On May 31, 2013 CoDA led the event co-sponsored by the American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA) during the XVII International Congress of IFRAO.
It was a two part forum/workshop that emphasized key issues and challenges in the life cycle of digital collections from digitization and digital capture to preservation and access.
The forums engaged the IFRAO community on three intersecting sets of issues that embody the digital cultural heritage lifecycle:
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Moving from physical to virtual: Digital representations and born-digital materials making
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Where does it all go? Hard drives and cloud repositories
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Digital Stewardship and Sharing. Planning for long term (10+ years) preservation and access to digital heritage
In the second session we provided an overview and discussion of our freely available database and content management systems
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Codifi + Mukurtu CMS Overview
The Center for Digital Archaeology thanks you all for attending, asking such great questions, and making our Forum such a success! As a special present to all the participants we are posting these notes from the forum.
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Part I:
CoDA introduction
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501c3 non-profit, Meg Conkey is officially our Executive Director
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Preservation of content, media management, database design
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More @ www.codifi.org and http://www.codifi.info/blog/
Purpose: 2 part forum workshop,
CoDA will be giving 5 day intensive training @ DHSI, then CoDA will be at ATALM on June 12 to give a 3 part forum
Topics:
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Moving from physical to digital/virtual
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How to make sure content survives
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Digital Sterwardship/sustainability
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Brand new tech that CoDA developed
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Codifi: JVRP
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Mukurtu CMS
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Icebreaker!
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Do you work digitally? Why or why not? What is stopping you from? What sort of programs do you use?
Bob: Digital rock art data, CDs, DVDs, RAID arrays w/terabyte drives, 20-30 terabytes of data, no offsite/cloud backups
Outcomes: Practical approaches to self-preservation, many people don’t have full organizations/funding behind them
Assessment of services and what they do to your data and metadata
Mostly services destroy metadata/RAW file formats
Dropbox is great! Simple to use, version control
A lot of services are built on top of other services (amazon backbones)
$600/yr for a terabyte of cloud storage- storage is getting cheaper & better
CoDA has many guides written by professionals for metadata or the public
Why digitize?
Documentation, representation
Sharing of research
Image databases having a way to retrieve data
Allow massive data collection
Share with the public, visual tours
Image processing/enhancement
Don’t make iPhoto the primary data capture tool, it changes compression and messes with metadata
Make sure your images pass the “hash check”
Holly’s slides/examples- preservation of physical objects
Digitization of tribal collections-permissions from community: preservation, accountability, access
How do tribes want to share their data? 3D scans? Sharing the right/correct amount of data for the tribe
Conservation photography: scientific imaging, non-destructive editing
.DNGs with .tiff extensions storing metadata
Zuni example, working with Library of Congress
All digitization projects need to have a plan!
How will you share it, what’s your file naming convention, what metadata standards will you use, etc
Who, What, When, Where, Why, How?
Low cost solutions for digital photography: Canon Rebel is only $600 @ Costco…
Inexpensive photographic control software
Documentation & Filenaming: change filename, won’t harm file, CoDA has a very simple and easy to apply file naming conventions
Every file in your system should have a Unique Identifier
IPTC Core is the image metadata standard, CoDA has applied it to all of our data
Problems with iOS apps in Apple Store; paid versus free applications
The “iPad Effect”: apps store data inside themselves; if you delete your apps you effectively delete your data. It’s a problem!
22% of apps are now dead/unsupported
1% of apps are now used actively
Want to create digital cuneiform: data and file must survive
Lots of social media services do terrible things to your metadata (ex: facebook, flickr), Dropbox is the best
Grey literature problem in archaeology: you produce a report for a company as a consultant, they lose the copies of the report and everyone loses
Digital Stewardship:
The DCC Curation lifecycle model
Using digital objects to create Complex Digital Objects with metadata
Databases Structured collections of records/data stored in a computer system
Lifecycle actions:
- Description and representation information
- Presentation Planning
- Community watch and participation
- Curate and preserve
- Sequential Actions
- Conceptualize
- Create or receive
- Appraise and select
- Ingest
- Access, use and reuse
- Transform
- Occasional Actions
- Dispose
- Reappraise
- Migrate
Don’t let your data go stale!
