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Digital Document Quarterly
Perspectives on
Trustworthy Information
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Volume
3, Number 2, 2Q2004
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HMG
Consulting
Saratoga,
CA 95070
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©
2004, H.M. Gladney
ISSN: 1547-8610
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“It is with philosophy as with religion: men
marvel at the absurdity of other people's tenets, while exactly parallel
absurdities remain in their own, and the same man is unaffectedly astonished
that words can be mistaken for things, who is treating other words as if they
were things every time he opens his mouth to discuss. No one … will deny that the mistaking of abstractions for
realities pervaded speculation all through antiquity and the middle ages. The mistake was generalized and systematized
[by] Plato. The Aristotelians carried it on.
Essences, quiddities, virtues residing in things, were accepted as a bonâ fide explanation of
phenomena. Not only abstract qualities,
but the concrete names of genera and species, were mistaken for objective existence.” John
Stuart Mill[1]
Abstract
The main section below, Topics in Digital
Preservation of Knowledge, argues that the technical component of digital
preservation research and development should focus on the design and management
of digital objects ‘hardened’ for durability.
It leads to today’s most difficult conceptual question: “How can
today’s information producers represent their output so that its eventual
consumers might be able to understand the meanings that these producers intend
to convey?”
To suggest how to proceed towards practical
digital preservation, this section combines prior DDQ material with analyses of
economic projections and technical trends.
For research into answering the difficult conceptual question, we
believe that the soundest foundation is early 20th century theories
of empirical knowledge. We identify
seminal works that collectively seem a sufficient basis—works by Wittgenstein,
Carnap, Quine, Popper, and Nimmer. We
recommend specific ideas from these sources as starting points for research
into preserving knowledge.
Information
scientists concerned with digital preservation seem to have focused on
repository functionality and management.
In contrast, DDQ has consistently focused on preserving documents,
partly because digital library technology is well understood and presents no
conceptual preservation issues. My
colleagues and I believe the focus on repositories, rather than on preserved
objects that repositories manage, to be misplaced and not in the best interests
of archival institutions or their professional staffs.
Our
architectural focus is driven by economic trends and deployed information
network characteristics. Since these
apparently do not much influence most other digital preservation thinking, we
sketch a subset below and suggest why they drive us in directions more fully
articulated in our Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Objects (TDO) papers. Since the Trusted Digital Repositories[2] and the [U.S.] National Digital
Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) reports represent Digital
Library Federation consensus and identify a funded technical
plan,[3] we take these as the articulation of the
focus we believe misplaced.
The
reader might be surprised at the length and depth of our analysis of design
imperatives sketched below. Our care
and the reader’s critical attention are mechanisms for avoiding, or
discovering and repairing, systematic errors.
They are driven by (1) software engineering precepts suggesting that
high quality is favored by spending relatively more time on design and less on
implementation and deployment; (2) recognition that careful design is
inexpensive compared to lifetime utilization costs; and (3) expectation that
errors embedded in preserved digital objects might not be noticed by their
eventual consumers and, if noticed, not be correctible by them.
We
cannot be confident that our preservation method is sound without a profound
understanding of what we mean by ‘knowledge’.
We need a thorough analysis of preservation objectives that includes an
answer to, “Precisely what is it that creators want to communicate to future
generations?” This is not in the sense
of selecting which documents we want to preserve, but rather in a sense
suggested by Levy.[4] The
best basis we know for confidence in methodology is certain early 20th
century analytical thinking.
"Prediction
is difficult. Especially about the
future." —attributed to Niels Bohr
We
are in the midst of widespread changes[5] in how people interact with information, how
it affects their lives, and how information will be managed in a networked
world. The information science
literature about digital preservation pays less attention to economic factors
and technical trends than to examining how current paper-based repository
methods can be adapted to a digital world.
The
shift of information search from library services to private sector services
might be a harbinger for further disintermediation.[6] For
instance, academic faculty members and private individuals often provide superb
information organization and deliver this directly to consumers.[7]
Librarians and library institutions might believe disintermediation
undesirable—socially as well as for their professional and institutional
futures. If so, they need to start
leading part of the information revolution rather than merely following.
Some
trends are well known, at least in the sense that they are often mentioned in
the business literature.[8]
Some whose strategic consequences bear thinking about are: [9]
·
The number of people with education, leisure, and
interest in reading and writing is much larger than it has ever been, even as a
fraction of the total population, and is growing.[10]
·
Many people younger than 30 years tend to be more
comfortable with digital technology, and more skilled in its use, than most
people 50 and older. The latter group includes most of the decision makers in
libraries and archives.
·
Digital technology is becoming affordable in
lesser-developed countries, some of whose people are becoming Internet users,
particularly in China[11]
and India.
·
The amount of digital information that might be
preservation-worthy is growing rapidly.
The many estimates[12]
suggest that the portion represented by research library collections is small
and shrinking.
