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Digitization Standards

Using file format standards has been a key part of many digital preservation programmes. The use and
development of reliable standards has long been a cornerstone of the information industry. Their
existence facilitates the discovery and sharing of resources. Standards are also relevant to the digital
environment and provide the same prospects for resource discovery and interoperability between
diverse systems.

Advantages of standards in digital preservation:

• Standard formats are likely to present fewer problems in migrating from one format to another.

• A relatively small number of standard formats will be much easier to manage in both the short and
long term.

• A broad consensus on standards will facilitate and simplify collaboration on digital archiving between
institutions and sectors.

Factors which inhibit the use of standards in digital preservation

• The pace of change is so rapid that standards which have reached the stage of being formally
endorsed - a process which usually takes years - will inevitably lag behind developments and may even
be superseded.

• Competitive pressures between suppliers encourage the development of proprietary extensions to, or
implementations of, standards, which can dilute the advantages of consistency and interoperability for
preservation.

• The standards themselves adapt and change to new technological environments, leading to a number
of variations of the original standard which may or may not be interoperable long-term.

• Standards can be resource intensive to implement.

• In such a changeable and highly distributed environment, it is impossible to be completely

prescriptive.

STANDARDS RELEVANT TO DIGITAL PRESERVATION

1. The Open Archival Information System (OAIS), ISO 14721:2012 is the commonly accepted
reference model for digital preservation and is the one to which digital preservation systems
should conform. At the core of OAIS is a set of high-level functions which describe an archival
system capable of preserving digital information and of making it available over the long term.
Aside from these core functions, OAIS describes both the external environment in which an
archive operates, and the digital elements which are managed by the system. OAIS also defines
a set of responsibilities that an archive must fulfill. It is important to understand that OAIS does
 not give any detailed guidance about the procedures, protocols, and applications that are used
in a preservation system; it is instead a general model, equally applicable to a national archive as
to, for instance, a domestic collection of photographs.

OAIS is designed to be applicable to a wide variety of disciplines, and so the model deliberately avoids
terms which may have different meanings in different fields.

OAIS indentifies the following mandatory responsibilities of a digital archive:

 Negotiate for and accept appropriate information from acquisition sources

 Obtain sufficient control of the information in order to meet long-term preservation objectives
 Determine the scope of the archive’s user community
 Ensure that the preserved information is independently understandable to the user community,
in the sense that it can be understood by users without the assistance of the originator
 Follow documented policies and procedures to ensure the information is preserved against all
reasonable contingencies, and to enable dissemination of authenticated copies of the preserved
information in its original form, or in a form traceable to the original
 Make the preserved information available to the user community
2. ISO 16363:2012 audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories defines a
recommended practice of assessing the trustworthiness of digital repositories. It has a
checklist; Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification: Criteria and Checklist (TRAC).
It is a means of measuring the performance of a digital archive against a standard set of
criteria based on OAIS. As such, it is a useful means of assessing an archive’s reliability
and of identifying, weaknesses in its approach to digital preservation
TRAC is divided into three sections:
i. Organizational infrastructure
ii. Digital object management
iii. Technologies, technical infrastructure, and security.

Within each of these sections TRAC details a set of criteria, giving examples of the kind of
evidence needed to show how well an archive meets each one. TRAC is a powerful tool which
can be used as part of the process of setting up a digital archive, or for assessing the
trustworthiness of an established one. An archive which is responsible for the management and
preservation of digital data for the long-term must comply with the TRAC criteria if it wishes to
be considered reliable and it may be necessary to have TRAC compliance independently
audited.

3. The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standards (METS) is a standard for encoding
descriptive, administrative and structural metadata regarding object within a digital
library.
 4. Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) data dictionary is the
international standard for metadata to support the preservation of digital objects and
ensure their long term usability. It is a de facto standard that defines the information
you need to know to support long-term digital preservation. Preservation metadata
answers a number of questions that support the preservation of digital objects over time. It
deals with provenance (who has had custody or ownership of the object?), authenticity (is the
object what it purports to be?), preservation activity (what has been done to preserve it?),
technical environment (what is needed to render and use it?) and rights (what intellectual
property rights must be preserved and what actions are granted by the rights holder to the
archives for carrying out preservation actions?).

