SLA ConGrunt: News Libraries, Digital Archives and Preservation
Presenter: Vicky McCargar
You Can Kiss Your Assets Goodbye: the state of news archives at the dawn of the digital era
Vicky did a survey of news libraries on the state of digital archiving and preservation
2 reasons for doing the survey now:
* The learning curve for these issues are still vertical
* Now is the time for some benchmarks
"In pursuit of the bottom line, management seems to feel that it is more important to spend money on getting the paper out today than it is to archive it for the future."
Q - has your paper lost any text or photos in its archives?
Various tales of woe: may be due to obsolete software, programming error, human error, problematic archive upgrades, missing metadata, bad formatting, lost/concatenated fields, file corruption; migration to other interfaces (such as the Web); "I don't know"
Who responded to the survey (done on Newslib mailing list)?
85% news libraries
15% other
How are archives used
News research
Sales to public
Size of editorial staff
Average: midrange/medium-sized news staff
Management buy-in
Very - 33%
Somewhat - 46%
Job competencies
Degree req. - 39%
No degree req. - 61%
CE opportunities
Yes - 51%
No - 49%
Is any archives' budget earmarked for preservation?
No - 70%
Yes - 20%
Separate budget - 10%
Written policy for preservation exists?
No - 79%
Yes - 21%
If there is no policy, is staff familiar with best/recommended practices?
Yes - 51.6%
No. 48.4%
Can you take preservation action on a file for which you do not have copyright?
Yes - 30%
No - 10%
Don't know - 60%
Beyond text and photos, are you keeping web video, info graphics or web pages?
Video: No - 85%, Yes - 15%
Graphics: No - 10%, Yes - 90%
Web pages: No - 80%, Yes - 20%
News libraries are also starting to keep: text in proprietary format, images other than JPEGs and TIFFs, spreadsheets, GIS databases, specialized databases (FileMaker Pro, Access, Cold Fusion) - standards can be critical
Are you using metadata standards?
Yes - 58.3%
No - 41.7%
Which ones?
I don't know
International Press Telecommunications Committee (IPTC) standard - evolved out of standards for transmitting photos
Somewhat to highly customized - 66%
Vendor adaptations
Smart answer: we add or subtract as needed but we try to keep the fields similar ..."
Are you using a corporate standard for metadata?
Yes - 12%
No - 88%
What's in your metadata?
Rights info - 69.2%
Unique ID - 57.7%
Software name 38.5%
Software version - 38.5%
Hardware req. - 15.4%
Operating system req. - 15.4%
Peripherals for rendering - 7.7%
Who is responsible for hardware support for preservation?
IT - 82%
Archives - 5%
Other - 13%
Who is responsible for software support for preservation
IT - 59%
Archives - 13%
Other (vendors, newsrooms, photo) - 28%
Are you currently working with a vendor on preservation?
Yes - 30.3%
No - 69.7%
How knowledgeable are your staff?
High - 3%
Moderate - 15%
Low - 55%
Zero - 3%
Don't know - 24%
Most pressing issues:
"Finding good preservation solutions ..."
"Arriving at standards and keeping up with the technology ..."
"Accurate technology that makes the content completely searchable, readable and printable in the future."
"CD rot" (NIST has found that the average shelf-life of CDs is 10 years)
"Changing file formats and obsolescence."
"Getting the resources needed to do it right."
"Need for well documented industry-wide best practices and standardization of tools and data formats."
"... getting material to digital formats. We are not thinking about the preservation issues after."
"I'm afraid that once I finally have all the metadata is procedures in place for the current software, all the work could be lost with a mistake when it's updated for the future ..."
Towards best practice
Good news:
IPTC/NewsML/NITF
Growing awareness of the problems of digital archives
Continuing education available
Growing understanding of metadata's role
Rights management is robust
Needs work:
Losses, noticed and unnoticed
Format control
Soggy standards
Nonexistent, weak or outdated policies
Resources scarce
Confusion over meaning of "preservation"
Money goes for retro digitization
Trends we're watching
Vendor awareness
Preservation-specific metadata
Policy development
Format proliferation
More tales of woe
Next survey: 2007