Where in the Lifecycle is the quality assurance? Curation process is a never ending action, frequent validation checks
Use the community expertise to aid in validation and data correction
Is a RTI a Complex Digital Object? Yes, by definition
How long will new archival media last? Difficult to estimate (gold cds as example, trying to get data off of them is a nightmare!)
Products
Digital publishing evolved: Codifi
Community content management: Mukurtu CMS
Mobile capture and sharing: Mukurtu Mobile
Digital memory preservation
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Codifi
Conceptual way of organizing data, helps discover intrinsic relations between events, people, places, media
Codifi data model: 4 parts:
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Data
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Media
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Interface
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Sync
Meg Conkey’s Between the Caves project
Codifi is a collaborative workflow
Legacy data on zipdrives, access database in France, excel databases, etc
[Finds Inventory, Photos + keywords, Fieldnotes] Sites data
Data cleansing and Processing done on Sites data, photo cds (and keywords), fieldnotes
Proprietary/stale file formats are evil, file formats vs commercial software
CoDA offers a Data Audition! A 10 hour block of our time for free
All our software will be freely available
Part II:
Jezreel Valley Regional Project (JVRP) Field Recording Database:
Running in FileMaker 12
CoDA is JVRP’s offsite back up
iPad photographs get you: orientation/direction, geolocation
Folder hierarchy in Dropbox
Advantages of using FileMaker/FileMaker Go (free, mobile)
Only have to buy one copy of FileMaker to do your development
FileMaker Server is also great, we have JVRP doing backups every minute
Data Separation Model:
Data Archipelago (on Mothership/Doctor Octopus)
All media is stored externally
Codifi Database (thin and lightweight on iPads)
Emphasis on remote redundancy and multiple backups in Dropbox
Bolt on construction
Only 5 required fields
Codifi standards document will be available on the web, all code is fully documented
JVRP iPad live demo:
Dashboard: for quick navigation between field forms
Locus Layout:
Customized error messages/guides for archaeologists
All records have unique id UUIDs in background
Sedimentology demo-creating story of data automatically while filling in form
Also allow user entry/user created fields
Recreate field forms as close as possible into database, can print paper forms directly from database
Total Stations/GPS integration, link .xml files from total station direct to database
Adding Media: auto generating and linking of media to contexts
Auto generating a full report of all the activity within the database
Unified Search, super-fast searchability
Report directly into the database the release notes
Currently iOS only, working on funding to get HTML5 versions
Publication Project
Last House on the Hill (BACH area reports)
Fostering deeper conversations about material from the book/monograph
Database is a vertical copy of the book
Each PDF page is stored in database
Full color figures with captions
Exported field contents contain all metadata
Integrated search with deep semantic linkages
Text highlighting for searching
Database is still incredibly small, all content is served via server
Database framework will hopefully be publically released by the Fall
Mukurtu Cultural Management System (CMS)
A community-centered digital heritage management tool
Funded by Institute of Media and Library Sciences (IMLS)
Empowering communities to store and share their data for themselves
CoDA is focused on agile community development
Also focused on digital returns, linking physical objects to digital objects
Mukurtu CMS is a collaborative curatorial process
Top 3 Mukurtu Features:
Cultural Protocols
3 sharing protocols:
Open
Community
Strict
Traditional knowledge licenses (TK licenses and labels)
Roundtrip
Rolling out mukurtu.net, hosted solution
Mukurtu Mobile as well
Mukurtu is not a social network, it is a robust content management system that builds digital heritage items
Plays well with other web services
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more @ http://www.mukurtu.org/
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