Digital art, in its countless manifestations, has become an integral part of contemporary art production. Its cultural relevance is unquestioned, but its conservation does present new challenges to museums and collections alike. After all, we are not talking about static objects that can be “stabilized” in the classical sense; rather, digital art is akin to performance because new conditions can arise in each process or each performance. What can be done if the technology is already out of date the moment you switch on the computer? How do we deal with works of art that are dependent on proprietary software that’s no longer being updated by its manufacturers, or whose manufacturer no longer exists? How can net-based projects be preserved for the future? In an era of rapid technological change and short-lived technologies, the question of how best to conserve our digital heritage is becoming increasingly urgent. Conservation of digital content and digital born art faces many problems – fragility, digital longevity and technological obsolescence are some of the concerns that have had to be dealt with for many years. Net-based and networked art are built and distributed within a complex system that often includes social media or other restricted platforms. Digital culture consists of "practices, not objects” - art, technology, media and social relations are merged into a networked process. We constantly have to adapt our tools and practices to fit the performative and processual practices of artworks we seek to preserve, works that are in a constant state of flux. To preserve web-based works of art, stakeholders of cultural heritage also have to deal with the inter-relatedness and rhizomatical structure of artworks that reference dynamic and real-time data sources and must develop new methods for the documentation of digital content.

With examples of works from the collection of HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) as a unique institution with a pioneering role in Switzerland, the presentation gives insight into software-based artistic practice and the complex tasks of preservation of digital art that can be described as a networked process. HeK has focused on net-based works and preserves therefore an artistic practice that represents a particular challenge for musealization. The presentation will focus on some of the challenges and opportunities in the conservation and contextualisation of these media art practices for museums, emphasizing the collaborative approach and cooperation beyond institutional borders. In the process, we will explore the issues related to the “performative phase in conservation" and look at why it is important to initiate a "network of care," composed of research institutions, museums, artists and amateurs alike, active in the fields of open-source culture – a valuable contribution to the preservation of digital culture.

Virtualization and emulation provide the technical basis for a potential preservation strategy to keep performing digital objects accessible, despite obsolescence of their original technical platform. By simulating the presence of physical components, in the form of virtual hardware, it is possible to maintain the software environments needed to run original software.
In this paper we describe a conceptual model to analyse and document the hardware and software elements of software-based artworks, in order to then identify dependencies and assess risks. This information is used to select the most appropriate options when creating disk images, and to make decisions about whether an emulation or virtualization platform is more appropriate in supporting these disk images. We conclude with recommendations for ensuring the sustainability of disk images in the medium-to-longterm, and strategies to mitigate the risks related to external dependencies.

We use emulation to preserve a complex digital artifact in the museum. We describe all stages of the preservation process and discuss the technical and curatorial problems that we encountered. The exhibition setting defines additional requirements for an emulation. Our findings and lessons learned are instructive for emulation researchers and museum practitioners. The preserved artifact now is on display in real exhibitions.

While sophisticated research infrastructures assist scientists in managing massive volumes of data, the so-called long tail of research data frequently suffers from a lack of such services. This is mostly due to the complexity caused by the variety of data to be managed and a lack of easily standardiseable procedures in highly diverse research settings. Yet, as even domains in this long tail of research data are increasingly data-driven, scientists need efficient means to precisely communicate, which version and subset of data was used in a particular study to enable reproducibility and comparability of result and foster data re-use.
This paper presents three implementations of systems supporting such data identification services for comma separated value (CSV) files, a dominant format for data exchange in these settings. The implementations are based on the recommendations of the Working Group on Dynamic Data Citation of the Research Data Alliance (RDA). They provide implicit change tracking of all data modifications, while precise subsets are identified via the respective subsetting process. These enhances reproducibility of experiments and allows efficient sharing of specific subsets of data even in highly dynamic data settings.

