Everyone (well, several people–maybe you–and some important institutions) is talking about capturing and preserving scientific data. Bill LeFurgy has a brief and informative introduction to the phenomenon in the The Signal, the blog of the National Digital Preservation Information Infrastructure and Preservation (NDIIP) program. In his post, The Library: One Place for Publications and Data, he reports that “there is now a coalescing sense among researchers and policy makers that ongoing access to data is needed to replicate scientific results and spur new learning though secondary use.” Read the full post.

CENDI.gov and National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS.org) have opened registration for a one-day workshop, Repositories in Science & Technology: Preserving Access to the Record of Science. The workshop will be held in the Mumford Room of the Library of Congress on 30 November. See the announcement and registration form for details. Who should attend? “The over-arching nature of this one-day workshop will appeal to a broad array of communities, including librarians, scientists/researchers, technologists, information professionals, both managerial and content providers, publishers, and futurists – anyone who is concerned with ensuring access to the record of science, both today and in the future.”

If you have not seen it yet, check out Amy Taylor’s DGI blog post Authentication & Digital Law: Report from AALL. She reports on a conference session about the new draft Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act (UELMA).

UELMA is also the topic of today’s Library of Congress digital preservation blog post, Meet My Trustworthy Friend, UELMA. The post explains the potential impact of UELMA:

This is huge! While not proscribing any particular preservation or authentication method or technology, the law establishes a digital preservation framework for official electronic legal materials moving forward.

If legal material defined by the act is published only electronically it must be designated “official” and meet the requirements of the act. If there is a print version of the legal material, an official publisher may designate the online version “official,” but the requirements of the act to authenticate, preserve, and provide access must be met.

Of course, as Amy explains, each state must enact the language of UELMA in its legislature for it to have real impact.

To all of you professors and instructors who post the reading lists for your courses on the Web, thank you. Those out of academia are busy with the day-to-day and the putting out of fires, but we also need to step back and school ourselves on professional topics in a broad way.

The nonprofit Rare Book School in Charlottesville, VA, has posted a reading list for its course on Born Digital Materials: Theory & Practice which may be of interest to archivists and librarians alike. Other course reading lists cover topics more narrowly related to the world of rare books, but it’s an example of institutions sharing their expertise with the profession.

Do others have great professional reading list sources to share?

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is an old management adage. Sarah Rhodes of Georgetown University helps us with the measurement part in her recent journal article Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability (Law Library Journal vol. 102 no. 4). Sarah reports her analysis of link rot data based on a sample from the archive of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, a “collaborative digital preservation program established to preserve and ensure permanent access to vital legal information currently available in digital formats on the World Wide Web.”

Due to the nature of the archive, “more than 90% of the top-level domains in the sample were state government (state.[state code].us), organization (.org), or government (.gov) URLs, representing approximately 41%, 32%, and 17% of the sample, respectively.” The archived materials are predominantly PDFs. Among her findings: The state government, .org, and .gov domains were the leaders in link rot, with state government outpacing them all.

As Sarah explains, the Chesapeake Group’s archive is highly selective and not representative of Web archives in general. For details on the definitions and methodology used for this study, see the full article.

[h/t @richards1000]

The State Library of North Carolina launched a digital preservation education site today. From their blog post:

The site, http://digitalpreservation.ncdcr.gov, has resources that can help North Carolina government employees – and those responsible for digital information in general – learn how to ensure that today’s digital information is saved so that it can become tomorrow’s heritage.

From the website:

If you create or are responsible for digital materials that you or others will need to access at some point in the future, then you should have a basic understanding of how to care for those files.

The main section of the site walks you through “what is digital preservation?” to learning about the technology and processes. The Learn section links to tutorials and workshops.

Although the site was designed for North Carolina state government employees, it is generic enough to be of any use to anyone wanting to learn the basics of digital preservation.

Creation of the site was supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

The Library of Congress has announced a new National Digital Stewardship Alliance, a “partnership of institutions and organizations dedicated to preserving and providing access to selected databases, web pages, video, audio and other digital content with enduring value.” The NDSA, announced in a 3 August 2010 press release, is intended to encourage a “distributed approach to digital stewardship.”

The new NDSA is described on the website of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The NDSA web page lists the founding members and planned working group structure. The founding members were drawn from the NDIIP membership and include such government or government-related groups as:

• Alaska Division of Libraries Archives, and Museums
• California State Library
• Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
• Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes
• National Council of State Legislatures
• Utah Division of Archives and Records Service
• Wisconsin Department of Administration

Membership is planned to include government agencies, educational institutions, non-profit organizations and businesses.

This year’s Best Practices Exchange will feature presentations from the four state-level projects funded by the Library of Congress National Digital Information
Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, will deliver the meeting’s keynote address.

The event, Best Practices Exchange: Libraries and Archives in the Digital Era, will be held in Phoenix, AZ, on 29 September – 1 October 2010. The registration deadline is 25 August. Once registered, the conference is free, but it involves active participation to promote the exchange of best practices. See the conference website for full information.

Pam Greenberg at The Thicket at State Legislatures blog highlights the topic of preserving digital legislative records in today’s post, Creating a Digital Trail for State Legislatures.

The post points to the work of the Minnesota Historical Society, in collaboration with the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), to establish model practices in digital preservation and access for state legislative information. For more information on the project, see:

• Preserving State Government Digital Information, from the Minnesota Historical Society
• Partners: Preserving State Government Information, from NDIIP
• A Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation
  of State Government Digital Information Project, from NDIIP

As announced in our previous post, GPO Announces LOCKSS Support, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has joined the international  digital preservation alliance LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe).

The Stanford University News provides more information on the project in their article Stanford helps to digitally preserve mountains of documents. In the article, Stanford University librarian James R. Jacobs explains,

The more you centralize digital content, the easier it is to change
things without anybody knowing. LOCKSS is a safety net. The simplicity
and beauty of LOCKSS is that there are lots of libraries which preserve
that content.

Jacobs is leading the LOCKSS-USDOCS Project and provides further information in his FGI blog post GPO joins LOCKSS: digital deposit a reality.