·
The number of contributors to information management
and search technology is much greater than the digital staff of traditional
libraries and archives, and growing.
·
The information services industry is changing rapidly
to exploit the Internet[13] and
to provide scaling to very large digital object collections.
·
Any document is potentially linked to many documents of
other kinds. We cannot partition the
world’s collections into unconnected partial collections. For instance, we can neither define an
impervious boundary between cultural documents and business records, nor
segregate picture collections from pure text files.
·
Every document contains references to other documents that are essential to its
interpretation and provenance evidence.[14] These references might not be explicit.[15] We represent such references as citations,
or links, or pointers.
·
The content of any collection or individual document is
the result of some individuals’ subjective choices. As a consequence of this and the prior points, there is no
structural distinction between a document collection (a.k.a. ‘library’) and an
individual document.[16]
·
The information quality and evidence of authenticity
that people expect has increased steadily since early in the 20th
century (when radio broadcasts and music recordings became popular).
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Figure 1: How Much Storage will $200 Buy? The 2004 point ihas been added to the NY Times chart.
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·
Automation is now inexpensive compared to human labor.[17] For instance, see Figure 1. It is
reasonable to plan a home computer with a terabyte of storage!
·
Information consumers, information producers, and information
service providers will not change their tools to accommodate digital
preservation, except for very modest upwards-compatible modifications. The provider who plausibly promises the
least disruption will win.
·
Many applicable technical specialties are highly
refined, with their own extensive and deep literature, and active interest
groups. For instance information
retrieval is represented by ACM SIGIR.
Librarians
have been thorough in investigating what history teaches about preservation.[18] They might balance that by similar care in
looking forward.
Archivists have more than once changed their collective
opinion about what information representations are worth preserving. Levy and O’Toole suggest that it is time for
another change, without specifying the nature of the change precisely.[19]
Large-scale digital preservation will be affordable only if
we automate every human processing step that can be replaced by a machine
procedure. However, we should not
preclude any human intervention based on human judgement and values.
The literature suggests practical
urgency because older digital content is already being lost. A second urgency is that metadata—provenance
information needed to convert a document into an archival record—are best
created and packaged with the active participation of each document’s
creator(s).
Protocol and data representation standards for information interchange
are a key focal topic for digital preservation.[20] At some level, all documents being
interchanged must share structural schema.
To
avoid troublesome ambiguities of reference, we must assign a unique reference
name (a.k.a. ‘identifier’) to each digital object. We often find it useful to assign more than one name to an
object.[21]
Integrating digital networks from lightly coupled components
has been common for more than a decade.
For content management the accepted infrastructure components that need
to accommodate long-term preservation include:
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Figure
2: Relationships of components of a digital document repository. In
contrast to the usual usage of ‘trusted’ in “Trusted Digital Repositories”,
the usage here is correct.[22]
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System layering[23] is
essential to partition technical responsibilities, to enable software porting
across hardware and operating system platforms, and to permit customization
wanted by different institutions and sometimes by individual users. Figure
2 suggests some of the layering and some of the
functional components of content management services.
OAIS
permits differences between a ‘Submission Information Package (SIP)’ and its
corresponding ‘Archival Information Package (AIP)’ and ‘Distribution
Information Package (DIP)’. However, as
can be inferred from Figure
3, to ensure that the document representation that a
consumer receives is independent of network path by which it reaches him,[24]
each DIP needs to be identical to its corresponding SIP. Repository clients (producers and consumers)
will not care how AIPs are represented.
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Figure
3: Digital object paths from producer to consumer. Copies
of a particular object might reach the consumer by paths that he cannot
control and that might be different from time to time.
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Repository institutions should work to encourage content
producers to submit objects already packaged for preservation to share
preservation costs, to exploit producers’ knowledge and competence, and to
mitigate the challenges of scaling to large collections.
“Documents are talking things. … The brilliance of writing is the discovery
of a way to make artifacts talk, coupled with the ability to hold that talk
fixed, so that a fixed, stable message can be carried through space and
time. It is something that documents do
well and people by and large don't. It
is not that we are incapable of performing in such a manner … but it is not of
our essence to do so. Yet it is exactly of the essence of documents, a defining
characteristic.” David
Levy[25]
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Figure 4: Data, information, knowledge, and understanding[26]
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Assuming that what we want to preserve is knowledge, we
might start by agreeing what we mean by ‘knowledge’. Popper’s ‘World 3’ definition (see below) is
particularly apt, and consistent with modern articulations such as that
suggested by Figure
4.
Beyond that, what we know in principle about the technical parts of digital preservation
includes:
·
How to protect information packages from being lost.
·
How to package information so that its eventual users
can reliably test its trustworthiness.
·
How to encode information so that it can be rendered
reliably.[27] In this context, ‘rendering’ includes
execution of computer programs.
