Free webinars for librarians: Preservation

Speaker note: In this talk, I’ll report on progress that my team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (CalTech) has made towards building a file observatory to support researchers on DARPA’s SafeDocs program. The goal of the SafeDocs program is to develop provable secure parsers for static and streaming file formats. The initial focus is on the PDF format, specifically. For this observatory, we’ve gathered millions of PDFs from Common Crawl and run them through around 20 open source parsers to assess variations in error codes and exception handling among the tools. We have also extracted and made searchable the files’ metadata and elements of the underlying structures of these PDFs to help researchers identify, understand and quantify structural features that are out of alignment with the PDF specification. We believe that some of our tools and techniques will be of use for digital preservationists working to understand file features and risk at scale.

The paradigm shift in publishing towards digital, and the growing importance of online content and large-scale digitization of books, newspapers and magazines has led to an enormous growth of digital publications in the Netherlands. In this webinar the National Library of the Netherlands (KBNL) will give their take on working towards a new preservation solution that is by design scalable and robust.
Topics highlighted: information architecture, archiving solution and workflow, metadata modelling, knowledge levels to achieve functional preservation.

While having a top-tier collections care program that adheres to best practices might be seen as a goal for your institution, the reality is that there are often barriers related to time, money, and staffing that prevent us from working to achieve the “best.” Using a model that breaks the larger best practices into smaller, attainable benchmarks, participants will be encouraged to think differently about how they approach collections care efforts. This webinar will explore instances in which it is perfectly appropriate for institutions to forgo the “best” in favor of “good” and “better” approaches to preservation that help them make incremental steps towards improved collections care.