Category: Conference reports

National Archives of Australia, WA branch, Fri 28 July 2023

Digitisation I: Decision space

Presenter: Debra Paisley, WA Digitisation Centre

• Developing a digitisation plan
• Should you digitise – digitisation evaluation tool prepped by Debra in Excel Digitisation Evaluation template.xlsx (based on USyd one)
• UWA on Recollect for their DAM – for the story of the journey to Recollect refer to WAUL DAM seminar notes OCT-2022
• Take down policy in place, for sensitive items – trigger warnings? i.e. stuff that hasn’t aged well or might be politically incorrect, diversity/race insensitive etc
• DCWA uses FADGI (Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative) guidelines + NAA reference to determine digitisation formats and processes
• Useful to digitise lower value/risk items to test/improve processes and increase confidence in systems in skillset

Digital Preservation I: Planning for digital preservation

Presenter: James Doig, Assistant Director (NAA)

• Digital preservation is not IT backup — does not include intellectual description and context for interpretation and analysis/research etc
• Australian Fed government and agencies have General Records Authority 31 – if you have digitised a copy, then can destroy original, up to about 1980 at present
• 200+ formats in NAA Preservica system, top file format is TIFF; missing a lot of “Office document’ formats in top 20 i.e. missing records born digital — should be in Office formats?? Are these not being supplied as ‘records’ by departments?
• Good use of basic ‘stats’ on collection — i.e. not seeing the numbers they would expect for a digital workforce, when TIFF is the top format
• File format proliferation — why 200+ formats under custody — is this advisable? Or pragmatic reality?
• NAA uses Mediaflex system for film + AV storage / catalogue – Preservica system for born digital (NFSA and DAMSmart also use Mediaflex) Rose Holley’s Blog – views and news on digital libraries and archives: Audiovisual achievements – National Archives of Australia (rose-holley.blogspot.com) https://www.tmd.tv/wp-content/uploads/CASE-STUDY_NAA_A4.pdf
• OAIS (Open Archival Information System) model, 1 of 3 models talked about; also used by Piers at Gaia Resources – a conceptual tool for covering all the bases and maintaining control over the records
• Concept of digital knowledgebase about the collection e.g. formats, handling etc — what tool do we use to capture and maintain this? — preservation planning
• Increasingly need to ask if donated material has been encrypted — unencrypt before ingest
• NAA/AARnet emulation as a service for archival software – see James’ later presentation
• Biggest challenge at NAA – organising transfers from organisations/departments

Digital Preservation II – Digital preservation toolkit

Presenter: James Doig, Assistant Director (NAA)

• DROID connects to PRONOM (format database) help with obsolesce identification?
• NAA uses SHA-256 and SHA-512 checksums (MD5 for Mediaflex) — as endorsed by Australian Defence Signals Directorate
• NAA migrating MS Office documents to Libre Office, but less happening because of momentum behind the format — i.e. a de facto standard for office documents, and likely to be accessible in future because of sheer numbers

Digitisation II: Trusting Digitisation

Presenter: Joanna Sassoon

• Digitisation is just another method of ‘copying’ of records
• Record keeping system needs to note relationship between source and copies, so the context is not lost, and the chain of evidence is not lost
• Suggest we can learn much from Police forensic staff who need to maintain evidence that can hold up in court
• Use of ‘targets’ i.e. physical labels included in the digitised image to explain source/context – used in microfilm capture
• DIP – dissemination packages from OAIS model to assist context travelling with object when accessed by users?

Digital Preservation III: Case studies in methods, platforms and integration

Presenters: Piers Higgs, Gaia Resources; Meg Travers, Gaia Resources; James Doig, Assistant Director (NAA)

• Gaia with familiarity with AWS (and Archivematia, ArchivesSpace, ArchivesGateway (GAIA) and ArchivesSearch (GAIA); worked with QLD SRO and PROV
• PREMIS METS XML file to track what happened to file/object throughout its lifecycle
• Bagger to create AIPs
• Storing the AIPs in the cloud and local
• Meg: email as records – EPADD app (use for eDiscovery?)
• James: demo of AARNet’s EaaSI (emulation of as a service infrastructure) – Swinburne person/professor prompted AARNet to develop further? Swinburne Creative Writing G21 project Macromedia Director replay????

