An Update on Digital Preservation at The British Library

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An Update on Digital Preservation at The British
Library

• Helen Shenton
• Head of Collection Care, British Library
• IFLA Durban 22 August 2007

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An Update on Digital Preservation at the British
Library

• 1. The story so far
• 2. LIFE project
• 3. Planets project
• 4. Risk Assessment of Digital Material in the BL

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1. THE STORY SO FAR
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1. The story so far

• Digital Object Management Programme
• www.bl.uk/about/policies/dom/homepage
• Voluntary Legal Deposit of Electronic Material
  2000-2003
• 2003 Primary Legislation for Legal Deposit of
  Electronic Material
• Digital Preservation Strategy Revised
• Digital Preservation Plans
• e-journals Microsoft digitisation project C19th
  literature
• www.bl.uk/about/collectioncare/
• Web Archiving Consortium
• www.webarchive.org.uk
• Cross-functional Digital Preservation Team

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2. LIFE Lifecycle Information for E-Literature
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LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature)

• University College London and British Library,
  funded by JISC
• LIFE has developed a Lifecycle model with an
  emphasis on estimating the cost for digital
  preservation activities.
• Starts to answer the question
• What is the long term cost of preserving digital
  material?
• LIFE can calculate the costs of preserving
  digital information for the next 5, 10 or 100
  years
• Builds on work that defined the different stages
  in a collection items life for a physical
  monograph and serial
• 6 stages in the LIFE have been defined
  Acquisition, Ingest, Metadata, Access, Storage
  and Preservation
• 3 case studies used e-journals, web archiving
  and voluntarily deposited legal deposit

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An Example - Hand-held Monograph
0.33
3.15
0.00
2.25
0.00




4.50

Total Cost in Year 5 10.23
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LIFE Website Blog

• Websitewww.life.ac.uk
• LIFE Blogwww.life.ac.uk/blog

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3. PLANETS
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Planets overview

• 4-year research and technology development
  project co-funded by the European Union to
  address core digital preservation challenges
• Started June 2006 with 15m budget
• Co-ordinated by the British Library
• 16 partners including national libraries and
  archives, leading technology companies and
  research universities
• Aims
• improve decision-making about long term
  preservation
• ensure long-term access to valued digital content
• control the costs of preservation actions through
  increased automation, scaleable infrastructure
• ensure wide adoption across the user community
  establish market place for preservation services
  tools

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http//www.planets-project.eu/

• The British Library
• National Library, Netherlands
• Austrian National Library
• State and University Library, Denmark
• Royal Library, Denmark
• National Archives, UK
• Swiss Federal Archives
• National Archives, Netherlands

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http//www.planets-project.eu/

• Tessella Plc
• IBM Netherlands
• Microsoft Research, Cambridge
• ARC Seibersdorf research
• Hatii at University of Glasgow
• University of Freiburg
• Technical University of Vienna
• University at Cologne

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Planets Architecture
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Next 18 months

• Planets Preservation Planning tools PLATO
  (August 2008)
• Integrated preservation planning services
  (September 2008)
• A descriptive language for generic description of
  preservation action tools (Aug 08)
• Next generation migration tools for digital
  objects (demonstration November 2008)
• Emulation tools for specific environments
  (November 2008)
• Characterisation description a characterisation
  extraction language (May 2008)
• Characterisation tools to extract significant
  properties from digital objects (Nov 08)
• Characterisation registry and registry for
  preservation action tools
• A Testbed for service to organisations outside
  Planet (November 2008)
• Planets Interoperability Framework (May 2008)

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4. Risk Assessment of Digital Material at the
British Library

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4. Risk Assessment of Digital Material at the
British Library

• Quantification
• Used 2006 content analysis for UK-wide survey of
  the Digital Preservation Coalition Mind the Gap
  
• By 2007 at the BL
• 300 terabytes of data
• Growing by over 50 terabytes a year
• e-manuscripts, maps, STM, digitised masters,
  websites
• Wide variety of formats
• Most common formats are found
• Smaller amounts of rare and proprietary data
• Method
• 2003 Risk analysis
• DRAMBORA and AS/NZ 43602004 risk standard

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Risk Assessment of Digital Material - Analysis
and Results

• 6 Direct Risks
• Media Degradation
• Media Obsolescence
• File format obsolescence
• Hardware obsolescence
• Operating system file system
• Software obsolescence
• 2 Indirect Risks
• Policy (Cataloguing, Metadata)
• Policy (Handling, Training)
• Virtually all were highest category of risk
  (media degradation)
• 3 failure rate for disks
• Value system to prioritise into Digital Object
  Management Programme
• Proposed priorities
• Newspaper pdfs, elements of legal deposit,
  digitised masters

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THANK YOU helen.shenton_at_bl.uk

• Acknowledgments
• Adam Farquhar
• Rory Mcleod
• Helen Hockx-Yu
• Richard Davies
• Peter Bright
• Paul Wheatley