I attended the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting in Minneapolis, April 6-7, 2009. Below are some takeaways that I found noteworthy, especially as they relate to repositories.<\/p>\n
Keynote Address – David Rosenthal, Chief Scientist, LOCKSS, Stanford University: <\/strong>David challenged some of the prevailing thought on digital preservation regarding format obsolescence.\u00a0 He stated that incompatibility is not inevitable, rather that “creating incompatibility = reinventing the wheel”.\u00a0 He argued that format obsolescence never happens.\u00a0 He backed this up with evidence from the last few decades.\u00a0 The moral of the story: If we go ahead and just collect the bits, we will be fine.\u00a0 A rather freeing thought, given that the perceived complexities often make digital preservation a non-starter.<\/p>\n JPEG2000 is a viable alternative:<\/strong> Ryan Chute, from Los Alamos National Library, demonstrated the Djatoka (pronounced jay-too-kay), which is an open source JPEG2000 image server, built with the Kakadu software library.\u00a0 The Djatoka server now has two client implementations (IIP implementation at the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and Open Layers at UNC).\u00a0 Conceivably, JPEG2000 could be used as both a presentation format and as a preservation format (lossless compression around 2:1 and visually lossless compression around 10:1 from tiffs).\u00a0 Demonstration looked very sharp, will need to pay attention to how it performs in production environments.\u00a0 Discussed with Ryan the plans for integration with Fedora, and there are a few implementation paths to evaluate.<\/p>\n Preservation services in the clouds, Duraspace: <\/strong>Sandy Payette and Michele Kimpton discussed the joint venture between Fedora Commons and Dspace Foundation.\u00a0 Duraspace will be a service (eventually a set of services) as well as open source software.\u00a0 The initial use case will allow for a preservation based service in the cloud.\u00a0 They have identified a few sites that they will be piloting these services with.\u00a0 By Q1 2010, they expect to have extensions available for Fedora and Dspace to plug into these cloud services.\u00a0 I asked about a scenario where we might store preservation copies in the cloud and store derivatives locally, and have Fedora and Akubra broker the data to the right store; they said this is a scenario they are planning for.<\/p>\n Cool Book Digitization Workflow at Northwestern:<\/strong> I attended a presentation by Claire Stewart and Steve DiDomenico from Northwestern on their web-based book digitization workflow, codename “crabcake”.\u00a0 They are digitizing books and ingesting into Fedora.\u00a0 Their Fedora implementation is similar to ours with an atomistic content model and use of METS for structural metadata.\u00a0 Very clean set of workflow tools.\u00a0 The most impressive part of their presentation is their GUI for manipulating the METS structure for a book digital object.\u00a0 This interface is built heavily with Ext JS.\u00a0 Their project is grant funded, and they will be releasing as open source in the summer.\u00a0 From what I can tell, installation of their tools may require some adoption of their local practices, at the very least, their interpretation of METS.\u00a0 Regarding their digitization\/QC process, they have a lot of throughput, they push things into Fedora with very little human intervention and fix later, in essence getting things online with very little impediment.<\/p>\n Trident project report:<\/strong> I gave an update on the Trident project.\u00a0 The presentation was well attended, and the project was well received.\u00a0 There was good discussion around the metadata application profile, its possible extension to different metadata schemas, and general use cases for the Editor.\u00a0 There was a general validation that our project continues to head in the right direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I attended the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting in Minneapolis, April 6-7, 2009. Below are some takeaways that I found noteworthy, especially as they relate to repositories. Keynote Address – David Rosenthal, Chief Scientist, LOCKSS, Stanford University: David challenged some of the prevailing thought on digital preservation regarding format obsolescence.\u00a0 He stated that incompatibility is … Continue reading CNI Spring Task Force Meeting \u2013 April 6-7, 2009<\/span>