Digitisation III: The WA Digitisation Centre

Presenters: Debra Paisley, WA Digitisation Centre; Janet Luk, WA Digitisation Centre

•  On-charge rate for externals $190 ph, allied organisations $130 ph

Panel Q&A

Chair: Ros Malone, BCGS

• Format proliferation — 200+ formats sustainable + advisable?
• Trusting cloud storage claims? If no on-prem storage or alternate copies?

MC Claire Fletcher, Manager Resources & Collections, Murdoch Library

DAM Project reports

Implementing a DAMS at UWA – Lucy Cammell, Coordinator Acquisitions, UWA Library

• UWA Cultural Collection
• Responding to digitisation activities from DCWA
• Discovering and preserving UWA ‘cultural assets’ in digital form project – inc indigenous protocols
• Procurement end 2019 Library and ITS: functional requirements (DAM + Discovery), assessed existing systems (discounted Alma/Prima + Rosetta ad-on), access rights granularity and relationships between items, item formats needed, search + browse experience, environment scan, RFP ended up with ‘Recollect’ from a NZ company
• Recollect – integrated DAM + discovery, inc single sign on + community access, custom metadata scheme (encoded in Dublin Core; and integrate with Trove), focus on relationships (objects, people and places), on-demand Australian storage (as needed), granular permissions and access rights (item can be separated from metadata), built in preservation module (makes derivatives, and manages pres copies in storage; but not file obsolescence)
• Challenges – enterprise-scale buy-in (variety of opinions, and stakeholder engagement esp contributors schools, galleries, museums), useful campions, funding initial and ongoing digital storage
• Good engagement with University Archive, and Calloway Centre (Music)
• Owned by Library going forward, AWS SnowCone for big data transfers
• Integration with Trove and CollectionsWA

 Digital Curation Sustainability Culture, Rochelle Palmer – Library at ECU

• Digital Curation Centre, UK – focussed ‘end goal’ of preservation and openess, ideally started at the creation point, documentation and value adding implicit (human readable) and explicit (computer readable) content – context and metadata
• RDM acronym in slides – Research Data Management?
• Key to sustainability is human factor

 Ongoing Development of Collections WA

Megan Schlipalius, Project Officer, Collections WA also AMaGA WA branch

• Publish collection records online for free, plus organisation page
• Launched June 2020 (from collecting sector working group formed in 2016; wide membership), do not replace existing collection management systems
• Similar to Victorian Collections, established in 2009
• WA Museum tech support and built platform
• Copyright has ‘ask first’ policy where materials are cleared before adding
• Moral rights, but not an infringement of rights to do anything in good faith to restore or preserve a work
• Indigenous cultural IP – important to engage with communities
• AMaGA has created a roadmap – First Peoples: a roadmap for enhancing indigenous engagement in museums and galleries
• Sensitive records flagging (and not published publicly to Collections WA) e.g. privacy laws, graphic images, offensive, culturally sensitive, secret or sacred
• Upload from Mosaic, Spydus, ehive, Portfolio, excel spreadsheets, or harvesting from online systems
• Includes geotagging facility
• Includes QR code generator to link to a collection, or a record e.g. exhibition displays
• Can syndicate with Trove
• Joel Leather from WAM useful tech contact working with Collections WA

 Panel discussion

• Lucy Cammell (UWA Lib), Scott Nicholls (UWA Lib), Andrew Kelly (Digital Preservation Officer, SLWA, shadowland.net), Megan Schlipalius, Rochelle Palmer
• UWA got traction on ‘research assets’ concept, investment in collection and preservation beyond bricks and mortar, global engagement indigenous repatriation
• Query around DCWA digitised materials mandatory added to UWA DAM? Decision in progress.
• Copyright SLWA – some items embargoed, digitised but archive only for pres, access only on site
• Copyright UWA – huge range of considerations, knowledge gap round expertise on copyright, Recollect seems to have enough fields to control
• Does info flow between collection management and DAM systems esp copyright details. UWA DAM is a siloed system at moment, with manual ingest from collection management systems
• SLWA 350TB of material, Scott Nicholls working on preservation, creating digital preservation policy, roadmaps, guidelines (but other peers have integrated w physical) using DPC RAM as assessment tool and find gaps + push forward

Data and evidence in the age of algorithms – Dr Leisa Gibbons & Dean Britton, Program Managers, State Records Office WA

Data and AI systems considerations

• Context understanding (users and clients/customers)
• Robustness and accuracy
• Works as intended: planning & design
• Data as a record for evidence

Data clouds considerations

• Privacy
• Resilience – integrated into economy, tied to operational infrastructure
• Integrity: accuracy, governance
• Security

Can data be a record?