In this paper we describe the services that are offered by CERN [3] for Long Term preservation of High Energy Physics (HEP) data, with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as a key use case.
Data preservation is a strategic goal for European High Energy Physics (HEP) [9], as well as for the HEP community worldwide and we position our work in this global content. Specifically, we target the preservation of the scientific data, together with the software, documentation and computing environment needed to process, (re-)analyse or otherwise (re)use the data. The target data volumes range from hundreds of petabytes (PB – 10 5 bytes) to hundreds of exabytes (EB – 1018 bytes) for a target duration of several decades.
The Use Cases driving data preservation are presented together with metrics that allow us to measure how close we are to meeting our goals, including the possibility for formal certification for at least part of this work. Almost all of the services that we describe are fully generic – the exception being Analysis Preservation that has some domain-specific aspects (where the basic technology could nonetheless be adapted).

The availability and accessibility of digital artworks is closely tied to a technical platform, which becomes quickly unavailable due to a fast technical life-cycle. One approach to keep digital artworks performing is to replace physical hardware parts with emulation. Preparing an emulator to publicly display digital art is typically time-consuming and, more importantly, usually done on a case-by-case basis, making each installation a unique and costly effort.
We present an adaptation of the Emulation as a Service framework to be deployed on a self-contained USB-stick, booting directly into a prepared emulated environment. Furthermore, we report from practical experiences using the system in two museum exhibitions.

Twenty-two years ago a city emerged from computers, modems and telephone cables. On 15 January 1994 De Digitale Stad (DDS; The Digital City) opened its virtual gates in Amsterdam. DDS, the first virtual city in the world, and made the internet (free) accessible for the first time to the general public in the Netherlands. But like many other cities in the world history, this city disappeared. In 2001 The Digital City, the website, was taken offline and perished as a virtual Atlantis. Although the digital (r)evolution has reshaped our lives dramatically in the last decades, our digital heritage, and especially the digital memory of the early web, is at risk of being lost. Or worse already gone. Time for the Amsterdam Museum and partners to act and start to safeguard our digital heritage. But, how to excavate The Digital City, a virtual Atlantis, and reconstruct it into a virtual Pompeii? In the case study of web archaeology we will try to answer the questions: how to excavate, reconstruct, present, preserve and sustainably store born-digital heritage and make it accessible to the future generations?

Archiving of geodata historically focused on methods of keeping digital geodata alive “almost forever”. Project Ellipse is a joint effort by the Swiss Federal Archives (SFA) and the Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo) running from 2011 to 2016. Its aim is to find a common solution for the archiving of geodata in order to implement the applicable legislation. Ellipse follows the entire archiving process chain: from the inventory and appraisal of geodata, to its submission to the digital archives and finally to the users, who expect geodata in a form that is authentic and accessible in a future technological environment.
Archiving of geodata is a complex task that demands intensive cooperation among all stakeholders. Despite our efforts, not all questions have been solved successfully. In this paper, we will report our findings and solutions as well as the obstacles we encountered during the course of Project Ellipse.

Applying digital preservation actions to research data is a practical step in carrying out research data management to its fullest extent and helps ensure this data remains usable in the future. This paper considers how repositories holding research data can link to an external third party tool, Archivematica, in order to carry out preservation actions as part of the data deposit workflow into the repository. We present experience from local use of Archivematica at the Universities of York and Hull in the Jisc Research Data Spring project “Filling the Digital Preservation Gap” as well as Archivematica as a shared service by Arkivum. A main focus across these use cases is a practical approach – parsimonious preservation – by using the Archivematica tools as they exist now whilst building a foundation for more comprehensive preservation strategies in the future. A key area of ongoing investigation covered by this presentation is dealing the with long tail of research data file formats, in particular how to best manage formats that are not immediately supported and need to be added to file registries such as PRONOM.

Digital content and data require software for interpretation, processing, and use. This requirement raises the issue of sustaining software functionality beyond its prime use, when it is fully supported and maintained. Virtualization and emulation are two techniques that can encapsulate software in its functional form; furthermore, emulation has recently gained traction as a viable option for long-term access to digital objects. At the same time, archivists, librarians, and museum curators have begun concerted efforts to preserve software that is essential for accessing the digital heritage. In this context the members of the panel will discuss relevant work that they have been involved in to address the goal of software sustainability and preservation

We present a model and testbed for a curation and preservation infrastructure, “Brown Dog”, that applies to heterogeneous and legacy data formats. “Brown Dog” is funded through a National Science Foundation DIBBs grant (Data Infrastructure Building Blocks) and is a partnership between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. In this paper we design and validate a “computational archives” model that uses the Brown Dog data services framework to orchestrate data enrichment activities at petabyte scale on a 100 million archival record collection. We show how this data services framework can provide customizable workflows through a single point of software integration. We also show how Brown Dog makes it straightforward for organizations to contribute new and legacy data extraction tools that will become part of their archival workflows, and those of the larger community of Brown Dog users. We illustrate one such data extraction tool, a file characterization utility called Siegfried, from development as an extractor, through to its use on archival data.

