Working Across Organizations white paper
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This document discusses the cooperative digital preservation model implemented by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints across numerous organizations. Key aspects include developing records management plans with each organization, acquiring and processing records according to criteria, and implementing a digital preservation system with support from the IT department. The approach involves cooperation between the Church History Department and other Church departments and institutions to ensure their important digital content is successfully preserved for future generations.
Working Across Organizations white paper
- 1. Working Across Organizations to Successfully Implement Cooperative Digital Preservation Future Perfect Conference 2012: Digital Preservation by Design (March 2012) Abstract Besides the Church History Department, a number of other departments support This paper discusses the cooperative, Church functions and activities. Examples outreaching model of digital preservation that is of these departments include Auditing, being successfully implemented by the Church Education, Family History, Finance, of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints across General Counsel, Media Services, Physical numerous organizations. Facilities, Public Affairs, Security, Temples, Welfare Services, etc. Introduction to the Church of Jesus In 1966, the Deseret Management Christ of Latter-day Saints Corporation was organized to manage The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day some of the commercial companies Saints is a worldwide Christian church with affiliated with the Church. Today, this more than 14.4 million corporation owns and oversees media, members and 28,784 insurance, and hospitality businesses. congregations. With headquarters in Salt Executive Support for Digital Lake City, Utah Preservation (USA), the Church Due to the Church’s scriptural mandate operates three to keep and preserve records, digital universities, a business preservation is extremely important to college, 136 temples, and thousands of Church leadership. This translates to strong seminaries and institutes of religion around and consistent executive sponsorship plus the world that enroll more than 700,000 ongoing funding and IT support, which are students in religious training. absolutely critical to digital preservation The Church has a scriptural mandate to success. keep records of its proceedings and In addition, the Office of the Church preserve them for future generations. Historian and Recorder provides constant Accordingly, the Church has been creating and vigilant oversight of the Church’s and keeping records since 1830, when it preservation efforts. This is one reason why was organized. A Church Historian’s Office the Church Historian and Recorder is the was formed in the 1840s, and in 1972 it was Executive Director of the Church History renamed the Church History Department. Department. 1
- 2. Responsibilities of the Church The plan identifies all records series (i.e., History Department collections) produced by the department and sets a retention schedule and a final The Church History Department has disposition for each collection. Some responsibility for collecting, processing, schedules call for records to be destroyed as providing access to, and preserving records soon as their active life is over. Others of enduring value that originate from all the require the records to be kept for a number Church organizations identified previously. of years in order to satisfy legal and/or With such a broad range of records- government compliance requirements. producing sources, the Church History On average, less than ten percent of the Department has implemented an collections are given a final disposition of outreaching, cooperative approach to “archive,” which means the collection digital preservation that is proving to be should be preserved for future generations remarkably effective. because of its enduring value. The records management plan also identifies which collections should be digitized (if they are not born-digital) for easier access and for digital preservation. An Appraisal Advisory Committee, composed of experienced archivists, reviews the department’s records management plan and helps with appraising records for preservation value Church History Library before giving final approval to the plan. at Temple Square in Salt Lake City Because of this outreaching, cooperative approach to records management, each At the heart of this approach is the Church department has a records Church History Library Division. Within management plan in place today that meets this Division are the following teams which the needs of the department as well as the are relevant to this paper—Records Church. Management, Acquisitions, Archival Developed in 2009, a Collections Processing, and Integration and Access. The Development Policy provides the following unity and coordinated efforts of these teams criteria for Church History Department are a major factor contributing to the acquisition of materials— success of the program. The outreaching, cooperative approach 1. Applicability to the Church History begins with the Records Management Department’s purpose Team. This crucial team works with the 2. Provenance (i.e., the collection’s origin, Records Coordinator of each Church authenticity, and history of ownership) department to develop a detailed records 3. Historical significance management plan for that department. 4. Usefulness, including expected frequency of access 2