• Exemplar ‘data driven’ version – direct user interface to client ‘outsourcing’ data validation to user, but some online verification services might be improving data quality e.g. address verification
•  How do we re-construct the story for evidence?
• Data governance becomes important to verify legal integrity in cases
•  Integrity of transactional logs – are they protected and controlled? Can you piece them together? i.e. will they stack up as evidence
•  Preservation of entity relationships + web services to re-create records – what are the dependencies e.g. Curtin Handbook drawing on multiple databases/systems
•  In place records for structured data in corporate systems?
•  Robert S Seiner’s book Non-invasive data governance: The path of least resistance and greatest success. https://technicspub.com/non-invasive-data-governance/
•  What does deleting/disposition mean for cloud storage? Sanitisation?

AI’s Role in Mineral Exploration Through Legacy Unstructured Data – Alex Jenkins, Director WADSI & Russell Menezes, CEO Radixplore

• WA Data Science Innovation Hub (WA Govt and Curtin collaboration) To shift WA’s economy to a broader base of industries
• Priority areas for WADSI: supply (of talent), advocacy, collaboration, research translation
• DALLE AI as image compression – recall images from text
• Radixplore (AI application for mineral exploration data https://www.radixplore.com) How does this relate to the WA Geological survey and Curtin’s efforts (Open access Digital Mineral Library) https://news.curtin.edu.au/media-releases/researchers-help-expand-mineral-exploration-using-machine-learning/
• AI search for unstructured data in the mining exploration domain, future work on de-commissioning facilities and equipment What are possible applications in other industries?

Humans, machines and data: what the future might look like – Linda Shave UK

• Digital DNA storage – NFSA storing Cathy Freeman’s 2000 Olympics 400m race https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/nfsa-dna
• Data archaeology
• Quantum computing
• 6G and Metaverse – more data storage at the ‘edge’ on devices; and how do we cope with fake data?

Tips and Techniques for promotion of good RM/IM practices in your organisation – Tabitha Walker, Senior Records and Information Management Consultant, Information Proficiency

• Choose an ‘AVATAR’ for representing RM in your organisation
• Be Accessible – to end users and management, talk their language, use analogies
• Be Visual – walkarounds – get to know the users, different mindset (setting expectations for interest) capture stats and publish them i.e. co-opt area competitiveness (leaderboards and scores for teams/areas on compliance)
• Adapt to the users – poll your audience, change training style, find what is working, customise systems
• Training can be fun – simplify, self led upskilling, understand bugbears, identify champions, find fun
• Be Amusing – embrace the meme, engage users, make it interesting
• Be Relatable and relevant – carrot vs stick (find fixes, new things), fit to workplace culture, make it relevant to the organisation and to users, show that you are not perfect, aim for inclusion

Alex Payne—Mind the tools

• How does language shape what we do?
• Web developers are polyglot programmers: a soup of HTML, CSS, JS + then all the backend variants. How often do we think about the efficiency of this?
• WWW era 1991–92
• CGI era 1993–97: C, Perl (established the value/pair communication method!)
• Applet era 1995–97: Java (eventually unbundled by Microsoft, overtaken by Flash)
• Flash era 1998–present? (now mostly used for delivering video and games)
• JS era 1998–present
• PHP era 1998–2005
• LAMP era 2001–07
• Frameworks era 2005–present: Ruby on Rails, Django
• Post-framework era
  • Message queues connecting heterogeneous components
  • Service-oriented architecture (scalability)
  • LAMP assumed
  • Cloud (really!)
• Native era
  • Google native client
  • Videos out of Flash (HTML 5)
  • Mobile apps
• Functional era, defined by:
  • dynamism: rapid builds + releases, close user -> developer interaction
  • tension: web v.s. rest of technology industry
  • heterogeneity: variety! swap tools
  • evolution: rapid, both technical and cultural

Lessons

• dynamic typed, interpreted languages are dominant
• languages exclusive for the web face tough competition
• nothing lasts forever!

