Abstract. Addressing the preservation and long-term access issues for digital resources is one of the key challenges facing informational organisations such as libraries, archives, cultural institutions and government agencies today. A number of major initiatives and projects have been established to investigate or develop strategies for preserving the burgeoning amounts of digital content being produced. To date, the alternative preservation approaches have been based on emulation, migration and metadata -or some combination of these. Most of the work has focussed on digital objects of a singular media type: text, HTML, images, video or audio and to date few usable tools have been developed to support or implement such strategies or policies. In this paper we consider the preservation of composite, mixed-media, objects, a rapidly growing class of resources. Using three exemplars of new media artwork as case studies, we describe the optimum preservation strategies that we have determined for each exemplar and the software tools that we have developed to support and implement those strategies.
This paper describes a Web-services-based system which we have developed to enable organizations to semi-automatically preserve their digital collections by dynamically discovering and invoking the most appropriate preservation service, as it is required. By periodically comparing preservation metadata for digital objects in a collection with a software version registry, potential object obsolescence can be detected and a notification message sent to the relevant agent. By making preservation software modules available as Web services and describing them semantically using a machine-processable ontology (OWL-S), the most appropriate preservation service(s) for each object can then be automatically discovered, composed and invoked by software agents (with optional human input at critical decisionmaking steps). We believe that this approach represents a significant advance towards providing a viable, cost-effective solution to the long term preservation of large-scale collections of digital objects.
This research aims to develop design guidelines for systems that support investigators and analysts in the exploration and assembly of evidence and inferences. We focus here on the problem of identifying candidate 'influencers' within a community of practice. To better understand this problem and its related cognitive and interaction needs, we conducted a user study using a system called INVISQUE (INteractive Visual Search and QUery Environment) loaded with content from the ACM Digital Library. INVISQUE supports search and manipulation of results over a freeform infinite 'canvas'. The study focuses on the representations user create and their reasoning process. It also draws on some pre-established theories and frameworks related to sense-making and cognitive work in general, which we apply as a 'theoretical lenses' to consider findings and articulate solutions. Analysing the user-study data in the light of these provides some understanding of how the high-level problem of identifying key players within a domain can translate into lower-level questions and interactions. This, in turn, has informed our understanding of representation and functionality needs at a level of description which abstracts away from the specifics of the problem at hand to the class of problems of interest. We consider the study outcomes from the perspective of implications for design.
We report an exploratory user-study in which a group of civil servants with experience of, or involvement in, intelligence analysis used the tool INVISQUE to address a problem using the 2011 VAST dataset. INVISQUE uses a visual metaphor that combines searching, clustering and sorting of document surrogates with free-form manipulation on an infinite canvas. We were interested in exposing the behaviours and related cognitive strategies that users would employ to better understand how this and similar environments might better support intelligence type work. Our results include the observation that the search and spatial features of the system supported participants in establishing, elaborating and systematically evaluating explanatory narratives that accounted for the data. Also, visual persistence at the interface allowed them to keep track of searches and to re-find documents when their importance became apparent. We conclude with reflections on our findings and propose a set of guidelines for developing systems that support sensemaking.
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