- 3. 5. Relative value compared to existing Church Information and Church History Department holdings Communications Services 6. Anticipated costs of acquiring, processing, providing access, and As mentioned previously, IT support is preserving absolutely critical to digital preservation 7. Physical condition (if not born-digital) success. Recognizing this, Church and prospects of long term viability leadership provided the Church History 8. Legality of title Department with a dedicated digital preservation IT team from Church As may be inferred from these Information and Communications Services acquisition criteria, virtually all the records (ICS). This critical team consists of a digital that are acquired by the Church History preservation solutions manager, software Department are candidates for preservation developers, quality assurance engineers, because the criteria ensure that only records and application support engineers. The of historical value—and thus enduring preservation IT team also has access to a value—are accepted. software architect, and works closely with Records and artifacts may be donated to the digital preservation product manager the Church History Library. If they are who reports to the Church History accepted per the acquisition criteria listed Department. on the previous page, the Library’s As with the Church History Library Acquisitions Team is responsible to process Division, the unity and coordinated efforts the records for digital preservation. of these team members are crucial to the Processing of archival records that success of Church History’s outreaching, originate within the various Church cooperative digital preservation program. organizations is performed by the Library’s Working cooperatively together, the Archival Processing Team. One member of extended preservation team implemented this team has the title of Digital Archivist. the Digital Records Preservation System Processing steps for digital preservation (DRPS) illustrated on the next page. include digitizing (if needed), digital DRPS is based on Ex Libris Rosetta—a curation, and cataloging. specialized application that provides Also, the Integration and Access Team configurable preservation workflows and sets metadata standards and specifies how advanced preservation planning functions. records are to be organized. NetApp StorageGRID is the DRPS When the Church History Department storage layer. It provides Information acquires records, whether donated or Lifecycle Management (ILM) for the DRPS created by Church organizations, it takes archive. In order to support ILM migration over stewardship of those records. In effect, of preservation files from disk to tape, the donors and Church organizations StorageGRID utilizes IBM Tivoli Storage transfer responsibility for preserving their Manager as an interface to tape libraries. records to the Church History Department. 3
- 4. DRPS also employs software extensions that One example of this occurs with the were developed by the ICS preservation team Media Services Department. This prolific (shown in the red boxes below). department generates multiple petabytes of production audiovisual data annually in order to support the Church’s worldwide communications needs. To illustrate, last Christmas the Church launched a new website as a gift to the world that provides free Bible videos of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ (biblevideos.lds.org). Architecture of the Church History Department’s Digital Records Preservation System Nativity scene from biblevideos.lds.org (DRPS) DRPS is a dark archive—meaning that Viewable with a free mobile app, these delivery of requested records is only digital videos were produced by the Media provided to the department or institution Services Department. that produced the records. Likewise, About 40% of Media Services’ projects records in the archive may only be are targeted for archiving. However, only a discovered by the organization that portion meets Church History acquisition produced the records. Furthermore, criteria. The others are required by Media authorized access requests are serviced by Services to support long term production DRPS staff; thus producers of records do needs. Media Services’ projects tend to be not have direct access to the DRPS archive. cascading, meaning that something created This arrangement enhances security of the today will likely be used many times in the archive. future to augment other projects (the Bible videos are an example of such cascading). Outreaching, Cooperative Digital Since DRPS was implemented to meet Preservation the needs of all the Church, Church History’s outreaching, cooperative In some cases, a department’s records approach to digital preservation management plan calls for certain records accommodates Media Services’ need to to be archived that do not fit the Church archive projects that do not meet Church History Department’s acquisition criteria. History acceptance criteria. 4
- 5. However, a different stewardship model team collaborated with Media Services in applies to these projects. In effect, the order to automate the DRPS ingest process. Church History Department makes DRPS Many considerations were involved to available as a service to archive them. make the automation seamless. At the top The DRPS service model requires that of the list were issues with cataloging and Media Services (i) be responsible for the discovery. master catalog of these projects, (ii) provide The Church History Library catalogs its required preservation metadata, and (iii) holdings at the collection level. Ex Libris assist with future file format Aleph is the catalog software, and transformations. collections are discovered with Primo. In return, the DRPS operations team On the other hand, Media Services manages the projects once they have been catalogs its projects at the item level. A ingested into DRPS. Visual Resources Library (VRL) was Another example of cooperative digital developed by ICS for catalog software, and preservation applies to Media Services’ discovery was also custom developed. born-digital projects. In order to bridge these differences, the Those born-digital projects which meet ICS integrated catalog team, in response to Church History acquisition criteria may be Church History direction, implemented an needed for production purposes many instance of Aleph for Media Services that years after they are archived (e.g., the Bible can be discovered using Primo. videos). Therefore, the DRPS operations Media Services was responsible for team has agreed to ingest born-digital migrating its VRL catalog to this instance of projects into DRPS in their production file Aleph, which they were willing to do format (DNxHD wrapped in an MXF because of anticipated DRPS benefits. container) rather than the preferred Another challenge of automated ingest preservation format (Motion JPEG 2000 was automation of metadata extraction for wrapped in an MXF container). digitized projects. To meet this challenge, Years from now, when these born-digital the ICS preservation team developed a tool files are not as likely to be needed for that automatically extracts metadata from production work, they will be transformed either instance of Aleph, depending on to Motion JPEG 2000 (MJ2) files with whether the project to be ingested falls assistance from Media Services. under the DRPS service model or the This cooperative approach meets the Church History acquisition model. needs of Media Services while reducing The next step was to integrate DRPS Church History preservation risk by with Media Services’ systems. This required minimizing the number of file format the DRPS operations team to develop transformations required to ultimately workflows in conjunction with Media achieve the MJ2 preservation format. Services that define the data and metadata Because of the enormous capacity of flows between the systems. Working Media Services’ files to be ingested into cooperatively, the teams finished the task DRPS, the Church History/ICS preservation promptly. 5
