Thank you for joining us for the University of Pittsburgh Library System briefing. Improving stewardship: opportunities and tensions.
My name is Kari Mae and I'm the Digital Archivist and Preservation Librarian for the University of Pittsburgh.
I will be presenting today with Clinton Graham, Systems Development Lead for the ULS Information Technology.
We'll be presenting information on: implementing full digital preservation and the University of Pittsburgh Library System
(ULS), selecting Preservica, setting standards, and drafting a digital preservation policy,
integrating systems using APIs, opening new pathways with authenticated access.
So let's get started.
The ULS has acquired, created and provided access to digital content for 20 years using various platforms and standard business backups.
During 2019, I conducted extensive research into seven possible digital preservation solutions.
In June of 2020, the ULS began using Preservica to provide active digital preservation to its archival assets.
We began looking into Preservica because it clearly provided the four core aspects we had set as requirements.
One: the potential for applying more uniform standards to all ULS digital assets; Two: risk mitigation practices.
Three: scheduled consistent health checks ; and Four: reporting across all content But Preservica also offered to further capabilities of great interest to us.
One: there are existing APIs that could be used to integrate platforms already in use by the ULS.
And two: there is a potential for allowing authorized access to specified collections.
With digital content stored over various repositories hosted on various platforms,
the integration of these platforms was recognized early on as an important goal for the improvement of the storage and maintenance of ULS
assets as a whole. APIs could allow the transfer of preservation copies from these repositories to a single secure system for full preservation.
Online publication of Open Access materials is already available through the ULS digital collections Web site using Islandora.
But the ULS holds several collections with access potential affected by copyright limitations.
By combining the user portal provided by Preservica with the capability to apply user authentication to specific collections,
ULS could offer a viable new path for online access to these materials.
But before moving forward with these exciting possibilities, we need to create a foundation for our newly initiated digital preservation program.
This means we had to start setting some standards. My position is situated in the Archives and Special Collections department.
So my work of setting standards began with a focus on archival collections,
I tracked the journey of a digital asset from acquisition to ingest for preservation.
Next, I documented these steps in the archives and digital preservation workflow.
When seeing this workflow, colleagues were surprised by the number of individuals and separate units involved.
The flow chart also made the complexity of the path abundantly clear.
So setting standards to be used throughout this process started at the very beginning with the finding the method for creating disk image files.
Then, moved through specifications for documenting physical media.
Next, the acceptable base level contents of a submission information package were determined.
Finally, formats to be used for normalization were selected.
With this information, the ULS Digital Preservation Team was created and using these standards began drafting a digital preservation policy.
Members of his team are not only from the A&SC, it includes staff from administration, ULS IT,
the Metadata and Discovery Unit, Digital Collections, University Archives, and Digital Scholarship.
Though the first steps in creating the program have focused on archival collections, a diverse membership
in this team was necessary to represent the needs that will arise as content from other repositories is ingested.
In February of 2021, the ULS Digital Preservation Policy was distributed to all ULS colleagues.
Now, I'd like to hand over to Clinton to present the information on APIs.
Thanks, Kari. With the digital preservation policy in place,
we can begin thinking about the technical connections which we'll need in order
to build the connections between our systems to help facilitate that policy.
This begins with One Philosophy: open source in support of open access.
The ULS has a deep investment in leveraging and contributing to open source tools
to facilitate making scholarly and archival materials publicly available.
This gives us a strong foundation of existing APIs for interoperability.
And the option of building out new APIs if we find any that are missing or faulty in functionality.
This presents us with Two Challenges, which I'll describe as: Preservation First and Preservation For. Preservation First represents the work
that is done in Preservica, where access copies can be made publicly available to other systems.
We have a substantial backlog of uncurated digital content,
which is sitting on original or duplicate storage media and will be assessed, organized and described in Preservica.
If that content is appropriate for public release, the REST and Content and Linked Data APIs in Preservica in concert with APIs
or other tooling within our dissemination systems, will help us to build a workflow for getting the dissemination information package
from Preservica ingested into the appropriate public facing repository.
Preservation For represents the existing content,
which has been published in another system which Preservica is then used to capture and preserve.
We have a substantial amount of existing published content which is deserving of full digital preservation.
As that content is identified, APIs or ETL tooling within the existing publication system will help us to streamline the
creation and processing of submission information packages destined for Preservica.