This paper describes the processes which led to the creation of an innovative interface to access a digital archive composed of two Swiss newspapers, namely Gazette de Lausanne (1798–1998) and Journal de Gen`eve (1826–1998). Based on several textual processing steps, including lexical indexation, n-grams computation and named entity recognition, a general purpose web-based application was designed and implemented; it allows a large variety of users (e.g. historians, journalists, linguists and the general public) to explore different facets of about 4 million press articles spanning an almost 200 hundred years period.

The Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) has built up its digital preservation system SLUBArchiv from 2012 to 2014. In January 2015, we launched the preservation workflow for digitized documents. This workflow extends the in-house mass digitization workflow, which is based on the software Kitodo.Production. In this paper, we describe the three major challenges we faced while extending our mass digitization workflow with an automatic preparation and ingest into our digital long-term preservation system and the solutions we found. These challenges have been
(1) validating and checking not only the target file format of the scanning process but also the constraints to it,
(2) handling updates of digital documents that have already been submitted to the digital long-term preservation system, and
(3) checking the integrity of the archived data as a whole in a comprehensive but affordable fashion.

This paper describes the interoperability solutions which have been developed in the context of the E-ARK project. The project has, since February 2014, tackled the need for more interoperability and collaboration between preservation organizations. The solutions being developed include harmonized specifications for Submission, Archival and Dissemination Information Packages; and pre-ingest and access workflows. Furthermore, the specifications have been implemented using a range of software tools and piloted in real-life scenarios in various European archival institutions.
This paper provides a statement on the need for interoperability, and an overview of the necessary specifications and tools, and it calls for preservation organizations to continue collaboration beyond the lifetime of the E-ARK project.

Information Governance as defined by Gartner is the “specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archival and deletion of information. Includes the processes, roles, standards and metrics that ensure the effective and efficient use of information in enabling an organization to achieve its goals”. In this paper, we present assess the maturity of seven project pilots using the Information Governance maturity model based on existing reference documents. The process is based on existing maturity model development methods. These methods allow for a systematic approach to maturity model development backed up by a well-known and proved scientific research method called Design Science Research. An assessment was conducted and the results are presented in this paper, this assessment was conducted as a self-assessment in the context of the EC-funded E-ARK project for the seven pilots of the project. The main conclusion from this initial assessment is that there is much room for improvement with most pilots achieving results between maturity level two and three. As future work, the goal is to analyze other references from different domains, such as, records management. These references will enhance, detail and help develop the maturity model making it even more valuable for all types of organization that deal with information governance.

In this paper we describe the National Library of New Zealand’s attempts to conceptualise how we measure the degrees of effort required to achieve acceptable levels of digital preservation. We argue that understanding digital preservation practice in terms of “optimal effort” may help us conceptualise where and how best to achieve the greatest impact in proportion to effort. The paper examines the various roles of digital preservation, including the archival/curatorial, digital object handling, preservation management, and policy roles through case studies of our experience. We argue that through conceptualising our ideal digital preservation and the levels of effort required to achieve those, we will be able to better understand where our effort is being expended and the levels of preservation we are achieving.

In this paper, I explore the concept of significant properties and how such properties do and do not fit within the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. Combining interview data from research about the deployment of OAIS in cultural heritage institutions with data about video game production and preservation from the Preserving Virtual Worlds II (PVWII) grant project, this paper maps stakeholder-identified significant properties onto the 2012 version of OAIS. Significant properties have many definitions and even many names. Operationalizing this term broadly, many such properties do fit within existing OAIS entities. However, significant properties that are relational and external to digital objects’ code and environments do not. This paper concludes that additional metrics are needed to begin shaping the process of documenting significant properties at scale.