An open engineering challenge is illustrated by word
processor documents whose users want preservation of all possible
renderings. Saving ‘.doc’ (e.g.) files
is not enough, since the renderings are articulated by vendor software that
includes operating system components and other vendors’ device drivers. Extracting and saving the necessary programs
is made difficult by vendor secrecy.
The most difficult previously expressed digital
preservation objective[28] is
“ensuring that information consumers can read or otherwise use each preserved
object as completely as its producers intended.” Accomplishing this is, in principle, impossible for at least some
data types. A prudent revision of the
challenge is, perhaps, “how can producers today represent preserved
information to minimize each eventual consumer’s misunderstandings of what
these producers intended to convey?”
What sound basis exists for choosing how to convey digital
documents? Arguably, the best available
foundations for analysis are found in early 20th century
thinking. Provisionally, a sufficient
selection is:
1.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus distinction
between objective and syntactical concerns, on the one hand, and subjective and
semantic concerns, on the other hand.[29] His Philosphical
Investigations teaches that every use of language—a word, a
sentence, a report, a book—is comprehensible only in the context of innumerable
other communications.[30]
2.
Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical
Structure of the World[31],
which starts with a pragmatic notion of ‘object’:
“The word "object" is here always used in its
widest sense, namely, for anything about which a statement can be made. Thus, among
objects we count not only things, but also properties and classes, relations in
extension and intension, states and events, what is actual as well as what is
not.”
The
Logical Structure of the World, §1.
Carnap
grounds a small number of objective definitions in ostensive use of relations
and outlines a construction method for articulating more complex objects.
3.
Karl Popper’s 1967 essay Knowledge: Subjective versus Objective,[32] which includes:
“… without taking the words `world' or `universe' too
seriously, we may distinguish … first, the world of
physical objects or of physical states; secondly, the
world of states of consciousness, or of mental states, or perhaps of
behavioural dispositions to act; and thirdly, the world
of objective contents of thought, especially of scientific and poetic thoughts
and of works of art.
“… consider two thought experiments:
“Experiment (1). All
our machines and tools are destroyed, and all our subjective learning,
including our subjective knowledge of machines and tools, and how to use them. But libraries and our capacity to learn from
them survive. Clearly, after much
suffering, our world may get going again.
“Experiment (2). As
before, machines and tools are destroyed, and our subjective learning,
including our subjective knowledge of machines and tools, and how to use
them. But this time, all libraries are
destroyed also, so that our capacity to learn from books becomes useless.
“If you think about these two experiments, the reality,
significance, and degree of autonomy of world 3
(as well as its effects on worlds 1 and 2) may perhaps become a little clearer to you. For in the second case there will be no
re-emergence of our civilization for many millennia.”
4.
Willard Orman Quine’s Word
and Object teaches how to map normal language usage to
relatively unambiguous forms inspired by formal logic.
“According to an influential doctrine of Wittgenstein's, the
task of philosophy is not to solve problems but to dissolve them by showing
that there were really none there. This
doctrine has its limitations, but it aptly fits explication. For when explication banishes a problem it
does so by showing it to be in an important sense unreal; viz., in the sense of
proceeding only from needless usages [of language].
“…
“It is ironical that those philosophers most influenced by
Wittgenstein are largely the ones who most deplore the explications just now
enumerated. In steadfast laymanship
they deplore them as departures from ordinary usage, failing to appreciate
that it is precisely by showing how to circumvent the problematic parts of ordinary
usage that we show the problems to be purely verbal.” Word and Object, §53.
5.
David Nimmer’s Adams and Bits: of Jewish Kings and
Copyrightsb[33]
identifies what can be protected, and therefore much of what is worth
preserving.
“News Item: Fire swept through the converted grain silo that
Naomi Marra has called home … Feared
lost among the charred ruins is the last extant copy of her lyric ode, Ruthless
Boaz. … devotees hope that,
following her many public declamations of the work, most or all of it may
remain preserved in her memory. … Query: Is Ruthless Boaz still
subject to statutory copyright protection?”
With
this hypothetical case, Nimmer analyzes the protection of intangible
value—patterns inherent in the reproductive instances of each document.[34] The essential patterns of a document are
those needed to allow it to be Levy's
“talking thing”.[35]
For the purposes at hand, we need not read earlier than
1920. Collectively, Wittgenstein,
Carnap, and Quine acknowledged and progressed
from the work of Emmanuel
Kant, Auguste
Comte, Heinrich
Hertz, Karl
Weierstrass, Ernst Mach,
Gottlob Frege, David
Hilbert, and Bertrand
Russell. All later
epistemological thinking was based on the work of these masters.
The
treatment above emphasizes permanently significant aspects of long-term digital
preservation. It provides part of the
reasoning that leads us to believe that the architecture described in our Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Objects work is forced
by the existing information infrastructure and by end users’ needs.[36]
What
follows summarizes current activities of more than average interest.
PC Magazine discusses “ways
to ensure that the contents of your discs are readable down the road and
how to set up a backup plan to keep your archives safe”.[37] The guidelines tell the home computing
enthusiast how to preserve digital photographs and personal data for 25 years
or longer, i.e., at least until the results of current preservation research
are embodied in practical and inexpensive products.