Criteria for selecting digital materials for permanent preservation

Content: priority should be given to items which will be of the greatest current or future use to the
parent body.

Added Value: If the material in electronic format is also available in print, the electronic resources
should provide added value over its print equivalents, including timely access, lower costs, enhanced
searching, or access from multiple workstations.

Ease of Use: The work should be easy to use, requiring minimum training. Documentation supplied by
the vendor must be clear.

Maintenance: The amount of support required by staff to make the resources available must be
considered. The decision to collect resources requiring significant amounts of staff time to preserve,
including migration to newer formats, must be weighed against the current and future scholarly value of
the resources.

Standards: The work should meet acceptable, commonly used technical standards, digital formats, and
practices.

ƒ Equipment: The work should operate on equipment and operating systems either currently or
expected-to-be available. Resources requiring extensive, specialized, and/or expensive new equipment
or storage space to make them available will be acquired only if the research value is indisputably high.
Output: T he work should provide convenient output to printers and/or users' files.

Copyright and ethical issues in digital preservation

Copyright has been defined as the exclusive legal right given to an originator or an assignee to print,
publish, perform, film or record literary, artistic or musical material and authorize others to do the same.
Exclusive rights include:
 To reproduce
 Prepare new works that derive from copyrighted work
 Distribute to the public
  Perform the work publicly
 Display the work publicly

Digital content has, unlike its print counterpart, some unique features that present challenges in both
development and management, especially from a legal perspective. These include the proposition that
digital content (1) is dynamic, (2) may suffer issues of non permanence, and (3) may have more than one
media format.

Preservation efforts face many legal problems. The primary problem is how to ensure the non‐
infringement of copyright, by avoiding unauthorized exercise of the authors’ exclusive rights, as well as
determining what content is protected by copyright, to facilitate access to content as well as consent
from copyright holders.

Non‐permanency of dynamic content

Digital content is dynamic. As the need arises, items are constantly added and corrections and
modifications made to specific files and databases. This means that a file may change from day to
day. The problem then emerges on how to preserve digital content and vouch for its integrity.

Due to this dynamism, Preservation efforts face many legal problems. These include:

 how to ensure the non‐infringement of copyright, by avoiding unauthorized exercise of the

authors’ exclusive rights, as well as determining what content is protected by copyright, to
facilitate access to content as well as consent from copyright holders.
 issues of privacy and confidentiality may be raised by the dynamism and non‐permanence  of
digital content, as may ethical issues in health and personal data.
 Changes in technology can render some digital files corrupt and unreadable. The longer the
time frame required for future access, the more the uncertainty with information preservation.
Challenges include changes in format, data definitions, and metadata content. The format
problem is exacerbated by the fact that many formats are proprietary and continue to evolve
into more complex versions with newer features and functions, sometimes ‘orphaning’ earlier
versions. Legal access problems can occur when a proprietary owner contractually limits access
or goes out of business.

Long-term preservation using s migration of data involves both software and hardware. This sometimes
involves re‐arranging structural and data elements sequence.

Two copyright problems arise:

First, the act of migration usually will involve copying of the information, which may be an infringement
of the author’s exclusive reproduction right.

Secondly, the re‐arrangement of the structural and data elements may trigger the trampling of
another right: the author’s exclusive right to make derivative copies. Permission to migrate may have
to be sought from the copyright holder.
Multi‐media content and its complexity

Digital content may contain a mixture of different media formats, including text, sound, graphics, video,
and a variety of other file formats. Eg. Of multimedia digital content are electronic books, or e‐books.
An e‐book could have, for example, an article about a country, a video about parts of the country, and a
sound file of examples of music from the country.

