In my March 31 blog posting, I first described the Research Communities of our College. With this blog post, we will look at one example from one particular research community’s work: THE FUTURE OF THE PAST. This Research Community seeks to understand how library and archival materials and processes can suggest how we move forward in the future to preserve, organize, and prioritize what we know.
Dr. Bruce Ambacher is a member of this research community and a Visiting Professor at the iSchool where he coordinates and teaches in the archives specialization of the MLS program. Prior to joining the College in 2007 Bruce spent 31 years at the National Archives and Records Administration in a variety of positions relating to electronic records, digital preservation, standards and archival education. His work included the FBI appraisal project, coordinating the preservation of the Iran-Contra (PROFS) and Clinton Administration electronic records.
Bruce’s current research has been in helping to develop standards for “digital data curation” in collaboration with archivists, Librarians, data curators and scientists. Below Bruce describes where the work is going, and what he is looking forward to in the future.
Bruce Ambacher:
As information specialists we are interested in why and how information is created, why and how it is organized and preserved, and why and how it is used. Preservation, especially digital preservation is key to all of this. We know preservation is not just storing the ones and zeroes. Future users need to know what those ones and zeroes are, who created them, why, and how they are combined. In more formal terms digital preservation involves conveying to future users knowledge of the creator and the provenance, essential characteristics, content, fixity, and curatorial changes to the data over time. It also involves information specialists in developing and maintaining access systems for those future users.
The cultural heritage components of the information community have been seeking ways to ensure the long-term preservation of and access to digital information for more than two decades. The first effort emerged from the groundbreaking effort of the Commission on Preservation and Access, and the Research Libraries Group. Their 1996 report, Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving Digital Information. This seminal work led to a series of international task forces that developed the concepts of what the major components of a digital archives should be, the trustworthy digital repository, and the auditable requirements for various aspects of a digital repository. The first International Standard to emerge was the Open Archival Information System Reference Model, (ISO 14721). The model established a clear common language for a digital archives and a widely accepted standardized view of the structure and process of acquiring, processing, preserving, and providing access to digital information. OAIS became an ISO standard in 2002 just as archives, libraries and data repositories began facing the issue of digital preservation and long term access.
In 2003-2006 I served as NARA’s co-chair of the Research Libraries Group – National Archives and Records Administration international task force that developed Trustworthy Repositories: Audit and Certification Criteria and Checklist. TRAC, as it was widely known, quickly became a way to measure whether a digital repository could be “trusted” to preserve digital information. But the document had its limitations.
Under the auspices of the Digital Curation Centre in the United Kingdom, a new international task force was assembled to refine TRAC and develop it into an International Standard. That task force has worked since 2007 to develop Requirements for Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Repositories . RAC is now a draft International Standard (16363). RAC is a rules based document with clear statements of the criteria and of what information or document types could satisfy each criteria.
You can see why I think this June marks a major turning point in the decades long search for digital data curation standards. I will join a small international group of digital archivists, librarians, data curators and scientists to conduct test audits of draft ISO Standard 16363, The audits, funded by the Alliance for Permanent Access, will be conducted at six volunteer digital repositories in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. The results will be used to refine the draft standard before the ISO member bodies vote final adoption later in 2011.
I believe that in the future the digital curation community will look back on June 2011 as a major milestone on the path toward ensuring trustworthy data by establishing a standard whereby trustworthy digital repositories can be measured and appropriately identified.
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