Guidelines_en

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SLDR guidelines for the sharing and long-term preservation of oral resources

This page is an attempt to summarise fair practices based on the whole set of features offered by SLDR in its OAIS environment. This draft version makes use a question-answer presentation.

As the producer of an oral resource (an item) you may wish to know whether and how it can be shared and preserved on SLDR. Please read these instructions carefully to figure out a solution that may change over time (as far as access rights are concerned) maintaining a perfect matching of specificities of your resource.

Digitized oral resources (items of various kinds) are often named information packages. This term is borrowed from OAIS and we use it to designate a directory containing files with (almost) no restriction on number, size, hierarchy and file names.

Please contact us for questions and corrections!

Basic questions

What do ‘sharing’ and ‘preservation’ stand for in practice?

• SLDR makes it possible to share documents as current data (on the submission site), as a medium-term archive (via the development platform of CC-IN2P3) or as a long-term archive (via the production platform of CC-IN2P3 associated with the archival platform of CINES). Procedures for accessing documents are identical in these three cases. Thus, producers may easily modify the archival status of any item in compliance with the research program from which it originates.

• Resources shared by individual producers or institutions via SLDR are made available to third persons (users) on a non-commercial basis. Availability may be of several kinds:

  • Free access: a whole item, or some files in an item, may be downloaded by any user of the Net and no trace will be kept of this transaction. (See for instance links at the bottom of the table of contents for item sldr000525.)
  • Controlled access: users must be registered on SLDR and belong to a group for which access to the item is granted. A trace of the transaction is archived on the site; further, the user will be requested to agree with SLDR licence and other conditions spelled out by the producer of the resource.
  • Restricted access: the item is only accessible to persons using a specific id/password. This configuration is suitable for work in progress that needs to be shared by participants in a project.
  • Some metadata are not eligible for public access before a date set by the producer of the stored item in compliance with regulations on personal data. To this effect, SLDR records include confidential fields.
  • The producer of an item may grant its access to privileged users with the following non-exclusive options: (1) only downloading; (2) access to source files and older versions; (3) permission to edit metadata.
• Shared items or files are downloaded from SLDR exclusively. SLDR licence discourages peer-to-peer distribution so that the unicity and completeness of resources iss preserved. Technically, files may be available from our website (currently hosted by Université de Provence) or from our specific distribution site (CC-IN2P3) according to the OAIS model. Users do need to know the actual source of data; they might only notice that downloading is faster when performed from the distribution site.

• Preservation is accomplished in four steps:

  • Items stored on SLDR are protected by backup procedures;
  • At the next stage, every item is also sent to the test platform of the archiving site (CINES), which is convenient for assessing the validity of its content (notably in terms of file formats and encodings). These information packages are automatically forwarded by CINES to CC-IN2P3, the distribution site;
  • Several versions of an item can be piled up to take into accounts its modifications; there is no theoretical limit to the number of versions;
  • Once an item has become stable (e.g. the project has been completed) it is sent to the production platform of the archiving site and assigned a permanent ARK (Archival Resource Key). Again it is forwarded by CINES to CC-IN2P3 for its distribution; at this stage new versions may still be piled up, although it is not good practice to store many versions as the system keeps providing access to all older versions.
• SLDR services are entirely constructed on permanent identifiers and URLs. Thus, for instance, clicking http://sldr.org/sldr000014/download will attempt a download of item sldr000014 irrespective of its item being stored on SLDR website or on the distribution site (CC-IN2P3) in test or production mode. (More examples on this page.)

Who pays for what?

• SLDR services are offered free of charge to the international research community.
• Since its creation, SLDR has been developed and maintained by a team of engineers at Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL, Aix-en-Provence, France), a research unit under Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and Université de Provence.
• The OAIS model has been implemented as a pilot project of TGE-Adonis for the sharing and long-term preservation of oral resources. Currently, long-term preservation is managed by CINES under a delegation of the French National Archive (SIAF). The distribution site is a TGE-Adonis cluster hosted by CC-IN2P3.

My data

Is my data eligible for SLDR?

• SLDR follows a generic sharing/preservation scheme covering resources from a very broad research area: experimental linguistics, field linguistics, speech/singing research, sociology, anthropology, musicology, to quote a few. This research area is not restricted to humanities and social sciences as it includes “hard science” research on speech/singing production and perception.
• Data should claim a scientific interest, patrimonial value, or both, on the long term. However, keep in mind that many cultural productions are already stored on institutional archives; their distribution via SLDR would therefore require a justification in terms of scientific interest.
• Data should be in digital format. SLDR does not provide facilities for digitizing analog recordings, texts or pictures.
• Page Formats is a list of formats compliant with long-term preservation. Any file in a different format may be stored and shared by SLDR but it will not be preserved on the long term. Therefore we strongly recommend using these formats as soon as possible.
• Producers should be able to supply complete descriptive metadata for their deposit. Part of metadata may be kept confidential (see details).