A second PC Magazine article, The
Dead-Media Bogeyman includes:
“… there has to be some concern over the
long-term reliability of digital storage, with the recent overblown fears about
disc rot—a perceived problem that harks back to the late 1970s and some bad pressings
of laserdiscs. In fact, we are
witnessing a consolidation process resulting in more and more backups. And because we tend to use music
industry–type (CD and DVD) consumer standards, we will probably have
playability for a hundred years or longer.
There is not as much dead media in the music industry; just consider
that with the right equipment you can still play a 78-rpm record from 1904!” John C. Dvorak[38]
Such information calls into question alarmist
expressions of the urgency of digital preservation.[39]
OASIS has
identified “a common set of file formats … for free software on the desktop.”[40] This complements the PRONOM
service offered by [U.K.] Public Record Office.
The presenters at METS Opening Day West and
the RLG
Members Forum on Metadata and Digital Repositories were
persuasive that METS (the Metadata Encoding and Transmission
Standard) is sufficiently
advanced for institutional commitment.[41]
TASI (the Technical Advisory Service for
Images) is providing a guide to metadata
vocabularies that links to over 60
formal vocabularies with introductions to classifications, subject headings,
and thesauri.
Our paper about making preserved information
trustworthy[42]
proposes basing any consumer’s authenticity testing of a preserved document on
the authenticity of a cryptographic key.[43] The paper also proposes a way by which a
small number of public institutions can certify these keys so that such
certifications are highly unlikely to be falsified. Our method works because its execution is easily controlled administratively,
because it is easy and inexpensive to apply, and because responsibilities are
partitioned so that it would be against the interests of certifying
institutions to permit fraud.
After the cited paper had been committed to
press, we discovered that Waugh
suggests two other methods of showing that a
particular public key belonged to a particular signer at the time a preserved
object was signed.[44] In the
first method, keys can be served by an institution that is trusted to safeguard
such keys faithfully—a service that is much easier to provide and much less
risky to end users than purported “trusted digital repository” service.
In the
second method, a well-known publisher might use the same certification key-pair
for many works. The user interested in
the authenticity of a work issued could check that its public key value is
identical to that of a body of works from that publisher. This is likely to be acceptable to a user
who is satisfied by knowing that the work is truly from the particular source
alleged.[45]
On a
related topic, Boneh and Franklin have invented a way of choosing asymmetric keys whose public
portion is easy to remember.
The accepted order in research and
development has universities engaging earlier than industry, particularly when
new ideas are needed, and sometimes when existing ideas are insufficiently
tested for acceptable commercial risk levels.
Open-source digital repository software is emerging from universities
about a decade after similar technology has had marketplace success[46]—suggesting
that the opposite order is becoming common.
The following critique of a Humboldt
University announcement illustrates a frequent failing—not considering prior
work as part of a new project, especially if the prior work comes from a
discipline other than that of the authors.
Taxpayers might ask why the Library of Congress, in its NDIIPP plan[47],
seems to be proposing yet another digital repository project—one whose
published initial plan is not only vague, but a decade out of date, since at
least one similar, but more specific, design was published in 1993.[48] It is disturbing that the NDIIPP plan makes
little allusion to any prior technology.
Many digital preservation R&D projects
are wasteful, except perhaps as team learning exercises. The text of a recent announcement illustrates
typical weaknesses. Humboldt Univ.
(Berlin) has announced a “Center of Excellence for Trusted Digital Repositories
(TDRs)” whose “goal … is the development and implementation of a Trusted Digital
Repository based on the Reference
Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). Phrases from the announcement[49]
raise questions:
(1) “development
and implementation of a TDR”. What
remedies are proposed for TDR weaknesses that DDQ communicated two years ago to
the authors of the Trusted Digital Repository report?[50]
(2) “based
on the ‘Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS)’”
and “the OAIS model is widely accepted among managers of digital information
as a basis for a technological solution of the addressed problems”. OAIS defines a digital repository
ontology—language for communicating the identity of a topic of discussion, and
is almost silent about architecture.[51] Can one infer anything more from consensus
about OAIS other than that its proponents are discussing the same topic?[52]
(3) “Keeping
data formats readable in the long run is a …yet unsolved problem.” Much of this problem has been solved in principle,[53] but
apparently the solution is not widely known or accepted. Nor is the solution fully tested or
demonstrated, partly because there has been little funding.
(4) “reliable … TDRs are capable to solve the
key issues of long-term preservation of digital information.”[54] Who has demonstrated feasibility of a
reliable TDR?
(5) “market the system as well in the open
source community as in the commercial field.” In view of established commercial and open-source repository
software offerings, what Humboldt-Center features are proposed as an incentive
to potential customers?
