Saturday, February 5, 2011

What I took away from @ NY LegalTech Jan 31, 2011

What I took away from @ NY LegalTech Jan 31, 2011

I attended two sessions:
• Implement, Monitor and Update Records Policies: Practical Steps to Success
• Impact of Emerging Content Sources on Corporate Compliance and Risk
Lessons Learned-Both sessions provided helpful resources and insightful discussions. The sessions were a reminder to me of how sound Records Management practices are absolutely essential to success of any organization.
Some particular take a ways:
Proactive Records Management-Outstanding point of consideration!
Begin to prioritize GARP
Learn GARP
Promote GARP
Utilize GARP in Records Management Strategy
Begin to grapple with the issue of managing social networks from a records management standpoint
Be cognizant of the legal issues and risk associated with stored electronic information
Considering the multiple tools that are available. How to assess them and how to make them work best for your environment


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Update on Digitization of Vital Records

Update on Digitization of Vital Records

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Friday, February 4, 2011

Write PDF Conversion Application With Just 2 Lines of Code

Write PDF Conversion Application With Just 2 Lines of Code: "Here's how to write a PDF to Word or PDF to HTML applications with just 2 lines of code using BCL easyConverter SDK 3.0:



1 | Set oConverter = CreateObject('EasyConverter.PDF2Word.3')

2 | oConverter.ConvertToWord('C:\input.pdf', 'C:\output.doc')



Download the Resources to Get Started:











For Writing PDF to Word Applications











For Writing PDF to HTML Applications
"

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PDF Online Services are now better than ever

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Heritrix Evaluation/Review

Heritrix Evaluation/Review: "

This is the third installment in a series of evaluations of website harvesting software on the Practical E-records blog.  The first two installments were reviews of the HTTrack open source software and the GNU Wget free utility.  This third installment is a review of Heritrix, the Internet Archive’s open source web archiving software.



Heritrix is an open source, extensible web crawler designed by the Internet Archive for website capture.  It can be downloaded by individual archives to be used for in-house web archiving.   The Heritrix program is written in Java so that it can be run on any platform, but only Linux is supported.  The manual and documentation assume that you have basic Linux knowledge.  On starting this project I had no knowledge of Linux and while I learned enough to install and run the program, my lack of knowledge and the lack of easily accessible output files made my foray into Heritrix ultimately unfruitful.


Systems developers and those who have more experience with technology such as Heritrix will likely find it a great tool, but compared to the other two web harvesting software tools I evaluated—GNU Wget and HTTrack—it was much less user friendly for those with limited technical knowledge.


Before downloading the program and installing it I read over the first couple of sections of the User Manual and skimmed over a couple of tutorials for working in Linux.  The later sections of the manual make more sense if you go over them once you have the user interface set up.  The way Heritrix works on this platform is that you first have to install the program using a Linux command line, but then you can launch a more user friendly Web User Interface for actually setting the parameters of the crawl (unlike with GNU Wget where all the parameters are set at the command line).


To download the program I went to the download page and downloaded the Linux/Mac version (heritrix-1.14.4.tar.gz).  Just like with GNU Wget you need to first open up a command line interface and from there you can install Heritrix to your computer following the instructions included in the manual.   There are also instructions for launching the web user interface in a browser.


Once you have signed in with the username and password that you choose during your installation, you can adjust the parameters necessary to run a crawl in Heritrix.  In Heritrix there are profiles and there are jobs.  Profiles are created to be a template for a crawl job and you can adjust parameters under a profile that could be used for multiple jobs.  In order to run a crawl though you need to also set up a job as well (which can be based off of the profile).  I first set up a new profile called “Default I” and configured the job using the Modules tab and the Settings tab.  Under the Modules tab I adjusted Crawlscope, URI Frontier, PreProcessors, Fetchers, Extractors, Writers, PostProcessors, and StatisticsTracking.  Under the Settings tab I adjusted Crawl Organizer, Max-Toe-Threads, User Agent, Max Retries, and Total Bandwitdth Usage.  These terms are all described in detail in the User Manual and I found the best use of my time was to read the details of each parameter in the manual as I was setting up the job (rather than before) and judging whether it needed to be adjusted.  Having the system up in front of you makes the jargon in the manual make more sense.


