DOCUMENT RESUME ED 471 957 IR 058 525 TITLE Building a National Strategy for Digital Preservation: Issues in Digital Media Archiving. INSTITUTION Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, DC.; Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ISBN ISBN-1-887334-91-2 PUB DATE 2002-04-00 NOTE 102p.; Commissioned for and sponsored by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, Library of Congress. AVAILABLE FROM Council on Library and Information Resources, 1755 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20036 ($20). Tel: 202-939-4750; Fax: 202-939-4765; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://www.clir.org. For full text: http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub106abst.html. PUB TYPE Collected Works General (020) Reports Evaluative (142) EDRS PRICE EDRS Price MF01/PC05 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Archives; *Electronic Text; *Information Policy; Information Sources; Information Technology; Library Technical Processes; Metadata; National Programs; *National Standards; *Nonprint Media; *Preservation IDENTIFIERS *Digital Collections; Digital Data; *Digital Preservation; Digital Technology ABSTRACT The United States Congress in December 2000 appropriated funds to the Library of Congress (LC) to spearhead an effort to develop a national strategy for the preservation of digital information. LC staff scheduled a series of conversations with representatives from the technology, business, entertainment, academic, legal, archival, and library communities, and asked the Council on Library and Information Resources to commission background papers for these sessions and to summarize the meetings. The resulting papers, along with an integrative essay by Amy Friedlander, are presented in this document. Contents include: "Summary of Findings" (Amy Friedlander);. "Preserving Digital Periodicals" (Dale Flecker); "E-Books and the Challenge of Preservation" (Frank Romano); "Archiving the World Wide Web" (Peter Lyman); "Preservation of Digitally Recorded Sound" (Samuel Brylawski); "Understanding the Preservation Challenge of Digital Television" (Mary Ide, Dave MacCarn, Thom Shepard, and Leah Weisse); and "Digital Video Archives: Managing through Metadata" (Howard D. Wactlar and Michael G. Christel). (AEF) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. N to Ch N7-4 42) sr alb rs, " . PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND U S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS Office of Educational Research and Improvement BEEN GRANTED BY EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) ib This documenthas been reproduced as received from the person or organization B.H. Leney originating it Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Points of view or opinions statedin this 1 document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy N ifIf un oo- I OPY AVAILAS E Building a National Strategy for Digital Preservation: Issues in Digital Media Archiving Commissioned for and sponsored by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, Library of Congress April 2002 Council on Library and Information Resources Washington, D.C. and Library of Congress About the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program The mission of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and PreservationProgram is to develop a national strategy to collect, archive, andpreserve the burgeoning amounts of digital content, especially materials that are created only in digital formats, for current and futuregenerations. ISBN 1-887334-91-2 Copublished by: Council on Library and Information Resources 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20036 Web site at http:/ /www.clir.org and Library of Congress 101 Independence Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20540 Web site at http: / /www.loc.gov Additional copies are available for $20 per copy and may be ordered through CLIR's Website. The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American NationalStandard for Information 0SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ANSI Z39.48-1984. Copyright 2002 in compilation by the Council on Library and Information Resources and theLibrary of Congress. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transcribed in any form without permission of the publishers.Requests for reproduction or other uses or questions pertaining to permissions should be submitted in writing to the Director of Communicationsat the Council on Library and Information Resources, 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 500, Washington,DC 20036. iii Contents Preface iv Summary of Findings, Amy Friedlander 1 Preserving Digital Periodicals, Dale Flecker 10 E-Books and the Challenge of Preservation, Frank Romano 23 Archiving the World Wide Web, Peter Lyman 38 Preservation of Digitally Recorded Sound, Samuel Brylawski 52 Understanding the Preservation Challenge of Digital Television, Mary Ide, Dave MacCarn, Thom Shepard, and Leah Weisse 67 Digital Video Archives: Managing Through Metadata, Howard D. Wactlar and Michael G. Christel 80 iv Preface Libraries traditionally have formed a preservation safety net for materials that will be transmitted to subsequent generations of information seekers and scholars. For paper-based documents, provision of adequate storage condi- tions was the best means to help ensure that materials would remain readable far into the future. With the advent of digital technology, many knowledge creators do their work on computers. Some of that knowledge may be printedon paper, but much of it, particularly databases, geographic information, scientific data sets, and Web sites, exists only in electronic form. At the same time, tradition- al forms of publications have changed significantly and,as a result, create new challenges. For example, publishers of electronic journals license their content to libraries, but libraries do not own that content and theymay not have rights to capture digital content to preserve it. What organizations or systems will provide the needed preservation safe- ty net for electronic materials? Recognizing the importance of this question, the U.S. Congress in December 2000 appropriated funds to the Library of Congress (LC) to spearhead an effort to develop a national strategy for the preservation of digital information. Understanding that the task cannot be accomplished by any one organization, Congress wrote into the appropria- tions language a requirement that LC work with other federal, scholarly, and nonprofit organizations to discuss the problem and producea plan. The staff of the Library of Congress immediately scheduleda series of conversations with representatives from the technology, business, entertain- ment, academic, legal, archival, and library communities. LC asked the Coun- cil on Library and Information Resources to commission backgroundpapers for these sessions and to summarize the meetings. The resultingpapers, along with an integrative essay by Amy Friedlander,are presented in this document. The responsibility for preserving digital information will be distributed broadly. Our hope is that information gathered by the Library of Congress will benefit all who are working on this issue. Deanna Marcum, President, CUR Laura Campbell, Director, National Digital Library Program Library of Congress 1 Summary of Findings Amy Friedlander Center for Information Strategy and Policy Science Applications International Corporation The late twentieth century saw the beginning of the age of dig- ital information in corporate archives, the creative arts, fi- nancial markets, medical information, and scholarship, among other venues. How the United Stateschooses to preserve and manage its digital information affects core issuesin key industries from medical textbook publishing to entertainment and to future scholarship in science, technology, and the arts and humanities. It profoundly affects how the future will come to know our present and is, therefore, integral to the nation's identity, now and to come. In this terrain, the Library of Congress (LC) has chosento open its investigations with a series of probes into six principal areas in which the LC faces collection-management issues: large Web sites, electronic books, electronic journals, digitally recorded sound, digital film, and digital television. This chapter summarizes what a series of interviews and papers, conducted and written during the late sum- mer and early fall 2001, revealed about acomplex and shifting landscape. Formal 30-minute interviews and shorter conversations and e- mail exchanges were conducted with individuals who represent a range of interests and organizations acrosspublishing, film, enter- tainment, news, electronic books, computer science, libraries, corpo- rate research, nonprofit organizations, professional andtrade associ- ations, and academe. Their names and primary affiliations are listed on page 9. (Note that corporate representativesfrequently sit on the boards of nonprofit and cultural organizations, and many communi- ties therefore inform their perspectives.) Most people talked about several concerns and formats; thus, we have abandoned any efforts to characterize responses exclusively by format (e.g.,e-books or e- journals, Web sites, digital film, digital TV, digitally recorded sound), profession, or organization. 7 2 Building a National Strategy for Digital Preservation Information gained from the interviewswas complemented by six "environmental scans"