(6) “The
data are long-term protected against loss, change or damage.” What protection do TDRs offer against
malfeasance or mistakes by repository employees? How is this accomplished?
How can a user, a century from now, establish confidence that data
received from the repository has not been improperly modified?[55]
(7) “Storage
and retrieval … can be done worldwide,” and “the repository can be
distributed worldwide. [Its] management
is centralized to [minimize] administrative workload.” Existing digital library and content
management offerings provide this. Some
have done so for about a decade.
Hundreds of initiatives target making digital deliveries easier to
use. What does the Humboldt team
propose that’s new?
News and
Commentary
NDIIPP
Events
The Library of Congress announced a joint project with Old
Dominion Univ., Dept. of Computer Science; Johns Hopkins Univ., Sheridan
Libraries; Stanford Univ. Libraries & Academic Information Resources[56];
and Harvard Univ. Library to explore strategies for the ingest and preservation
of digital archives. The Archive
Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT) is to identify, document and disseminate
working methods for preserving cultural materials, and to identify R&D
topics.
Acting on behalf of NDIIPP, the National Science Foundation
(NSF) has called for preservation R&D proposals in Digital Archiving
and Long-Term Preservation (DIGARCH). Related information can be found in an NSF-European Union
report entitled Invest
to Save: Report and Recommendation of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital
Archiving and Preservation, which was reported in DDQ 2(4).
The Higher
Education Funding Council is providing £2M
to digitize British 19th century newspapers for service from
a Web site.
“The Vienna Circle … led to a rebirth and
reformation of positivism and empiricism.
Neo-positivism stands in the foreground of contemporary philosophy,
especially in the anglo-saxon and scandinavian countries. It may safely be said to be the most
significant of serious philosophical movements in the period between the two
world-wars.” The
Vienna Circle, Introduction
Kraft was a young Vienna Circle member who
later succeeded to the philosophy chair that had been held by Ernst Mach and
Moritz Schlick. This book is an easy-to-read
introduction to logical empiricism.
"The
uniformity that unites us in communication and belief is a uniformity of
resultant patterns overlying a chaotic subjective diversity of connections
between words and experience.
Uniformity comes where it matters socially; hence rather in point of
intersubjectively conspicuous circumstances of utterance than in point of
privately conspicuous ones." Word
and Object, §2
The
literary output of Quine, mathematician and Harvard Professor of
Philosophy from 1956-2000, was prodigious. "Word and Object" deals
with ostensive knowledge and language as a phenomenon of social sharing. The book, which uses little visible
mathematics, seems readily accessible to anyone.
“… We
are accustomed daily to paraphrase our sentences under the stress or threat of
failure of communication, and we can continue thus. … The purpose of the study
is to bring the referential business of our language more clearly into view.
“Vagueness
is a natural consequence of the basic mechanism of word learning. The penumbral objects of a vague term are
the objects whose similarity to ones for which the verbal response has been
rewarded is relatively slight. Or, the
learning process being an implicit induction on the subject's part regarding
society's usage, the penumbral cases are the cases for which that induction is
most inconclusive for want of evidence. The evidence is not there to be
gathered, society's members having themselves had to accept similarly fuzzy
edges when they were learning.” Word and Object. §26
People
often prefer known risks to those associated with new territory. Uncritical enthusiasm for open source software
seems to be a contrary example. This is
partly conditioned by an unspoken assumption that what works well in personal
workstations will also work well in information servers such as digital
repository implementations—an assumption calling for critical caution.[59] Some
insight into the issues is provided by the Open Source Grows Up special issue of ACM Queue, whose articles
include:
Is OS Right for You? (A Fictional Case
Study): “Your
team has added open source code to a key company project. The players: a now-dead branch of the code
tree, a teeny bug, and an irate CTO.”
Open Source to the Core:
“Are you considering adding open source code to a project? An open source guru Jordan Hubbard tells you
what you need to know to get started.”
From IR to Search, and Beyond: “How is the evolution from information
retrieval to
text mining impacting the information workspace?”
There's No Such Thing as a Free (Software)
Lunch: “A techie-cum-lawyer
breaks down what everyone needs to know about open source licenses.”
Less expensive alternatives for Microsoft Office™ are being
refined. See:
·
Eleven Tips for OpenOffice at http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7158
·
Corel Word
Perfect 12 at http://eletters.wnn.ziffdavis.com/zd1/cts?d=75-178-1-1-497479-8161-1
·
Java Desktop 2
at http://eletters.wnn.ziffdavis.com/zd1/cts?d=75-178-1-1-497479-8164-1
·
A review comparing Office 2003 and OpenOffice.Org at http://eletters.eweek.com/zd1/cts?d=79-662-1-5-70562-76888-1
·
IBM’s Lotus Workplace strategy, with e-mail, word
processing, spreadsheet and database applications aimed at business at http://ct.com.com/click?q=8f-OOYvQ8KIO_U7RjMCtdkvtiT3W7eR
·
A BusinessWeek
review of Simdesk™.
