Lecture notes
Notes to presentation held in Lund 7 June 2005.
My name is Sigfrid Lundberg, research engineer and computer programmer within the Univertity's Library Network.
Over the years I have been working on diverse matters:
In addition to these activities I participated in EU funded telematics projects, Desire, EUN, EUC, ETB.
Around 1999 I became involved digitization and Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI), and I also realized that what I had done for years actually had a name -- text technology. Before that and after I've been involved in:
Much of these techniques are use in Humanities computing (e.g., creation digital critical editions of literary works), digitization, digital preservation and electronic publishing.
Libraries exists because they:
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Persons who knows or have experienced something may write about it The results are published. The publication is data and is stored as data in books, journals and possibly on hard disks, CDs etc.
Any corporate body storing published information is a library for sharing whithin its constituency is a library.
An archive is information collected by persons or corporate bodies to document a process. The process can be a person's life or a university's research or a company's business.
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Knowledge is stored in brains
Only human beings may aquire knowledge. They do so through a cognitive process called learning. Obviously, we may can only do that from information that were created in the past.
There is one exception: When we do research we gain knowledge that has never hitherto been stored as information.
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If we don't preserve, then all all knowledge would have been gained through original research.
It is cost effective way for the society to keep its information, be it publications or archival records, in institutions that collect, preserve, organize and provide access to information for their constituencies.
You may engage in digital preservation for two reasons:
All preservation (be it digital or conventional) is based on human efforts. It requires software, storage servers, hard disks, tape backup etc, and a lot of computing. It is a question of workflows...
There exists a specification of an Open Archival Information Service, which is an ISO standard. We have not even tried to implement it here in Lund. It would eat resources. Links about OAIS:
The service:http://laurentius.lub.lu.se, Laurentius
Properties of manuscripts
A challenging problem
Processing of manuscript descriptions
The entire catalogue in PDF. A fully indexed draft to a printed book.
More about Laurentius: Lundberg, Sigfrid (2002) Excursions along the border between metadata for resource discovery and for resource description
Service: http://www.ediffah.org/
More info on the technical solution: http://www.ediffah.org/reports/software.shtml
Two services, quite ordinary ones: Xerxes and Scripta
I will only discuss them from a digital preservation perspective. Typically an electronic publishing supports at least three functions:
Users are document authors and editorial staff (e.g., reviewers). Benefits from campuswide authentication system through LDAP. LDAP is also used for getting unique identification of authors (Lund University has more than five staff and students with the name Anders Nilsson).
Architecture of Xerxes' and Scripta's cataloging tool
Users are typically researches and students.
Architecture of Xerxes' and Scripta's search engine
Users are remote search engines, e.g., Google and Google Scholar and OAIster. Like Ediffah this system supports OAI
Digitization of images, films and analog sounds and videos
I honestly don't know all units facing these problems. Neither do I know were these problems are addressed competently and where their not.
We see a number of tendencies in the global economy.
Open Source Software, Open Access Media, Creative Commons, etc means to give away content, and earning your money from additional services (that's how Linus Torvalds became millionaire).
Preservation is an investment you normally cannot get a fast revenue from. What you may get is results from future research, or just patrons satisfied from reading a good book.
The question is: Who will pay preservation of things that are available for free on the Internet.