G&M: Who will preserve the past for future generations? on the fate of the archive
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G&M: Who will preserve the past for future generations? on the fate of the archive
 
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There is no data archive in Canada, and born digital material has no permanent home. We have some government departments & divisions who archive some data (NRCan, Canada Centre for Remote Sensing) but mostly our data, be it federal, provincial, or municipal, social sciences, art, journalistic or scientific are fragile indeed, even if we have access to some of them in open data portals at the moment.
The slashing of the national archive and the splitting of the collection does not bode well for either paper, digitization nor born digital data. The loss of subject matter specialists along with the reduction in acquisitions reduces access even more.
Open data is also about access to old data.
t
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Tracey P. Lauriault 613-234-2805 |
Re: G&M: Who will preserve the past for future generations? on the fate of the archive
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Not to disagree with this generally, but to point out an exception: the City of Vancouver Archives has taken transfers (snapshots of old data) from the City of Vancouver's Open
Data catalogue and will be preserving them in our digital preservation system and making them accessible via the Web.
>From attending open data events and speaking to open data researchers, it was obvious to us that the community needed access to historical data. Once we make the data available, perhaps our methodology and experience will help other Canadian memory institutions do the same. Sue Bigelow Digital Conservator City of Vancouver Archives 1150 Chestnut Street
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] on behalf of Tracey P. Lauriault [[hidden email]]
Sent: June 12, 2012 6:32 AM To: CARTA-L : Canadian Map & GIS Libraries and Archives; civicaccess discuss Subject: [CivicAccess-discuss] G&M: Who will preserve the past for future generations? on the fate of the archive There is no data archive in Canada, and born digital material has no permanent home. We have some government departments & divisions who archive some data (NRCan, Canada Centre for Remote Sensing) but mostly our data, be it federal, provincial, or municipal,
social sciences, art, journalistic or scientific are fragile indeed, even if we have access to some of them in open data portals at the moment.
The slashing of the national archive and the splitting of the collection does not bode well for either paper, digitization nor born digital data. The loss of subject matter specialists along with the reduction in acquisitions reduces access even more.
Open data is also about access to old data.
t
--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805 |
Re: G&M: Who will preserve the past for future generations? on the fate of the archive
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Thanks Sue, it is good to know there is an example of an open data municipal preservation strategy!
I recall working with the UBC based InterPARES 2 project with VanMap being a preservation case study with the San Diego Centre for Super Computing (http://www.interpares.org/ip2/ip2_case_studies.cfm?study=23) and I worked with Evelyn Peters who participated in the writing of this "From Data to Records: Preserving the Geographic Information System of the City of Vancouver - http://journals.sfu.ca/archivar/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13157.
I also know that in Waterloo the open data strategy is housed with archives and records management.
Do you have something written up about this preservation strategy and how it came about?
Cheers
t
On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Bigelow, Sue <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- Tracey P. Lauriault 613-234-2805 |
Re: G&M: Who will preserve the past for future generations? on the fate of the archive
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Yes, we’ve been involved with InterPARES for many years. Funny that you mention Evelyn; she’s now working for Artefactual Systems, the lead developer for the open source digital preservation system that we’ve been
partners in developing. http://www.artefactual.com/team
Preservation of the open data is a part of our responsibility to preserve the City’s records that are deemed of archival value, whether they are analogue or
digital. The preservation system that we’re using is Archivematica
https://www.archivematica.org/wiki/Main_Page The work--even all the meeting minutes—is published openly on the wiki. Archivematica is based on the Open Archival Information System standard
http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=24683 which describes the high-level requirements for digital preservation and access. In the course of developing Archivematica and
now implementing it, we’ve found that specific functionality requirements are a bit different for archives as for space data repositories, but the high-level outline is still valid. I’m sure that, once we take a look at the data catalogue, we’ll find issues specific to open data that we have to figure out before we ingest it into our system.
We will be happy to share those solutions once we have them. We regularly deliver presentations and publish papers to the archival community (and beyond). Tl;dr The data sets are now in secure, replicated storage. The problems of ingest and access have yet to be addressed but solutions will be shared.
Sue Bigelow
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
On Behalf Of Tracey P. Lauriault Thanks Sue, it is good to know there is an example of an open data municipal preservation strategy!
I recall working with the UBC based InterPARES 2 project with VanMap being a preservation case study with the San Diego Centre for Super Computing (http://www.interpares.org/ip2/ip2_case_studies.cfm?study=23)
and I worked with Evelyn Peters who participated in the writing of this "From Data to Records: Preserving the Geographic Information System of the City of Vancouver -
http://journals.sfu.ca/archivar/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13157. I also know that in Waterloo the open data strategy is housed with archives and records management. Do you have something written up about this preservation strategy and how it came about? Cheers t On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Bigelow, Sue <[hidden email]> wrote: Not to disagree with this generally, but to point out an exception: the City of Vancouver Archives has taken transfers (snapshots of old data) from the City of Vancouver's
Open Data catalogue and will be preserving them in our digital preservation system and making them accessible via the Web. Sue Bigelow Digital Conservator City of Vancouver Archives 1150 Chestnut Street
From:
[hidden email] [[hidden email]] on behalf
of Tracey P. Lauriault [[hidden email]] There is no data archive in Canada, and born digital material has no permanent home. We have some government departments & divisions who archive some data (NRCan, Canada Centre for Remote Sensing) but mostly our data, be it federal, provincial,
or municipal, social sciences, art, journalistic or scientific are fragile indeed, even if we have access to some of them in open data portals at the moment. The slashing of the national archive and the splitting of the collection does not bode well for either paper, digitization nor born digital data. The loss of subject matter specialists along with the reduction in acquisitions reduces access
even more. Open data is also about access to old data. t -- Tracey P. Lauriault
Tracey P. Lauriault |
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