Once I set up and ran the crawl it took roughly 8.5 hours to complete and it ran overnight on the computer.  Unfortunately, the output files proved to be too impractical for our use here.   The files are output as .arc files and you need to be able to extract the information from these .arc files in order to read and navigate the captured pages.  This was something I did not have the technical expertise to carry out and we could not find software to render the arc files.  The file format itself is described here and the documentation notes that “, the best way to retrieve a specific object from an archive file is to maintain an external database of object names, the files they are located in, their offsets within the files, and the sizes of the objects. Then, to retrieve the object, one need only open the file, seek to the offset, and do a single read of <size> bytes.”  However, it was unclear how the database is generated and even if we did have a database, we would need a method to access the files using the offsets.  This is a job, in other words, for a systems developer and we  therefore could not look at the pages to determine whether Heritrix captured the pages of our website with any greater or lesser fidelity than HTTrack or GNU Wget.


Evaluation Criteria:



  • Installation/Configuration/Supported Platforms: While available for download for Mac, Windows, and Linux, Heritrix is only supported on the Linux platform.  Downloading the program was easy, but installation requires some basic knowledge of using a command line interface.  Instructions on how to install the program are written out line by line in the manual which facilitates installation (especially for a nonprogrammer).  15/20



  • Functionality/Reliability:  Once the program was set up to run, it ran without crashing or freezing and completed in a timely manner.  I am unable to judge how reliably it captured the site however since I have not been able to view the capture.  10/20



  • Usability:  Not very user friendly.  You need to be familiar with a command line to install the program, but even when working with the browser user interface the terminology can be confusing even with the manual.  It is not very straightforward.   4/10



  • Scalability:  Though I only used it in the capture of one domain, it was specifically designed to be able to handle large scale crawls.  10/10



  • Documentation:  There is a user manual, FAQ, and wiki.  The user manual is absolutely necessary in setting up the program and I suggest spending some time with it.  Although the terminology can be confusing, the manual is still quite good.  I was able to set up an initial crawl by following the manual as I set up my first crawl. 8/10



  • Interoperability/Metadata Support:  Similar to HTTrack and GNU Wget, there is no metadata support that I could find to attach to your finished crawl. The program is designed to capture the site, but does not provide additional areas to add metadata surrounding the capture that I could find. While it would be nice to have this with the program, it doesn’t seem necessary to the function of the program (even though it is necessary to its use in archives).  Most likely, you would be adding ‘collection level’ metadata for the harvested site in an archival descriptive system.  However, it is unclear how one can even find the original files, since the documentation mentions that a external database should provide pointers to the file locations, in the arc file, but there are no instructions for how to capture information into such a database  0/10



  • Flexibility/Customizability:    Heritrix is very dynamic; there are many adjustable parameters when setting up a crawl.  For a novice, this can be quite intimidating and confusing, but for someone with more experience this is a very useful aspect of the program.  10/10



  • License/Support/Sustainability/Community:  Heritrix is an open source software that appears to be widely used.  In addition it was created by the Internet Archive which has wide support and is committed to issues related to digital archiving. 10/10


Final Score: 67/100

"

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Lifestreams: Archives for the Digital Age?

Lifestreams: Archives for the Digital Age?: "

Most archivists would argue that our profession’s major contribution to information science has been the development of specific techniques to preserve the context under which analog records were created and used.  The wide range of appraisal, accession, arrangement, description, and access techniques that we use seek to preserve and make known a single record’s relationship to other records created by the same records producer—as well as records produced by other individuals or groups.  When repositories succeed in preserving provenance and original order, those who use archives and personal papers are able to answer several questions that pertain to all aspects of research:



  • Are  the records are what they claim to be?

  • Do they provide high-quality evidence concerning a person or organization’s activities?  If so, how does that evidence compare to evidence in other, related records?

  • Is the information contained in the records accurate?

  • What external or internal factors may bias or otherwise affected a record’s veracity?


