[EP-underground] Re: Urgent !

Hi. I'm very interested in preservation issues, as
these appear important to many potential users of
GNU EPrints.

(This is really more a policy issue than technical, so I'm
posting it to eprints-underground)

As I see it there's several parts to preservation:
 
 * Preserving the 1's and 0's of the document. Which 
    requires funding for long term backups. Not something
    which can be done with software.

 * Preserving the information. This I don't know much
    about, but one solution would be to extract MSWord 
    and latex documents into a simple XML document format.
    And/or also storing the documents as uncompressed 
    images. The aim of this is to make files simple enough
    so that they can be read without the origional tools.
    EPrints does not do this, but could be made to.

 * Preserving the metadata. Keeping the index of what things
    are actually in the archive. EPrints stores this in
    an SQL database, but it can be exported in a simple,
    structured XML format.

 * Preserving the meaning. This is a step beyond preserving
    information, This would involve trying to make a data
    format which didn't assume the readers knew ASCII, XML
    or other encoding conventions. Didn't know english (or
    the language in question) and didn't even know the
    symbols (ABCD...) used in the document. The SETI 
    transmissions into space would be a good example of this.
    I only include this last example as a demonstration that
    preservation is a sliding scale, and not something where
    you can just say "yes, we handle preservation".
    

If you just want to play around with an eprints install, there is a
demonstration one available at demoprints.eprints.org

"Preservation" is a word that gets bounced around in the digital
archive scene, but I've never got a real feel for exactly what we
should be doing, and what should be the responsibility of the
archive managers.


On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 11:08:48 -0800, Sabrina Benrahmoun wrote:
> Dear Mr.Gutteridge,
> 
> I am working on a thesis that deals with long term
> preservation of ETDs and obviously the eprints
> software is something I should test and work on. in
> fact,I haven't downloaded the eprints software yet
> (for some technical problems to be soon solved I
> hope!), but I'm very interested in the archiving
> process (in terms of preservation) within eprints.
> I am sorry for disturbing you. I indeed read the whole
> documentation about the software and found the mailing
> list, but I still don't know to which category does my
> question belong (underground or tech??)
> 
> I really need your help!
> Regards,
> Sabrina
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
    Christopher Gutteridge -- [email protected] -- +44 (0)23 8059 4833

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