The Database Preservation Toolkit is a software that automates the migration of a relational database to the second version of the Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases format. This flexible tool supports the currently most popular Relational Database Management Systems and can also convert a preserved database back to a Database Management System, allowing for some specific usage scenarios in an archival context. The conversion of databases between different formats, whilst retaining the databases’ significant properties, poses a number of interesting implementation issues, which are described along with their current solutions. To complement the conversion software, the Database Visualization Toolkit is introduced as a software that allows access to preserved databases, enabling a consumer to quickly search and explore a database without knowing any query language. The viewer is capable of handling big databases and promptly present search and filter results on millions of records.
This paper describes the features of both tools and the methods used to pilot them in the context of the European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation project on several European national archives.

Based on the example of Friedrich Kittler’s digital papers at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA), this paper explores digital estates and their challenges on different logical levels within the pre-archival analysis, documentation and indexing process. As opposed to long-term digital preservation procedures, which are set about afterwards when relevant digital objects have already been identified, this process starts shortly after physical material (computers, hard drives, disks…) is delivered to the archive and has been ingested and safeguarded into volume image files. In this situation, it is important to get an overview of the “current state”: Which data was delivered (amount, formats, duplicates, versions)? What is the legal status of the stored data? Which digital objects are relevant and should be accessible for which types of users/researchers etc.? What kind of contextual knowledge needs to be preserved for the future? In order to address these questions and to assign meaning to both technological and documentation needs, the digital analysis tool “Indexer” was developed. It combines automated, information retrieval routines with human interaction features, thereby completing the necessary toolset for processing unstructured digital estates. It turns out however, that intellectual work and deep knowledge of the collection context still play an important role and must work hand in hand with the new automation efforts.

In this paper we describe new methods for the acquisition of emails from a broad range of people and organisations not directly connected with the organization responsible for the acquisition. Existing methods for acquisition of emails are based either on having easy access to an institution’s email server, or a labour intensive process of transferring the emails from donors’ email clients, involving for example visits to the individual donors.
Furthermore, we describe how different representations of the acquisitioned emails are ingested into our repository. The use of different representations makes it possible for us to perform a fine grained file characterisation, thereby facilitating the level of preservation watch we want in connection with the preservation of the acquisitioned emails.

Email provides a rich history of an organization yet poses unique challenges to archivists. It is difficult to acquire and process, due to sensitive contents and diverse topics and formats, which inhibits access and research. We plan to leverage predictive coding used by the legal community to identify and prioritize sensitive content for review and redaction while generating descriptive metadata of themes and trends. This will empower records creators, archivists, and researchers to better understand, synthesize, protect, and preserve email collections. Early findings and information on collaborative efforts are shared.

This paper outlines some of the most relevant copyright obstacles libraries in the cultural heritage institutions sector currently face, when trying to fulfill their mission in the digital context. For each of the four main activities – collecting, cataloguing, making available and preservation – the essential copyright issues will be outlined against the background of the legal situation in Switzerland. Where possible, short references to a broader copyright context and the laws of other countries will be given.
Particular emphasis will be placed on cataloguing and making available documents as the current ongoing Swiss copyright revision contains some innovative approaches: a catalogue privilege as well as new regulations for the handling of orphan works and mass digitization. Concerning collecting and preserving, at least some relevant questions in relation to copyright will be posed in order to maybe launch further discussions.

Cooperatively operated digital preservation systems offer institutions of varying size the chance to actively participate in digital preservation. In current times of budget cuts they are also a valuable asset to larger memory institutions. While the benefits of cooperatively operated systems have been discussed before, the risks associated with a consortial solution have not been analyzed in detail.
TIB hosts the Goportis Digital Archive which is used by two large national subject libraries as well as by TIB itself. As the host of this comparatively small preservation network, TIB has started to analyze the particular risk which losing a consortium member poses to the overall system operation. This paper presents the current status of this work-in-progress and highlights two areas: risk factors associated with cost and risk factors associated with the content. While the paper is strictly written from the viewpoint of the consortial leader/ host of this specific network, the underlying processes shall be beneficial to other cooperatively operated digital preservation systems.