Since the university library that provides my more arcane
source material, is an hour’s drive each way, and since part of its holdings
cannot be borrowed, I’ve been using a digital camera to capture excerpts
needing careful attention. I’d like to
convert the images to searchable text, but cannot currently do so because my
camera (an Olympus E100-RS) produces 72-pel images—too low resolution for ScanSoft Omnipage™.[60]
I therefore pay attention to promotions of portable
scanners, such as the $200 DocuPen™. However, its
reviews report sensitivity to wand positioning, poor clarity, poor life
for its expensive custom batteries, and exaggeration of its advertised storage
capacity. I’ll continue waiting for a
suitable device.
I’ve been pleased with the Opera
Internet Browser™ as a replacement for MS Internet Explorer™.[61] Its $39 price was a good investment. However, “’better than’ Is The Enemy of
“’good enough’”.[62] A March
Infoworld review led me to Mozilla Firefox™. I can attest that its “Why You Should Switch to
Firefox” description is an honest report.
Since
then I saw strongly favorable reviews of both the MyIE2 browser™ and the Avant Browser™. Since, their novel features are similar to those of Mozilla
Firefox, I have not tried them.[63] Just as this DDQ number was being completed, favorable Slim Browser™ reviews appeared. Each of these browsers is available for
downloading without expense to users.
In April, Business 2.0 had reported that, due to recent
increases in production capacity, the cost of thin liquid crystal displays had
dropped approximately 40% since 2001, and projected that LCD display sales
would bypass CRT display sales in 2004.
In May, BusinessWeek estimated that both DRAMs and liquid crystal
displays would be in short supply throughout 2004. In June, the Semiconductor Industry Group estimated that overall
chip sales would increase 29% this year.[64]
We therefore believe that prices of main memory, other chip
sets, and flat panel displays will not change much in 2004. In contrast, best prices for hard disk
drives (HDDs), for optical disk drives and media, and for wireless LAN link
adapters have plummeted and may be expected to continue to drop. Best buys in San Jose, illustrated below,
are probably loss leaders.[65]
|
HDD
(internal)
|
Seagate
120Gb 7200rpm 8.5msec
|
$48.
|
$0.40/Gbyte
|
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HDD
(external USB)
|
Hitachi
200Gb 7200rpm 8.5msec
|
$75.
|
$0.38/Gbyte
|
|
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[2] Neil
Beagrie, Meg Bellinger, Robin Dale, Marianne Doerr, Margaret Hedstrom, Maggie
Jones, Anne Kenney, Catherine Lupovici, Kelly Russell, Colin Webb, and Deborah
Woodyard, Trusted
Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities, RLG-OCLC
Report, May 2002. See also H.M.
Gladney, Critique:
Attributes of a Trusted Digital Repository, October 2001.
[3] Library of Congress, Preserving
Our Digital Heritage: Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure
and Preservation Program, 2003.
See especially its Appendix 9: Technical Architecture for the
National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).
See also
Neil Beagrie, National
Digital Preservation Initiatives: An Overview of Developments in Australia,
France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom and of Related International
Activity, CLIR pub116, 2003, and Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of
Congress, The
State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective, CLIR
pub107, 2002.
[5] William J. Mitchell, Alan S. Inouye, and
Marjory S. Blumenthal, Editors. Beyond Productivity,
Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity, Nat. Acad.
Press, Washington, 2003. See also
Perkings, John. Dawson, David. Geber, Kati. Beyond
Productivity: Culture and Heritage Resources in the Digital Age, D-Lib
Magazine 10(6), June 2004.
[7] For instance, the most useful source I found
for a quick study of Willard Quine’s work (see below) is the Web site provided by his son,
Douglas. Someone might argue that such
sources lack long-term durability. This
problem is as likely to be solved by institutions other than academic
institutions as by research libraries or archives.
[9] This list surely overlooks other important
factors. DDQ projections are not
currently backed by known evidence or explicit justification. Their intent is to stimulate thinking,
rather than to report careful research and analysis. Such limited intent would be inappropriate for a scholarly
report, but is appropriate for a newsletter.
[10] Hoffman, Donna L. Novak, Thomas P. Venkatesh,
Alladi. Has The Internet Become Indispensable? Comm. ACM 47(7), 37- 42,
July 2004. An easily overlooked
component is the highly educated, formally retired population. It is only recently that a significant
population fraction was healthy and vigorous beyond age 65.
[11] According to BusinessWeek (July 12, 2004,
page 14), “If forecasts from investment bank Piper Jaffray hold, around 153
million Chinese will be online by 2006, and China will surpass the U.S. in Web
users.”.