How can archivists ensure that future users will be able to answer these questions?  A person or group scatters digital traces of their activities across many dispersed and heterogeneous systems, including local hard drives, personal and work computers, mobile devices, blogs, social media accounts, and cloud storage devices.


I began to ponder this question several week ago when I leaned that Apple had lost a huge patent infringement case.  Digging beyond the New York Times story, I discovered that Apple was judged by the jury to have infringed on the “Lifestreaming” patents held by a company founded by Unabomber victim David Gelertner and his student  Eric Freeman.  So, I began to read more about lifestreaming here, here, here, here, and here.


As a concept lifestreaming seems to mirror common archival concepts.  As Gelertner described it in his Think Big interview:


[Lifestreaming] was a time-based versus space or surface-based organization of information. The idea was that every electronic asset you had, every piece of information, whether it was an email or instant message, whether it was a file or spreadsheet, whether it was a photo or am MP3, it would appear in a single time ordered stream that mirrored the evolution of your life. So, in principle the first thing on the stream would be my birth certificate, a little electronic version of that, my parents would put my school records, health records, whatever of their child onto the stream. And the stream continues to flow forward through time. I can deal with the – the future is available to me as well as the past. I can search in the past to find whatever I want and everything is fully indexed. If, when I schedule things when I know things are coming up, I put them in the future. When I have something I need to return to that I don’t have time for now, I put it in the future.[. . . ]


[T]he basic idea was to assemble just a chronological time-line heterogeneous with just absolutely everything on it.


While this vision seems utopian, Gelertner and his students developed a formal model (in publications) and computer code to implement lifestreaming.  The concepts have subsequently been incorporated into many successful commercial projects, including, allegedly, Apple. (The case is currently under appeal.)


Regardless of the merits of the case, there are several ways that this concept and lifestreaming tools could be applied to archives.  I previously noted the need for a Coverflow-like application to conduct rapid records appraisal.  But more to the point: what if archives began offering a lifestreaming/aggregation services similar to those listed on the lifestreaming blog?  It would help people and groups organize and control their digital lives in the present, while building a long-term repository of provenance-based research materials–that is unified in location and deposited under a standard deed of gift form.


Over the next few days, my graduate research assistant Liz Schlagel will be testing one such application, and we’ll post more as her experiments move forward.


As an aside, the ways in which Apple implemented lifestreaming is the reason I like my Mac so much better than a Windows or Linux desktop computer.  For example, the idea is at the core of both spotlight and the search function in Mail.app (Apple’s Mail client built into OSX). Mail.app’s search works flawlessly across the four accounts I use on a regular basis, as well as my sent mail archives.    Speculating a bit, I would say that the only reason it was not included in the patent infringement case is that Mail.app is not as heavily used as the other technologies over which Apple was sued.  In any case, it will be interesting to follow this case as it works through appeal."

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PDF/A Sofware and Workflows Article

PDF/A Sofware and Workflows Article: "

The current issue of DLib Magazine contains an excellent overview and evaluation of methods to convert documents into PDF/A, by Dan Noonan, Amy McCrory and Elizabeth Black, looking mainly at conversion tools in Acrobat and Word 2007.  Key findings:



  • In an environmental scan completed before the project, “[v]ery few institutions were even experimenting with the PDF/A format, let alone having adopted it as tool. Early adopters were predominantly in Europe. Towards the end of our project, we conducted a somewhat broader, yet informal environmental scan via an on-line survey. We received fifty-four responses of which seventeen, or 31.5%, noted that their institution had adopted the use of PDF/A as a preservation tool.”

  • “After spending over a year experimenting with various conversion tools and file types, we settled upon conducting implementation testing with existing tools that we had already licensed, Adobe® Acrobat® Pro and Microsoft Word. The tests revealed a number of issues that may impede achieving compliance with PDF/A-1a.”

  • “The working group concluded from our tests that PDF/A is most appropriate for files that are primarily text documents, and that it is significantly easier to get files into PDF/A form if those files are born digital or when one has control over making them digital. Surprisingly, the easiest to make fully PDF/A-1a compliant were those we scanned to PDF/A.”

"

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