Concepts Flashcards

Question

# What is... **Validity**

Answer 1

A file format and its informational content that follows a set of rules defined in its specification is considered to be valid.

Answer 2

A file format that conforms to a structure defined by its specification is considered to be well-formed.

Answer 3

An item, or groupsing of items that constitute a record in a digital repository, e.g. a book is an intellectual entity made up of many pages. Different mechanisms of displaying or looking after this book may be called representations.

Answer 4

A standard is commonly a set of recommendations and principles, that may or may not require absolute compliance. From the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) perspective, standards provide specifications for products, services, and systems, that help ensure quality, safety, and efficiency. In the digital preservation community, standards help to create a lingua franca as a platform to communicate upon.

Answer 5

The loss of data through degradation of a carrier medium, e.g. the loss of magnetic resonance on a floppy disk leading to the file allocation table (file directory) becoming unreadable.

Answer 6

The continuous monitoring of digital objects for changes in their bitstream. The monitoring of a file on a file system for bit rot.

Answer 7

The monitoring of the technical aspects of a digital object for obsolescence., e.g. the current long-term support status of a piece of software, or the introduction of a newer specification of a file format or standard.

Answer 8

The process of correcting a digital file that has suffered bit-rot, identified through the process of active management.

Answer 9

The use of offline, or near-line storage for digital archives. Little or no immediate access is provided. Files are preserved through bit-level preservation unless a concerted intervention is made by the archival institution.

Answer 10

A gamut of archival or preservation systems can be used to give users access to metadata and catalogue entries about records, but there is zero public access to the records themselves. A dark archive configuration like this may be used because information content demands it to be protected in such a way.

Answer 11

A review of a system to ensure compliance. The outcome of an audit is binary – either you pass or fail.

Answer 12

An assessment looks at how a system is succeeding and where there are gaps. The outcome of an assessment is feedback for growth; identification of gaps in practice; and spotlights strengths. Assessments completed regularly may lead to a successful pass on an audit (toward Trusted Digital Repository Status) in future.

Answer 13

* Beyond OAIS-like digital preservation (IT) systems; the coordination of digital preservation needs to happen 'outside-the-box' across the organization. * Organizations may be complex and there is a recognition that content of value may not be managed consistently across it and in-line with digital preservation principles. * Organizational alignment is the operationalization of digital preservation.

Answer 14

The development of practical digital skills, such as programming basics, for use in the GLAM sector.

Answer 15

* A popular definition of big data is data that requires a certain amount of computational power to be able to ask research questions and draw sensible conclusions from. * A working definition of 'big data' seems to be a range from Gigabytes (querying portions of your collection for keywords, for example), to the generation of a Gigabyte of data a second (the amount of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland)

Answer 16

The idea that preservation of digital records happens in situ in the organisation creating the records. Digital continuity focuses on the value of creating and maintaining the digital records in your organization. Principles of digital preservation apply to this material but the custodianship of an archival institution is not needed to apply them.

Answer 17

Related to the concept of provenance, an audit trail describes the agents and actors that have accessed a digital resource and the processes (read, write, transform) that have been applied to that resource.

Answer 18

The transformation of a file format into another file format with the same, or similar properties, e.g. migration of a JPEG image to PNG. Migration is a potential method of preserving digital information. The key for many users is the measurement and quality analysis of properties apparent in the data before, and after migration, and an understanding of what may be lost along the way.

Answer 19

The recreation of legacy, or current, computer architecture in software. A potential mechanism for allowing users to interact with archival records.

Concepts Flashcards

Learn about digital preservation concepts.