National Geospatial Digital Archive

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The National Geospatial Digital Archive (NGDA) is an archive of cartographic information funded by the Library of Congress through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in collaboration with the University of California Santa Barbara, and Stanford University. The purpose of the archive is to collect and preserve geospatial data and images on a national scale, and develop mechanisms for making data available for future generations.

Library of Congress (de facto) national library of the United States of America

The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the de facto national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. The library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; it also maintains the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. The library's functions are overseen by the librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress claims to be the largest library in the world. Its "collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 450 languages."

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) of the United States was an archival program led by the Library of Congress to archive and provide access to digital resources. The program convened several working groups, administered grant projects, and disseminated information about digital preservation issues. The U.S. Congress established the program in 2000, and official activity specific to NDIIPP itself wound down between 2016 and 2018. The Library was chosen because of its role as one of the leading providers of high-quality content on the Internet. The Library of Congress has formed a national network of partners dedicated to preserving specific types of digital content that is at risk of loss.

Stanford University Private research university in Stanford, California

Leland Stanford Junior University is a private research university in Stanford, California. Stanford is known for its academic achievements, wealth, and selectivity; it ranks as one of the world's top universities.

Contents

History

The NGDA is one of eight initial projects funded by the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. It is a partnership between University of California Santa Barbara's Map & Imagery Laboratory at Davidson Library and Stanford University's Branner Earth Sciences Library. [1]

The Branner Earth Sciences Library and Map Collections is the main library supporting the Stanford University School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences on the Stanford University campus and part of Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR). It was named after John Casper Branner, first professor of geology and former president of Stanford University, whose book collection was the initial core of the library. Branner Library contains more than 125,000 volumes, including 2000 serial titles, most of which are related to the earth and environmental sciences. The library also houses a collection of over 270,000 sheet maps and the Branner GIS facilities and services.

Objectives

Cartographic information is used by researchers, students, and other to study many subjects including disaster relief, population growth, and changes in agriculture. The NDIIPP established the National Geospatial Digital Library to several overlapping objectives. [2] The primary objective is to establish an archive of, sometimes, at-risk digital data. The distributed nature of the archive is important in case of a natural or man-made disaster. [3] The project is also developing mechanisms, like a wiki, to make the information available to users. An important goal of the project is building in flexibility so that changes in technology in the future will not damage the archive; this flexibility includes using metadata for all archived data. [3] Other long-term objectives involve agreements between participating institutions about what information will be preserved and how the preservation will be carried out, how copyrighted material will be handled, and how universities can be assured that their faculty and students have access to their archived data. [3]

In biology or human geography, population growth is the increase in the number of individuals in a population. Many of the world's countries, including many in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and South East Asia, have seen a sharp rise in population since the end of the Cold War. The fear is that high population numbers are putting further strain on natural resources, food supplies, fuel supplies, employment, housing, etc. in some of the less fortunate countries. For example, the population of Chad has ultimately grown from 6,279,921 in 1993 to 10,329,208 in 2009, further straining its resources. Niger, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the DRC are witnessing a similar growth in population.

Wiki type of website that visitors can edit

A wiki is a knowledge base website on which users collaboratively modify content and structure directly from the web browser. In a typical wiki, text is written using a simplified markup language and often edited with the help of a rich-text editor.

Metadata data about data

Metadata is "data information that provides information about other data". In short, it's data about data. Many distinct types of metadata exist, including descriptive metadata, structural metadata, administrative metadata, reference metadata and statistical metadata.

See also

Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely. Progressively, digital curation acts as an umbrella concept that includes many subsets appearing as related terms such as digital asset management, data curation, digital preservation, and electronic records management.

A digital library, digital repository, or digital collection, is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, or other digital media formats. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection.

In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and it combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and "born-digital" content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time. The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Preservation and Reformatting Section of the American Library Association, defined digital preservation as combination of "policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time." According to the Harrod's Librarian Glossary, digital preservation is the method of keeping digital material alive so that they remain usable as technological advances render original hardware and software specification obsolete.

Related Research Articles

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is an organization to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalog information (metadata). It attempts to build a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content. It allows people to harvest metadata. This metadata is used to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets.

National Digital Library Program

The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is assembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's rich cultural heritage. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a wide array of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable e-texts. To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of descriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, and introductory texts and programs, as well as indexing the full texts for certain types of content.

