm many of them in 1938. Today, As a gift to the world, the Church of the Society is known as FamilySearch—the Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints launched a world’s largest family history organization. new website (biblevideos.lds.org) on Operated by the Family History December 4, 2011 that provides free Bible Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of videos of the birth, life, death, and Latter-day Saints, FamilySearch provides resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. services free of charge to the public. Viewable with a free mobile app, these Millions of people use FamilySearch videos are faithful to the biblical account. records, resources, and services to learn The text also accompanies each video scene. about their family history. This remarkable gift provides a new and Comprising more than 2.4 million rolls, meaningful way to learn about Jesus Christ. the FamilySearch collection of microfilmed Of course, all these digital videos will be records is the largest collection of family preserved by the Church. history records in the world. The collection The Church’s Media Services contains more than 13.1 billion images of Department, which created the Bible historical and vital records created in more videos, generates multiple petabytes of than 100 countries. production audiovisual data annually. 2 Since 1999, FamilySearch has been Departments collaborated on digital digitizing this enormous microfilm preservation requirements, architectures, collection in order to make the records and potential solutions to meet their more accessible via the Internet. Also, tens individual requirements. of millions of additional records are being In 2008, it was discovered that the photographed around the world with National Library of New Zealand had digital cameras every year. developed a thorough set of business If authorized, these records (both requirements for digital preservation. Steve digitized and digitally photographed) are Knight, Program Director for Preservation published on the FamilySearch website Research and Consultancy at the Library, (familysearch.org) as they become was kind enough to share these available. requirements with the Church—which are Once the images are published, they are probably the most comprehensive available indexed by hundreds of thousands of anywhere, even today. The National volunteers. This global team indexes Library of New Zealand’s requirements millions of names each month. As provided an excellent basis from which permitted, published indexes, along with both Church departments developed their images of records, may be viewed free of own business requirements. charge at the FamilySearch website. One shared requirement was developing Between its microfilm digitization a solution that largely conforms to the pipeline, ongoing digital capture of family Reference Model for an Open Archival history records, and associated indexes, Information System (OAIS).1 This ISO FamilySearch is generating multiple Standard (ISO 14721:2003) highlights petabytes of data each year. All this digital functions and processes that are needed to information must be preserved for future implement an effective digital preservation generations because of its priceless and operation, but does not cover actual enduring value. implementation. It also introduces Within ten years, FamilySearch expects terminology that has become a useful de that it will have generated a cumulative facto standard in the digital preservation archival capacity of more than 100 community. OAIS is universally considered petabytes for a single copy. the industry’s definitive model for Clearly, the FamilySearch digital structuring a digital preservation system. preservation archive will also become one of the Both Church departments recognized the largest in the world within a decade— wisdom of using OAIS as a reference model independent of the Church History to guide both solution evaluation and Department’s digital archive. system architecture. Consequently, the digital preservation systems employed by Architecting the Church’s Digital the Family History and Church History Preservation Systems Departments today are OAIS-compliant. For several years culminating in 2010, the Family History and Church History 3 Another shared requirement was After several discussions with qualified, minimizing the total cost of ownership of relevant people, concerns over the ability of archival storage. In 2008, an internal study open source repositories to adequately scale was performed to compare the costs of eliminated these potential solutions from acquisition, maintenance, administration, consideration by both Church departments. data center floor space, and power to Alternative solutions considered were archive hundreds of petabytes of digital Tessella Safety Deposit Box (SDB) and Ex records using disk arrays, optical disks, Libris Rosetta. In order to determine if SDB