We'll do that primarily through Three Platforms: Islandora, the Public Knowledge Project and ePrints. Within Islandora
we have 50 plus terabytes of digital content of archival and distinctive collections.
The ULS has been an active member of the Islandora Community for the past five years,
and this platform will be a primary recipient of that "Preservation First" digital content, which we also may want to make available publicly.
Islandora has a robust set of community-maintained modules extending the
underlying Fedora Datastore not only with rich presentation capabilities,
but also with API and ETL functions that will need to make use of.
The Public Knowledge Project software represents 100 plus gigabytes of scholarly journal and monograph content,
of which we are the publisher of record. The ULS has a longstanding relationship with PKP as the organization's first major development partner.
The scholarly, peer reviewed journals published in the Pitt Open Library Publishing Program are covered
by industry standard backups and by membership within both public and private LOCKSS networks.
But the preservation options afforded by Preservica may also come into play in the future.
When that is the case, the ULS will also become a publisher of a new plugin for PKP to facilitate that connection.
And finally, ePrints, or frankly, another future repository platform.
We have 500 plus gigabyte of author self archive content in subject-based repositories and in the institutional repository.
The US has a long history of using ePrints as a platform for authors self archiving repositories,
but we're currently evaluating our commitment to the platform.
We do act as a steward of some very unique content within these repositories, which should be specially considered for long term preservation:
most notably, the University of Pittsburgh theses and dissertations.
If our platform remains as Eprints, we'll be looking to collaborate on existing integration efforts.
And if a new platform is judged to be preferred,
the ability to leverage or build out APIs to facilitate the interaction of Preservica will be a key consideration.
As part of our open source commitment, we'll be publishing our work
using and building the API connections in our GitHub repositories for community reuse and remixing.
There remains, however, a subset of artifacts which we can't fully make public yet.
And we need a mechanism for the limited sharing that we can offer within copyright guidelines.
For this, Kari will now present on our last item authenticated access. Kari.
Thank you, Clinton. The overall collection policy of the A&SC does not simply focus on acquiring and preserving final products,
but also seeks to maintain and present the entire creative process leading to those products.
Two collections with contents that clearly document the creative process or the George A. Romero Archival Collection.
The August Wilson Archive. Both collections contain drafts, notes, revisions, correspondence,
photographs, and audio/visual documentation related to completed published works and unpublished works . The ULS
quickly recognize the challenge of providing access to these significant personal archives,
since the use of much of the content is affected by copyright licenses, which disallow open online access.
Romero Collection is a core component to the ULS Horror Studies special collection,
and allows students, filmmakers and fans to trace Romero's projects from inception to completion.
Wilson archive presents researchers with the ability to trace productions from
conception through drafting to completion and even through varying performances.
Currently, researchers wishing to utilize these materials must: submit a completed request form,
schedule an appointment in the archives reading room, travel to the physical location, and work on a single standalone PC.
The ULS seeks to initiate a new option for accessing these materials by combining specialized permissions
on selected assets and a preset user account with a user portal requiring authentication for log-in.
These are standard capabilities of Preservica system. But our idea is to use them in a slightly novel way.
The new process will require the researcher to complete that request form and specify the materials that they would like to use.
The preservation librarian will then modify the permissions for those assets so that they can be viewed in the user portal.
They will then set up a user account and negotiate a date and time with the researcher to access the materials.
The preservation librarian will send the requester the username, password, and URL for access when appropriate.
The user account will then be enabled for the time arranged and disabled
when that time has ended. Asset permissions will also be returned to standard settings for security purposes.
In essence, the process is simple, but it does rely on several manual steps.
Initial testing of account creation and modifying permissions have been successful.
Next steps will include: further testing of methods for managing the rendering of specific content to ensure that only requested material are accessed
as agreed; tests that include examining access capabilities for various storage locations;
examining the possibilities and challenges of temporarily altering storage locations of specific assets;
and also determining the risks of taking any of these actions. We will also then need to design a research request form to gather all necessary
information to provide a successful access experience for the requestor.
Finally, we will draft the full workflow for filling these requests and define the individuals responsible for each step.
In summary, in moving to full digital preservation, the ULS has taken a solid step in improving the stewardship of its digital assets.
Though complex, using APIs to integrate the various repositories in use will be another solid step in improved stewardship.
Finally, the creation of a method to allow authenticated access to limited access collections will provide
improved potential for research in such collections and the creation of scholarly outputs.
We thank you for attending the University of Pittsburgh library system briefing.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.