The future

• Frameworks everywhere: JS, CSS, Typography (?) e.g. TypeKit, SiFR
• APIs everywhere
• JS everywhere (even in backend)
• Code generation
• Refining standards

Kevin Yank—CSS frameworks

• CSS reset: Yahoo YUI (aim is a common look) or Eric Meyer’s, bit of a controversy—creates extra work v.s. forces developer to use quality HTML code
• Typographic grids: column grids and baseline grids (Try Baseline framework to control leading for prototypes, then develop your own:
  • query the HTML these frameworks make you write
  • non-semantic classes: big beef—use own class names (with Blueprint via settings.yml)
  • encourage presentational thinking?
• Reasons to choose a framework: good documentation, nice code, any HTML source order, semantic classes
• CSS pre-fab: ready-made styles for documents made of prescribed components e.g WordPress themes, SlickMap CSS (for styling site maps)
• CSS abstraction: like JS frameworks (JQuery), server-side frameworks e.g. Compass Sass, Scaffold (for PHP)

Simon Pascal—Beautiful web type

• Reset CSS
• Try and get x-heights the same if pairing serif + sans-serif faces
• Slideshare presentation

Matt Balara—Flogging design

• Why is no one talking about design principles for ecommerce sites?
• Know your shoppers: cater for personas.
• browser: “I’m just looking.” 1st impression counts. Move towards multiple pathways instead of strict categories (so they’ve got more chances to find what they want)
• questor: looking for something specific. If you have a product with lots of features, provide lots of info; one with less features, use big pictures (diamond rings!)
• socialite: ask their social network about buying decision. Provide short URLs, send to friend, share this page etc.
• blow-in: direct to product page (perhaps from banner ad) Do as much as you can to show the product off. Take a leaf from Apple’s “product theatre”.
• Product pages design: focus, 5px Gaussian blur on the page, then test “Where would you click to…?”
• Buying process: destroy all stops from getting the money i.e. why ask for card type when this can be inferred from the number? Why use a dropdown for country, why not a search with auto-complete? Why ask for a telephone number?  (Will you actually ever use it?) Put the cbeckbox for accept terms & conditions right next to the progress button (rather than loose somewhere on the page)
• Improve thank you for your order pages—huge opportunity here to upsell.

Derek Powazek—The wisdom of community

• People are crazy
• The web is missing social cues
• The new experience where we are “alone, together”
• Kinds of crazy (crazy is a small % of the total number of your users)

1. Confused. Q: Which search term is higher on Google? “sex” or “google”? A: “google”! Counter these people by providing good examples (show them first, then allow posting); give help in context; use the context as a filter to screen out; design for community: web as first note in “call and response”
2. Too passionate. Reference the bystander effect where people don’t act if they’re in groups, with the alone, together the opposite occurs i.e. “isn’t anyone listening?!” (this is a symptom of succeess). The the angst a place to go. Timeouts, not deletions of accounts. Require accounts, no anonymity. Have community managers.
3. Hecklers. Historical good roots: well-informed people talking back to power, but can be bad on the web. e.g. Chevvy Tahoe mash up ad debacle. Starve them of attention. Timeouts, not deletions. Private messaging. Empower community members to report. e.g. “block” user function: but be careful about creating factions, which then people self-identify and behave as a collective.
4. Trolls. Don’t care at all. Active destroyers, not someone who disagrees with you. e.g. 4Chan. These people assume the gullibility of users and prey on them. Delete accounts, make them invisible (only they can see their posts), slow down the server, call the authorities.

Anil Dash—Next Year’s Web

Framework for deciding what will be the web in 2010: how people make it happen, how it evolves

• Do we take for granted the ability to create the web? Kids implicitly understand the web’s inate content creation.
• Building communities around niche interests—this would not be possible in other mediums e.g. LOLcats site.

