museumsandtheweb.com - digital preservation

Archiving Flickr and Other Websites of Interest to Museums

ryand — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 15:32:39 +0000

MW2012

Ryan Donahue, George Eastman House and Aaron Straup Cope, General layabout / SBHS

Abstract

Program Item Reference:

Preserving Flickr and Other Sites of Interest to Museums

Preserving the Web Content of the 21st Century: How the Internet Archive, Museums and Art Libraries can work together on Collection, Curation and Access

lorimd — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 21:13:36 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

Web archiving

Keywords:

Digital Technologies

Keywords:

cultural preservation

Keywords:

digital preservation

Abstract:

While most museums and art libraries put a great deal of effort into establishing a dynamic and engaging web presence for their institution, many are not currently preserving their own web presence or web content related to their institution's mission or collecting policies. This session will combine elements of a panel discussion on the importance of web archiving and provide use cases of museums, discussing best practices, lessons learned, challenges and successes.

Lori Donovan of the Internet Archive will give a demonstration of the web archiving service Archive-It and discuss how Archive-It can help museums and other cultural institutions preserve relevant information on the web, including their own web presence - their main website and social media sites - as well as content from artists, auction houses or other collecting areas.

Elizabeth Skene, Curator of Collections at the Arab American National Museum will present a case study of how the Arab American National Museum has selected which web content is relevant and worth saving and how they've used Archive-It to capture and preserve web content on Arab Americans in politics, art and other public positions.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

MW2012 Demonstrations I

Site:

http://archive-it.org

Authors:

Lori Donovan

Elizabeth Skene

Preserving Flickr and Other Sites of Interest to Museums

ryand — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:10:00 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Archiving Flickr and Other Websites of Interest to Museums

Keywords:

flickr

Keywords:

digital preservation

Keywords:

preservation

Keywords:

museums

Keywords:

internet

Keywords:

website

Abstract:

The digital turn, whether it be in photography, motion pictures, literature or other persuits, has forever changed the ways and means by which museums collect, interpret and dessiminate objects. Historically, museums have dealt primarily with objects that, in some way, are intuitiviely graspable from observation. Arrowheads are pointy, photographs are plainly seen, and writing read (with varying degrees of difficulty).
Digital information, on the other hand, is many times more difficult to intuitively grasp, and in many cases impossible to intuitively grasp. This has lead to a shifting approach in collection management: collect materials before they are scattered to the hard drives and floppy discs of history. With such a shift in approach, museums must become adept at preserving digital objects and ephemera in their original context, in many cases, a website. We examine one site of particular interest and complexity: Flickr.
Preserving Flickr has long been a popular subject of conversation among Flickr staff, alumni, and the museum community. Various tools and first steps have been taken, but no one to date has addressed the seemingly impossible task of preservation.
The authors of this paper are very familiar with its subject. Aaron Straup Cope is a Flickr alumni, and Ryan Donahue is the Manager of Information Systems at George Eastman House, an early partner institution of the Flickr Commons. Through our own knowledge and consultation with museum professionals, we shall address:

* The expectations of the community, that is to say, our assertions about the quality and characteristics of the information that is needed for preservation, which data is nice to have, and what is unlikely to be particularly important in the future, or even confusing.
* The state of Flickr today: What preservation mechanisms exist, the availability of programatic access to data via the Flickr API, and any ancillary issues pertaining to Flickr as it is today.
* Technical specifications of preserving Flickr: storage size, medium, formats, etc. and the rough costs of archiving when leveraging advances in archival storage, such as in-line block-level de-duplication, embedded metadata and non-relational data stores.
* Formulate a strategy for preservation that may be applied to other such sites of interest, integrating the foundational work of the OAIS model.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Megadata

Authors:

Ryan Donahue

Aaron Cope

Authority Records, Future Computers and Other Unfinished Histories

Aaron Cope — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 03:03:44 +0000

MW2011

Aaron Straup Cope, Stamen Design, USA

Abstract

What becomes the role for institutions and scholars charged with the study and safe-keeping of the past and the near-future when traditional methodologies like "authority records" are forced to compete with automated data collection, machine learning, the now-suddenly-practical reality of "big data" and the rise of broad communities of participation?

The breadth and reach of the Internet and the availability of alternative data sources, whether they are harvested programmatically or fashioned by amateur communities of interest, has created a world where both the conceptual and financial economics of traditional scholarship are rapidly being undermined. Further, in the absence of a way for non-experts to feel as though they can participate in the discourse outside of established venues and vocabularies, the opinions and assumed meritocracies of experts are increasingly being overlooked entirely.

What would it mean to change the role of digital preservation and scholarly interpretation from one where it looks and feels, to those the outside, like castle walls to be more like a rough guide composed of road signs and fence-posts? To consider a project whose goal is no longer to weave elaborate tapestries of the past facts but to produce textiles, and patterns, to be fashioned into reflections of the present?

Keywords: digital preservation, linked data, mashups, scholarships

Program Item Reference:

Authority Records, Future Computers and Other Unfinished Histories

Aaron Cope — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:25:17 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Authority Records, Future Computers and Other Unfinished Histories

Keywords:

digital preservation

Keywords:

linked data

Keywords:

mashups

Keywords:

scholarship

Abstract:

What becomes the role for institutions and scholars charged with the study and safe-keeping of the past and the near-future when traditional methodologies like "authority records" are forced to compete with automated data collection, machine learning, the now suddenly practical reality of "big data" and the rise of broad communities of participation?

The breadth and reach of the Internet and the availability of alternative data sources, whether they are harvested programmatically or fashioned by amateur communities of interest has created a world where both the conceptual and financial economics of traditional scholarship are rapidly being undermined. Further, in the absence of a way for non-experts to feel as though they can participate in the discourse outside of established venues and vocabularies the opinions and assumed meritocracies of experts are increasingly being overlooked entirely.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Linked Data

Authors:

Aaron Cope