museumsandtheweb.com - preservation

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

What If Web Archiving Were as Reliable As Pushing a Simple Button?

Chloé Martin — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 01:24:36 +0000

MW2011

Chloé Martin, France Lasfargues and Leïla Medjkoune, Internet Memory Foundation, France

http://internetmemory.org

Abstract

Web content is, by nature, ephemeral: sites are constantly disappearing; others are frequently updated, involving the removal of online information. This medium continues to grow in our society: many museums and cultural heritage institutions are developing websites with a variety of content (videos, forums, blogs, online exhibitions, catalogues) creating a large media-centric Web sphere of unique value. As with any other medium before, it is becoming essential to preserve this Web sphere of cultural and historical value. From this point of view, Web archiving is becoming a key part of today's heritage conservation.

Keywords: Web archiving, Preservation, Internet, Collection, State of the Art

Program Item Reference:

Web Archiving Workshop

Chloé Martin — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:13:08 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

What If Web Archiving Were as Reliable As Pushing a Simple Button?

Keywords:

Web archive

Keywords:

preservation

Keywords:

internet

Keywords:

collection

Keywords:

video

Abstract:

Web content is, by nature, ephemeral: sites are constantly disappearing, others are frequently updated, involving the removal of online information. This media continues to grow in our society: many museums and cultural heritage institutions are developing websites with a variety of content (videos, forums, blogs, online exhibitions, catalogues) creating a large media-centric websphere of unique value. Like any other media before, it is becoming essential to preserve this websphere of cultural and historical value. From this point of view, Web archiving is becoming a key part of today's heritage conservation.

In this one-hour workshop, we will present the main aspects of web archiving:

Why is it so important to collect and preserve web material?
What does Web archiving mean?
How to plan a web archiving project? Investment, Selection, Frequency, Quality Assurance
Example of one method: the shared platform, Archivethe.net, helps institutions to easily and quickly start collecting websites including dynamic content and rich media, enabling navigation in past versions of a website, as if it was still live.
Exploration of the typology of resources. A special focus will be done on videos.
How to give an access on this archive?

Participants will be invited to share their own experiences, needs and issues about it.

Who should attend?

This workshop is appropriate for anyone with an interest in collecting and preserving born digital content (including websites). It does not assume technical expertise.

Archivists, Website Producers, Project Managers, Curator

Type:

Mini-Workshop - teaches something or explores approaches

Mini-Workshop on Web Archiving

Site:

http://archivethe.net/

Authors:

Chloé Martin

TourML: An Emerging Standard for Museum Mobile Experiences

rjstein — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:22:09 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

TourML: An Emerging Specification for Museum Mobile Experiences

Keywords:

standards

Keywords:

metadata

Keywords:

collaboration

Keywords:

preservation

Keywords:

mobile tours

Keywords:

tourml

Abstract:

The recent explosion of options used by museums to produce mobile experiences is undeniable. In the last 18 months, dozens of new mobile platforms have entered the marketplace as museums are planning, producing, and launching new experiences for visitors on their mobile devices. Besides launching a successful tour, how can museum professionals ensure that the content we create will outlive the technology and vendors we select today?

A successful metadata standard for mobile tours would provide a number of advantages for museums. A mobile standard will allow museums to migrate the content and structure of a tour between the variety of tools available today and tools that may be available in the future. Similarly, a mobile standard would allow the same tour to be used on a number of current and future mobile devices. In addition, museums could choose authoring tools which best fit their staff and workflow needs while still deploying to whatever mobile device is best for their content - even if these tools are provided by different vendors. Perhaps most importantly, a successful mobile standard would ensure that museum content will outlive any particular technology we use today.

The TourML (tûrmoil) specification (http://wiki.museummobile.info/museums-to-go/products-services/tourml) offers a working – but preliminary – example of how such a standard might work. In order to develop a community consensus and to encourage support by commercial vendors, two collaborative mobile summits were held in the fall of 2010. The first occurred in London following the Tate Handheld conference in September (http://wiki.museummobile.info/archives/11005), and a second in Austin, TX during the Museum Computer Network conference in October (http://wiki.museummobile.info/archives/19948). In both meetings a diverse set of participants were gathered including museum professionals, vendors, and academics to review and collaborate together on a set of common semantics and structured descriptions used to author a specification for mobile experiences.

In this Mini-Workshop, the facilitators will review the current state of the TourML draft standard and host a discussion regarding outstanding issues for data modeling and implementation including, but not limited to:

Linking to object collections using existing metadata standards
Ways to use the TourML schema to encode and represent a variety of common tour elements
Design discussions regarding the XMLSchema definitions of the TourML specification
Validation methods for ensuring that instances of a tour are compliant to the standard
Possibilities for integrating mobile tours with mobile web CMS’s

Type:

Mini-Workshop - teaches something or explores approaches

Mini-Workshop on TourML

Site:

http://wiki.museummobile.info/standards

Authors:

Robert Stein

Nancy Proctor

Optical Media: Their Implications for Archives & Museums

ngamble — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:48:29 +0000

Bearman, D. (1987). Optical Media: Their Implications for Archives & Museums. Archives and Museum Informatics Technical Reports. 74 pp.

Archival Methods

ngamble — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:48:29 +0000

Bearman, D. (1989). Archival Methods. Archives and Museum Informatics Technical Reports. 67 pp.

Ethnographic Methods and New Media Preservation

jtrant — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:01:03 +0000

Adamczyk, P. (2008). Ethnographic Methods and New Media Preservation. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web 2008. Proceedings.