- 6. System integration also required DRPS acquisition criteria, however, so DRPS has persistent identifiers (PIDs) to be passed been offered to the institutions as a service. back to Aleph as well as the Media Asset Since these institutions do not have the Management System so a project can be same kind of working relationship with the requested for delivery from DRPS using the Church History Department as the Church PID that DRPS created for that project. departments discussed previously, the As a consequence of the DRPS service Church History preservation team model explained previously, the Church developed a customized Memo of History Department developed the Understanding for each institution that following policy regarding the number of provides guidelines for working together in copies to be kept in the DRPS archive (note: a cooperative manner. “version” refers to file format Each Memo of Understanding covers the transformations or physical records)— following topics— The number of archived record copies (including a. Glossary of Digital Preservation Terms version copies) to be maintained and/or managed by b. DRPS Overview DRPS will be determined on a records collection basis c. DRPS Service Model according to appraised value and availability of physical d. Pre-ingest Activities records. Each determination will specify the number of e. Ingest Activities physical version, previous version, and current version f. Ongoing DRPS Management and copies to be maintained (including after ingest), as well as Access/Delivery Activities location placement for each copy. The minimum number g. Service Level Agreements of current version copies is two, and they must be placed h. Cost Agreements in different locations. Three (or possibly more) current The DRPS operations team is currently version copies are desirable if no physical version copy is working with three of these institutions to available and appraised value warrants such. The begin ingesting the initial collections they maximum number of previous version copies is two. All copies are to be located so as to maximize physical safety have targeted for digital preservation. of the records. Previous version copies should be BYU (Provo), however, decided to deaccessioned from the archive when they can no longer implement its own instance of Rosetta in be rendered or they no longer provide a useful purpose. order to perform a proof of concept test in Another example of the Church History 2012 to determine if BYU will bring digital outreaching, cooperative approach to preservation in-house. Because the Church digital preservation involves the Church’s purchased an enterprise license for Rosetta, institutions of higher learning. These BYU was able to install Rosetta without institutions consist of Brigham Young incurring a license fee from Ex Libris. University (BYU) located in Provo, Utah; A final example of Church History’s BYU-Idaho; BYU-Hawaii; and the LDS cooperative approach to digital Business College in Salt Lake City. preservation is related to fixity information Each of these institutions has a records that is required to ensure DRPS data management plan that identifies collections integrity. the institution desires to preserve. Most of the collections do not meet Church History 6
- 7. In order to implement fixity information Secrets of Success as early as possible in the preservation Reflecting on reasons why the Church process, and thus minimize data errors, the History Department is enjoying success DRPS operations team runs tools developed with its outreaching, cooperative approach by the ICS preservation team that create to digital preservation, the preservation fixity information for producer files before team identified the following— they are transferred to DRPS for ingest. Therefore, producer departments need Top down executive support and not worry about generating fixity commitment to digital preservation. information to preserve their records. Internal cooperation between Church History divisions. Looking to the Future External cooperation between Church History (responsible for preservation The Church History Department has also tasks), Church Information and reached out to the University of Utah Communications Services (the Library—offering to help preserve its technology arm), and the records- collection of records that relate to Church producing departments/institutions. history. These are not trivial relationships. The University of Utah is a public university in Salt Lake City. Its Library has Getting down to a more personal level, collected many records over the years about the outreaching, cooperative approach to Utah history. Since the State of Utah was digital preservation explained in this paper founded by pioneer members of the Church is also largely successful because the in 1847, these records are of interest to the various teams involved (i) are willing to Church History Department. learn and understand the needs of others, The University of Utah Library has (ii) recognize and utilize the strengths and expressed interest in the Church History expertise of others, and (iii) are willing to Department’s offer, so future collaboration adopt best practices from each professional will assure that these valuable historical discipline. records are preserved digitally with DRPS. Also, some Deseret Management Conclusion Corporation businesses have recently The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day expressed interest in using DRPS as a Saints is making a substantial investment to service to preserve some of their records. extend the reach of its Digital Records So the outreaching, cooperative model of Preservation System, as described in this digital preservation that is being paper. The benefits of doing this cannot be successfully implemented by the Church of measured in financial terms, however. Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will Those benefits include building character continue to expand as more organizations and strengthening families—both of which come to understand the benefits of utilizing are designed to foster both personal and DRPS to preserve their records of enduring family happiness. value for future generations. 7