Are there legal issues?

• Data is shared/preserved by SLDR under the responsibility of a producer who may be a free-lance scholar or the member of a research institution.
• Producers should own the right to share/preserve their deposit under the terms and conditions of the SLDR licence.
• In case the full item is in free access, its use should be regulated by a non-commercial Creative Commons license. Currenty the only option supported is Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
• Producers are fully responsible for assigning access rights to items and the files that they contain. These assignments must be compliant with international intellectual property rights and regulations in force in the residence state of speakers/performers.
• Digital documents preserved in French archives are subject to Code du patrimoine, Act of 15 July 2008, by which (art. L213-1) public archives shall be in open access within the limits of cases listed in article L213-2 (see table). Notably, protection of privacy (category AR048) is a sufficient motive for restricting access up to 50 years after the date of recording unless informants sign a permission that may be revoked at any time or/and granted for a limited period. SLDR handles all situations described by French law. However, this law is only applicable to long-term preservation; items stored as current data or medium-term archive may be kept confidential for other reasons, e.g. copyright issues.
• Each item has its own set of access rights independently on related resources. This fact may have an incidence on your decision to create separate items for several resources in a project: for instance, accessing primary data (a sound recording) might be more restrictive than accessing the transcription of this recording.
• Access rights to items or individual files may be modified at any time, including for items stored in the long-term preservation. However, keep in mind that in the latter case access to previous versions remains possible, so that a sophisticated technical procedure might be required for withdrawing access to the old versions. Thereforee it is recommended to ask for long-term preservation only once access rights have become stable over the entire item.
• Practical proceeding with access rights is explained to data producers on page Access rights settings.

Who will assist me?

• Please contact the archive manager for immediate assistance. Further support may be provided by research associates familiar with your discipline.
• The archive manager will help you to organise the packaging of your resource in full compliance with these guidelines, taking advantage of the flexibility of packaging (see details).

Concrete steps

How shall I proceed?

1. Sign up on sldr.org and wait for your registration to be confirmed by an administrator. Your professional status should be clearly spelled out and it will be verified. Your research domain(s) is also an important piece of information for group assignment.
2. Create record(s) describing the item that you wish to share/preserve on SLDR. Beware of selecting the proper item type(s) — primary data, resource, tool or collection — as this type cannot be changed afterwards.
3. Enter descriptive metadata in the way you understand the submission form. You will be granted access forever to the editing all record fields, along with the archive manager if necessary.
4. Creating the record of an item will immediately provide persistent OAI identifier and URL, e.g. oai:sldr.org:sldr000014 and http://sldr.org/sldr000014. It will also create an associated page, e.g. http://sldr.org/wiki/sldr000014, on which you will be invited to expand your description of the item. These URLs will remain stable over item versions and configurations of the distribution site.
5. The archive manager will be informed about the creation of your record(s). S/he will validate your entries and prompt you for additional descriptive information. In the same time, you will discuss access rights and negotiate the uploading of data in the storage area associated with your entry.

Packaging an item for its long-term preservation and distribution

• If you have some background training in sharing digital material, read the following page carefully: Packaging items.
• Get in touch with our archive manager to take the best advantage of available solutions, even in case you have no prior experience or if our written guidelines do not sound clear enough.
• SLDR is still in its development phase. Therefore we welcome any challenging situation that will help us improving the service!

What will be the next steps?

1. In the case of a audio/video/text corpus you should send us scans of informed consent forms signed by all participants. A simple forme is here: http://sldr.org/doc/forms/ConsentementModele2_en.doc. A more elaborated one is here: http://sldr.org/doc/forms/ConsentementModele_fr.doc which implies a complimentary licence such as: http://sldr.org/sldr000761/licences//LicenceStRemy.pdf.
2. As the producer of an item you have access to its users' community, i.e. the list of persons who downloaded it, agreeing with the SLDR licence and your specific terms and conditions if any. For instance, http://sldr.org/sldr000014/com.
3. Once an item is on line you will be able to send requests for the storage of several versions on the test platform of the archival platform, and later to send a request for its long-term preservation.
4. As the producer of an item you retain the right to modify its descriptive metadata. Modifications will be automatically forwarded to the long-term preservation and distribution services. Modifying metadata does not yield a new version. (This is a great feature of the SLDR model.)
5. To create new versions you will need to contact the archive manager and negotiate an uploading of upgraded data, following which the item will be resubmitted to the OAIS framework.