This year’s web review

• Google: innovation comes from outside, the fate of large companies. (e.g. Google Wave, an Australian invention) i.e. not the web is not Silicon Valley centric, the cult status is not necessary.
• Microsoft: making a come-back? More humble, more user-centric. Ray Ozzie’s influence: decentralised collaborative tools.
• Yahoo: insecure? People leaving, not trustworthy. APIs unsustainable.
• amazon.com Kindle: all aspects of the product make money, the hardware and the software. i.e. not phone plans where the contact pays for the hardware. Cloud computing services, radical shift -> cheaper, financial incentive to use particular systems -> next commoditised machines to run the platform?
• Twitter. Power? A category (like blogging), not a single product. Entanglements: $150m VC funding, suggested users list, trending of building stuff onto the system, i.e. past of least resistance for short messages, but what consequences are there for developing on this?
• Facebook. It’s ivy-league university formation flavours the entire experience? Not customisable, locked down. What culture and community values are represented?
• AOL lessons: provided 1/3 of all internet access in US in their heyday—they “controlled the internet” including custom apps developed in “rainmain”, a proprietary API. Current exemplars include the iTunes App Store? Facebook applications? Open email won in the end (SMTP, POP3, HTML) and increased value in the network.

Ways to think about the web

• “Made of web” companies. What’s the largest social network? The web.
• Web is not immune from trends that have affected the transformation of traditional media. i.e. market share / eyeballs on TV channels -> no one winner, the networks will organise themselves into a long tail. “Mainstream” is at the top of the social media long tail -> are these equivalent to the old media networks? How do we benefit from walled gardens?
• A focussed community works better, organisations need to embrace obligations to web community. The power shifts to creators. e.g. YouTube mass media crap.
• Culture drives adoption. e.g. Opera on Twitter, part of the language.
• Niches are still there, site evolution of Gondwana land -> countries.

2010 web hints

• The “push button” web, real-time updates e.g. RSSCloud, PubSubHubBub
• Features bubbled up from community e.g. OpenID. GetUp an example?

Scott Gledhill—Entering the mobile space

• Personas in mobile?
• Gen Y + Z will have lots of buying power in next 5 years? Really high mobile usage, almost 100%, increasing mobile web access too.
• Used during in-between time.
• Where are you?
• Mobile 2.o hype -> parallel to 1999 web? overhyped?
• Eye candy is a critical business requirement
• Mobile = device fragmentation
• Learning Javascript: recursion, HTML
• Learning CSS
• Mobile web (open) v.s. custom apps.

Dmitry Baranovskiy—JavaScript libraries

• Altassain building their own JS library.
• Categories: low-level libraries, high-level libraries, toolboxes and widgets.
• The API is more important than the functionality. e.g. Twitter. English majors will do well.
• Library is the answer -> what are the questions: make something useful.
• Who is the target? Java, Ruby, PHP, JS.
• The best APIs have a simple use which implements (abstracts) complex functionality.
• Don’t try and move outside the “feel” of JS: it’s your friend.
• Performance: target IE6 and everywhere else will run fast.
• Replace for loops with while loops.
• Cache results of function calculations e.g. parsing colour values.
• Book: JavaScript Performance Rocks! by Fuch T & Hoy A.
• Animation: lots of functions looping, watch performance of those functions, memory leaks, don’t trust timeout values.
• Bullet proof: plays nice with other scripts and libraries
  • watch use of global space: treat it like a public toilet!
  • native prototypes: be careful with these.
  • avoid object.prototype and this. accessors.
  • beware of iframes: different array objects to windows
  • undefined is not a constant, it’s a variable and can be assigned a value!
• Packaging
  • size of JS code matters! (different to other languages)
  • minify / pack / obfuscate: best to YUI compress, then GZIP (alternatives JSmin, Dojo shrink safe, Packer (just minify: smaller, but slower)
  • YUI compressor trick: make functions into local variables especially if they are used lots in the code, but be careful that it does not take longer to execute.
• Error handling: most times it’s best not to write an error handling function, this allows the developer to see which line of code has the error.
• JSLint. Use it.
• DOM is a big bottleneck.

Nick Cowie—Progressive enhancement with CSS

• State Library of WA
• User trust (huge impact of eye-candy) e.g. CannyBill
• Surfin Safari
• CSS3.info

Adobe panel

• NY Times Obama inauguration speech interactive analysis
• Google “headless” Flash player for indexing Flash content