Geomatics Discipline concerned with the collection, distribution, storage, analysis, processing, presentation of geographic data or geographic information

Geomatics is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as the "discipline concerned with the collection, distribution, storage, analysis, processing, presentation of geographic data or geographic information". Under another definition, it "consists of products, services and tools involved in the collection, integration and management of geographic data". It includes geomatics engineering and is related to geospatial science.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.

PANDORA was the national web archive for the preservation of Australia's online publications. It was established by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and is now built in collaboration with Australian state libraries and cultural collecting organisations, including the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Australian War Memorial, and the National Film and Sound Archive.

Fedora Commons software for digital asset management

Fedora is a digital asset management (DAM) architecture upon which institutional repositories, digital archives, and digital library systems might be built. Fedora is the underlying architecture for a digital repository, and is not a complete management, indexing, discovery, and delivery application. It is a modular architecture built on the principle that interoperability and extensibility are best achieved by the integration of data, interfaces, and mechanisms as clearly defined modules.

The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL has assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.

An Open Archival Information System is an archive, consisting of an organization of people and systems, that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a Designated Community. The OAIS model can be applied to various archives, e.g., “open access, closed, restricted, “dark,” or proprietary.

Data format management (DFM) is the application of a systematic approach to the selection and use of the data formats used to encode information for storage on a computer.

The United Nations Spatial Data Infrastructure (UNSDI) is an institutional and technical mechanism for establishing system coherence for the exchange and applications of geospatial data and information for UN activities and supporting SDI development activities in Member Countries.

Data wrangling, sometimes referred to as data munging, is the process of transforming and mapping data from one "raw" data form into another format with the intent of making it more appropriate and valuable for a variety of downstream purposes such as analytics. A data wrangler is a person who performs these transformation operations.

The British Library Preservation Advisory Centre raises public awareness of preservation issues in libraries and serves as a nexus for developing and promoting improved preservation management of library and archive materials in the UK and Ireland. It was established as the National Preservation Office by the British Library Board in 1984, and was renamed to its current name in 2009. As of 31 March 2014 the centre is now closed.

The MetaArchive Cooperative is an international digital preservation network composed of libraries, archives, and other memory institutions. As of August 2011, the MetaArchive preservation network is composed of 24 secure servers in four countries with a collective capacity of over 300TB. Forty-eight institutions are actively preserving their digital collections in the network.

Global Map is a set of digital maps that accurately cover the whole globe to express the status of global environment. It is developed through the cooperation of National Geospatial Information Authorities (NGIAs) in the world. An initiative to develop Global Map under international cooperation, the Global Mapping Project, was advocated in 1992 by Ministry of Construction, Japan (MOC) at the time.

DuraCloud is an open source technology project for preserving and archiving digital content. DuraCloud is developed by and hosted as a SAAS by DuraSpace. The DuraCloud open source software is available under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research organization of research institutions

ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, was established in 1962. An integral part of the infrastructure of social science research, ICPSR maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction. Since 1963, ICPSR has offered training in quantitative methods to facilitate effective data use. The ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research offers a comprehensive curriculum in research design, statistics, data analysis, and methodology. To ensure that data resources are available to future generations of scholars, ICPSR curates and preserves data, migrating them to new storage media and file formats as changes in technology warrant. In addition, ICPSR provides user support to assist researchers in identifying relevant data for analysis and in conducting their research projects.

Keeping the foresight of rapidly changing technologies and rampant digital obsolescence, in 2008, the R & D in IT Group, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India envisaged to evolve Indian digital preservation initiative. In order to learn from the experience of developed nations, during March 24–25, 2009, an Indo-US Workshop on International Trends in Digital Preservation was organized by C-DAC, Pune with sponsorship from Indo-US Science & Technology Forum, which lead to more constructive developments towards formulation of the national program.

References

  1. ↑ Janée, Greg. "Preserving Geospatial Data: The National Geospatial Digital Archive's Approach" (PDF). www.ngda.org. Retrieved August 18, 2017.
  2. ↑ "NGDA - The National Geospatial Digital Archive". www.ngda.org. Retrieved 2017-08-18.
  3. 1 2 3 "Setting Storage Standards for Digital Media: An Interview with Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Assistant Director of Geospatial, Cartographic and Scientific Data and Services, Stanford University". www.directionsmag.com. Retrieved 2017-08-18.
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