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Dissertation Information for Mark Giguere

NAME:
- Mark Giguere

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- SUNY, Albany (USA) (1995)

ADVISORS:
- William Holstein

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Electronic document description standards: A technical feasibility study of their use in the microform preservation of contextual cues embedded in structured electronic documents during digital/analog/digital reformatting

Abstract: Preserving archival, state government agency, electronic records in a manner that ensures access to future generations, potentially thousands of years from the present, requires an inventive approach that simultaneously exploits computer-input and- output microfilming technologies and optical character recognition software along with the use of descriptive markup. No existing research has examined the possibility of an integrated, hybrid preservation solution using these technologies. Microfilm has been selected as the desired storage medium, due to its demonstrated archival longevity, the existence of peripheral computer-output microfilm devices, and the time-independent ability of humans to recapture information written to film and the use of an analog storage medium necessistates the use of reformatting technologies. Losses in contextual information, however, frequently occur during conversion of digital information to an interim analog storage medium. The research addressed here experimentally demonstrated and evaluated the technical difficulty of a process that attempts to mitigate such conversion losses using descriptive markup, and evaluated end user assessments of contextual information losses that occurred during the process of electronic document reconstitution from the analog storage medium.

Contextual cues were identified in a body of SUNY System policy documents by hierarchical analysis of logical and layout structures present. These structures were marked up in SGML and written to a microfilm storage medium. Reformatting technology vendor interview data determined current and future compatibilities with respect to the preservation process. While it was experimentally determined that existing optical character recognition software is unable to support the digital-reconstitution-from-the-storage-medium portion of the process, it was determined that electronic documents reconstituted to paper form using the SGML-implemented descriptive markup functioned as satisfactory substitutes for original policy documents, as judged by various policy end users. While the SGML extension the ODA/ODIF standard may ultimately offer the best opportunity for defining alternative solutions for preserving electronic documents and their embedded contextual cues, this research demonstrates the feasibility and limitations of a low-cost preservation solution for structured digital documents, using public-domain, SGML software. Future research should examine, in detail, the economics of this and similar preservation processes, the uses of non-loss-prone tagging technologies, and other methods of implementing descriptive markup.

MPACT Scores for Mark Giguere

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:12:58

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