[14] In Nancy Brodie,
Authenticity, Preservation and Access in
Digital Collections, Preservation 2000, we find,
“Technological tools of authentication such as encryption make preservation of
authentic documents very difficult. All
the pieces of a public key infrastructure, encryption algorithms, encryption
and decryption software, private keys, public keys, certificates, certificate
authorities, etc. would have to be preserved along with the encrypted
document.” This and more are, in fact,
forced for the more fundamental reason taught by
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Brodie’s
concern simply manifests that digital technology often forces its users to
express levels of detail that they are not accustomed to providing. Human beings accept an immense amount of
vagueness in their communication. (See
Chapter 4 of Quine’s Word and Object.) This is partly because they often have
opportunity to inquiry whenever a vagueness proves troublesome, which is not
usually possible for computer programs, a fortiori for preserved digital objects. The care needed with digital objects has a
reward, frequently bringing to light confusions that have not been noticed, and
requiring us to improve the precision of our speak.
[15] In fact, in human communication, most
references are implicit. This is sometimes
alluded to as ‘shared social context’.
How human natural language copes with references is carefully analyzed
in Quine’s Word and Object.
[16] This is not a statement about how any
information entity is represented, but rather about its intended meaning.
Carnap (loc.
cit.) §11 teaches the precise meaning of ‘structure’.
[19] Levy (loc. cit.) includes: “Within the archival community, whose focus …
has been on paper, microform, and [so on], the predominant answer to
[“preserving what?”] has shifted over time.
[O'Toole, On the Idea of Permanence, The American Archivist 52(1), 10-25,1989.]
notes that … in the early nineteenth century, archivists took their mission to
be the preservation of the information contained in documents rather than the
original documents themselves. … It was only … in the twentieth century, that
advances in preservation theory and practice … made it possible … preserving …
original materials. The pendulum thus
swung from … preserving the information content of documents to … preserving
the artifacts themselves. O'Toole
suggests, however, that the current focus is inadequate and argues for a return
to the earlier position …”
[21] Using different representations of a single
information object is common; which representation is convenient generally
depends on the application of the moment.
The same information is often transformed from one representation to
another. Whether one uses the same
identifier for different representations is itself a subjective choice; for
this reason, it is common to assign several identifiers to a single object.
See Digital
Resource Identifier (DRI) and Reliable References in Henry M. Gladney, Trustworthy 100-Year
Digital Objects: Evidence After Every Witness is Dead, ACM Trans.
Info. Sys. 22(3), 1-31, July 2004.
[22] We can correctly call the remote repositories
in this figure ‘trusted’, because each is trusted by the central (relative to
this discussion) repository’s manager for the limited responsibility of holding
and perhaps distributing replicas. In
contrast, see Trust,
Trusted, Trustworthy in DDQ 1(2).
[23] See, for instance, Figure 1 in
DDQ 2(3). Deployed layering is
more complex than our figures suggest.
The overall layering includes several layers in each of communication
services (TCP/IP), file managers, and database management subsystems. We do not discuss these we believe that is
neither affordable nor necessary to change any of this technology as part of
providing for long-term preservation.
[24] To understand why this is important, consider
the case of two consumers, with the first receiving a work as part of his
subscription to its publisher’s output and the second fetching the same work
many years later from an archival repository.
If these readers then communicate about details of what they suppose to
be the same work, they might be inconvenienced by differences in their copies.
[25] David Levy, loc. cit., which is “a set
of reflections on the meaning and possibility of preserving digital materials.”
[26] From a presentation foil shared by Steve
Griffin, National Science Foundation.
[27] ‘Interpretation’ is ambiguous in discussions
of digital document use. We use
‘rendering’ for the transformation from digital representation to human-perceptible
form, reserving ‘interpreting’ for the human conversion of stimuli to
sensations, or for the conversion of visual and oral stimuli (Wittgenstein’s
‘pictures’) to meanings and concepts.
[30] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, Bilingual Third Edition, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford,
2001. ISBN 0-631-23127-7
[31] Rudolf Carnap, The logical structure of
the world; pseudoproblems in philosophy, translated by Rolf A. George,
Univ. California Press, 1967. ISBN 0-812-69523-2 Originally published in 1928 as Der Logische Aufbau der Welt.
[32] David Miller (ed.), A Pocket Popper, Oxford
U.P., 1983.
[33] David Nimmer, Adams and Bits: of Jewish
Kings and Copyrights, 71 S. Cal. L. Rev. 219-245, 1998. Also in the Copyright Society Journal 46(2),
1998.
[34] This notion of what is essential is at the
core of the 1990s lawsuits about “look and feel” of screen presentations by software,
such as the Apple vs. Microsoft lawsuit of 1988-1994. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers calls this
‘the essence of the work’, and often alludes simply to ‘essence’.
[35] The word ‘essential’ is often misused by
failing to be grounded in some definite purpose of identified individuals. Here the purpose is implicit, viz., that the
document speaks for its author(s) helping to convey intended meaning. The question of usefulness of language is
central to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and re-addressed
in the second half of Levy (loc. cit.).
The grammatical question of implied referents is dealt with carefully in
Quine’s Word and Object.