Digital rights management technology is used to control access to e‐book content that is copyright
protected, to preserve the copyright owner’s exclusive rights. E‐book aggregators, such as
netLibrary and ebrary provide access to a digital library’s e‐content on a 24/7 basis by negotiating
intellectual property rights with publishers to provide access to content hosted on their servers.
Aggregators usually provide their own digital rights management technology, thus easing legal issues for
the digital content manager.

publishing e‐books in a digital collection requires that the digital collection manager understand the
access limitations that come with the digital rights management, and the different pricing models. These
models can range from outright purchases (much like print versions) to limited time and number of
persons per access, and may also come with use restrictions that define practices such as printing,
downloads, and amount of content that can be accessed. Legal issues in this area are complicated by the
fact that some media formats are covered by rules specific to the media (e.g. sound files). Also,
conversion of media from one format to another may trigger copyright infringement (e.g.
conversion of text into audio formats).

Page thumbnails and document icons

Other newer versions of familiar formats, such as document icons and page thumbnails, present new
legal issues. Document icons are small visual representations of documents.

Icons can include information about a document format or genre (e.g., pdf document, web page or
folder). Page thumbnails, on the other hand, are small images of a page usually in reduced resolution,
that can be enlarged by a reader for viewing.

In regard to Thumbnails, two rights that are exclusive to the copyright holder are implicated. Because
they make copies of the images they crawl, search engines may violate the author’s exclusive right
to make reproductions of a work. Also, because the thumbnails are shown to the users, search engines
may also violate the author’s exclusive right to public display.

Multiple, heterogeneous content

The heterogeneous nature of digital collections can be analyzed in two parts: the different types of
digital collections, and the different goals of digital collections.

Different types of digital format

The Internet, for example, can be viewed as one giant digital collection; a sort of a “meta‐
collection.” Individuals, libraries, and other Organizations often take subsets of the Internet to form
specific collections. This is generally done through book‐marking and linking. While there have been no
legal challenges yet to bookmarking, linking has generated some legal issues.

Likewise, libraries and other organizations may have, as part of their digital collections, commercial
databases. The major issues here involve copyright protection and licensing issues.

Digital content like collective works and compilations present challenges in terms of copyright. For
example under US copyright law a compilation is defined as “a work formed by the collection and
assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way
that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship. The term “compilation”
includes collective works.”

Collective works and compilations may or may not have common characteristics. In a collective work,
individual components are generally independent copyrightable works, while compilations may include
material that is not necessarily copyrightable. Separate contributions to a collective work can have
copyright protection that is distinct from copyright in the collective work as a whole. Owning a copyright
in a collective work entitles the copyright owner to “only the privilege of reproducing and distributing
the contribution as part of that particular collective work, any revision of that collective work, and any
later collective work in the same series”.

Copyright in each separate contribution to a collective work is distinct from copyright in the collective
work as a whole, and vests initially in the author of the contribution. In the absence of an express
transfer of the copyright or of any rights under it, the owner of copyright in the collective work is
presumed to have acquired only the privilege of reproducing and distributing the contribution as part of
that particular collective work, any revision of that collective work, and any later collective work in the
same series.

Divergent goals

As well as being heterogeneous and having multiple formats, digital collections also have different
goals. One of the goals of digitization, as mentioned above, is preservation. Some institutions have a
legal privilege to preserve.

Legal issues that are likely to arise here not only include copyright, but also evidence. The issue of non‐
permanence that was discussed above acquires critical importance when it comes to maintaining
documents for legal evidentiary purposes.

A closely related issue to non‐permanence for evidence is authenticity. Digital information can be
vulnerable to tampering or corruption. Depending on the nature of the collection, authentication
methods such as digital signatures, version control, and encryption may be necessary

Another goal is access. Access and preservation are much intertwined. There could be any number of
reasons for seeking access, including for entertainment, research, or safeguarding culture. Copyright is
always an issue, as, for example, not all copyrightable works have the same protection duration.
Different publications are covered under different copyright protection terms, depending on when they
were created or published. However, the issues most likely to rise are those of licensing for access.