Technology

Public Resources

pdf Avoiding Technological Quicksand
Jeff Rothenberg

“Most approaches that have been suggested as solutions to this problem—including reliance on standards and the migration of digital material into new forms as required suffer from serious inadequacies. In contrast, the emulation strategy as elaborated above, though it requires further research and proof of feasibility, appears to have many conceptual advantages over the other approaches suggested and is offered as a promising candidate for a solution to the problem of preserving digital material far into the future.”

Rothenburg, Jeff. Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation. Council on Library and Information Resources, 1999. 		223 KB 01/26/2010
pdf British Library - Risk Assessment
Rory McLeod, Peter Bright, Paul Wheatley

“Substantial quantities of digital objects are stored as single copies only, on handheld media in danger of decay. This stark warning is illustrated by many examples of disc decay that have been encountered and is backed up by the considerable evidence from external research into handheld media lifetimes. Digital content will continue to be lost unless action is taken now.”

McLeod, Rory, Peter Bright, and Paul Wheatley. Risk Assessment 2007. British Library, 2007. 		215 KB 01/26/2010
pdf Digital Preservation
Kyong-Ho Lee, Oliver Slattery, Richang Lu, Xiao Tang, and Victor McCrary

“The goal of digital preservation is to ensure long-term access to digitally stored information. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques used in digital preservation. We also introduce representative digital preservation projects and case studies that provide insight into the advantages and disadvantages of different preservation strategies. Finally, the pros and cons of current strategies, critical issues for digital preservation, and future directions are discussed.”

Lee, Kyong-Ho, Oliver Slattery, Richang Lu, Xiao Tang, and Victor McCrary. “The State of the Art and Practice in Digital Preservation.” Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology 107, no.1 (2002): 93–106. 		417 KB 01/26/2010
pdf Predicting the Life Expectancy of Modern Tape and Optical Media
Vivek Navale

“Unfortunately, physical deterioration of storage media is only one of the challenges faced in the long-term management of digital information. Although there are scientifically accepted techniques for predicting how long media will remain physically viable, we still have no way to predict when technological change or market forces will cause a particular storage medium to become obsolete. Although this FAQ deals only with physical longevity issues, prudent decision-making about the use of any digital storage medium also needs to take obsolescence into consideration.”

Navale, Vivek. "Predicting the Life Expectancy of Modern Tape and Optical Media." RLG DigiNews 9, no.4 (2005). www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20744#article3. 		350 KB 01/26/2010
pdf Public Sp 500-263 November 2005
“The Information Access Division (IAD) of the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the Preservation Research and Testing division at the Library Of Congress (LoC) has begun a collaboration to test the longevity of recordable optical media including DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, CD-R. The details of this collaboration are presented in this report.”

“Information Technology: NIST/Library of Congress (LoC) Optical Disc Longevity Testing Procedure.” National Institute of Standards and Technology. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 2003. 		289 KB 01/26/2010
pdf Risk Management of Digtal Information
Gregory W. Lawrence et al.

“In 1998, CLIR asked the Cornell University Library to undertake a risk assessment of migrating a handful of common file formats. This report is the fruit of their investigation. It is intended to be a practical guide to assessing the risks associated with the migration of various formats and to making sound preservation decisions on the basis of that assessment.”

“The goal of any risk assessment is to identify, as unambiguously as possible, the risk of loss over time and the measures that can be taken to mitigate that loss. This is what the tools are designed to do. The difficulty, of course, is determining when risk is acceptable and when it is not. The authors underscore the importance of experience and judgment in practicing the art of preservation.”

Lawrence, Gregory W., William R. Kehoe, Oya Y. Rieger, William H. Walters, and Anne R. Kenney. Risk Management of Digital Information: A File Format Investigation. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2000. 		211 KB 01/26/2010
pdf Stability Study
Oliver Slattery et al.

"The reliability and longevity of any storage medium is a key issue for archivists and preservationists as well as for the creators of important information. This is particularly true in the case of digital media such as DVD and CD where a sufficient number of errors may render the disc unreadable. This paper describes an initial stability study of commercially available recordable DVD and CD.”

Slattery, Oliver, Richang Lu, Jian Zheng, Fred Byers, and Xiao Tang. “Stability Comparison of Recordable Optical Discs—A Study of Error Rates in Harsh Conditions.” Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology 109, no. 		654 KB 01/26/2010

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