[36] This series of papers treats the needs of the
ultimate end users, information consumers and information producers, as more
important than the needs of digital repository personnel—a prioritization not
evident in cited digital repository literature.
[39] For instance, see Kevin Schürer’s The Implications of Information Technology
for the Future Study of History in Higgs, Edward (ed.) History and electronic artifacts, Oxford U.P., 1998. ISBN
0-19-823633-6
[41] Until I try to use METS to prepare documents
for preservation, I cannot be confident about this endorsement. We plan to use it in a prototype
implementation of the document packaging proposed in my Trustworthy
100-Year Digital Objects series.
[43] For an explanation of what cryptographic keys
and XML signatures provide—content integrity assurance, source authentication,
and signer non-repudiation—and the current state of XML signature tools, see
Peter Thorsteinson, G. Ganesh. .NET
Security and Cryptography, Prentice Hall, 2003. ISBN: 0-131-00851-X
[46] The first U.S. National Science Foundation
funding of digital library projects occurred only about two years after
IBM Digital Library (now named to IBM Content Manager) was delivered to its
first customers!
[47] NDIIPP Technical
Architecture - Update: Version
0.2 of the Technical Architecture for the National Digital Information
Infrastructure and Preservation Program is available. The Library is seeking feedback on this
draft.
[48] A Storage Subsystem for Image and Records
Management, IBM Systems Journal 32(3), 512-540, (1993) articulates
the core design of today’s IBM Content Manager. Since the first IBM Digital Library offering (as IBM Content
Manager was originally known) appeared in 1991, eight subsequent releases
provided enhancements to performance, scalability, reliability, and interfacing
with pre-existing applications—topics that are hardly mentioned in competitive
open-source promotions.
[49] The following critique reacts to a 6th
May JISC posting, which was more complete than the
Humboldt web posting. The
project partners include Sun Microsystems Inc., the Austrian Literature Online
Consortium, and XiCrypt GmbH.
The Humboldt
team has seen a prior version of this critique and is considering its
reactions, but is not yet ready for them to be communicated. (Private communication with Suzanne
Dobratz.)
[50] See Trusted Digital Repositories and Trust,
Trusted, Trustworthy in DDQ 1(2).
[51] See Use and
Misuse of OAIS in DDQ 1(3).
We discussed this in 2002 with authors of OAIS. Their leader, Don Sawyer, agreed with the
DDQ 1(3) opinion.
[52] See Consensus as an Impediment to Progress
in DDQ 1(3). There is insufficient evidence that the
prevailing opinions are well founded.
Scientific history is full of examples of mistaken consensus.
[54] Several top-level requirements are identified
by Notes about Digital Preservation in DDQ 2(2).
[55] Risks to end users of cultural documents are
mostly low. However, how can we today
know how future readers might use and depend on repository holdings? The question has practical implications for
cases in which the somebody’s finances, health, or reputation could be impacted
by his or someone else’s using flawed information.
Answers must
address the concern that the easy mutability of digital documents creates
reliability exposures. It must further
address the expectation that the number of digital objects held in a repository
will be much larger than the historical number of paper documents and that
audit procedures (as suggested by the RLG report cited above) would need to
discover which small number of digital holdings some unscrupulous or careless
employee might have altered in the decades that the repository held the digital
object.
[57] Viktor
Kraft, The Vienna Circle: The Origin of Neo-Positivism: the
origin of neo-positivism; a chapter in the history of recent philosophy, Philosophical Library, New York, 1950.
[58] W. V. (Willard Van Orman) Quine, Word and object, Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T.
Press, 1960. ISBN 0-262-67001-1
[59] This warning is stimulated by recent
correspondence with a university project that understands risks associated with
commercial software, but shows no evidence of understanding critical
differences between seasoned commercial offerings and recent open source
software. For instance, most of the
code of commercial data management software is provided to manage potential
errors that include system failures, to allow different operating system
platforms, and to provide scaling from very small to very large data
collections. These aspects are not
always mentioned in software promotions.
In the case
at hand, my correspondent emphasized functionality in the upper levels of
software layering—tailoring for particular classes of installation. (Figure 1 in
DDQ 2(3) suggests the kind of layering I have in mind.) Arguably, tailoring for institutions’
specialized needs and preferences is best handled in client software and in the
upper layers of server software. In
fact, this is precisely why we provided the Document Storage Subsystem/Archival
Storage layering (see Figure
1) in the very first version IBM Digital Library™ in
1991. It has been continued into
today’s IBM Content Manager™. See H.M.
Gladney, A Storage Subsystem for Image and Records Management, IBM
Systems Journal 32(3), 512-540, (1993).
[60] Except for this weakness, I am delighted with
the camera, which I purchased about three years ago.
[63] To bring a browser into productive service
takes me about an hour’s tailoring. To
gauge its quality, I would have to use it actively for several weeks.
[64] San Jose Mercury News, 10 June 2004.
[65] The prices reported include California sales
tax (8.25%).