COMPUTER 16

NEWS BRIEFS

Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0018-9162/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE

Emory University’s libraries take a multistep approach to archiving born-digital material, a process made challenging by factors such as authors’ past use of now-obsolete technologies.

For centuries, academic libraries have faced chal-lenges in preserving and storing important written documents. Now, they face a

new set of hurdles in preserving and storing born-digital material.

This material—stored on big and small floppy discs, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, ZIP drives, tapes, computers, and other devices—has proven to be more costly and sometimes more dif-ficult to preserve than paper files.

The issue is increasingly impor-tant because many libraries are just beginning to receive large numbers of archives from writers who have

used computers, said Michael Olson, the Stanford University Libraries’ project manager.

Properly archiving such content could change the way scholars work with the material, allowing them to quickly search within and across documents, and more easily compare and contrast them.

In dealing with such documents, librarians face obstacles such as extracting content from and reading material written in obsolete technolo-gies and file formats.

For example, Ben Ranker, senior software engineer in Emory Univer-sity’s Digital Systems Division, said

his school has received donations of documents created via ClarisWorks, MacWrite II and Pro, and early ver-sions of Eudora e-mail.

Some donors have given Emory entire older computers or word-processing machines, noted Erika L. Farr, director of born-digital ini-tiatives for the university’s Digital Systems Division.

The biggest issue with magnetic, optical, and flash media is that they can be in bad condition because of factors such as faulty original manufacturing or a poor storage environment, noted Susan Thomas, digital archivist and project manager

Libraries Face the Challenge of Archiving Digital Material

Original dataAuthorcomputers

Library will never work from this background copy; will only use it to pull additional copies into Gray archive

Copy that libraryuses to do internal work;emulated environment builtfrom this copy

TRIAGE: Original hardware assessed; data pulled

1. 2. 3.

1. 2. 3.

INITIAL PROCESSING: Librarycreates a working repository from original computers

RESTRICTIONS: Library and author agree uponwhich �les to redact. These restrictions can change over time, leading to updates in the White archiveFILE CREATION: Migration of old �le formats (MacWrite Pro, Eudora e-mail, etc.) and detailedingestion of individual �les; new disk imagescreatedPRESENTATION: Public can view available �les via either the emulated environment or via Web applications

REPOSITORY: Ingest and storage of disk images into secure o�ine repository

DISASTER RECOVERY: O�sitestorage of encryped disk images

Copy that is available to scholars andresearchers; presented viaboth emulatedenvironment and individual �les

Grayarchive

Whitearchive

Darkarchive

Source: Emory University

17MAY 2010

Princeton University researchers have created a piezo-rubber material that can help convert body movements, such as those that occur while walking, into energy that could power mobile devices or even medical appliances implanted in the human body. Source: Assistant Professor Michael McAlpine, Princeton University.

New Technique Uses Body Motions to Power Devices

Pr i n c e t o n U n i v e r s i t y researchers have devel-oped a technique for converting body move-ments, such as those that

occur while walking, into energy that could power mobile devices.

Looking for a lternate power sources for wireless devices is important because battery technol-ogy has not kept up with mobile technology in general. The human body represents an unharnessed source of such energy, according to assistant professor Michael C. McAl-pine, the Princeton research team’s leader.

The scientists also hope their technology will help power medical appliances implanted in the human body, such as heart pacemakers or insulin pumps, that currently require

users to have surgery when batteries must be replaced.

The Princeton research team has developed an approach based on printing inorganic, ceramic piezoelec-tric crystals, made of lead zirconate titanate (PZT), onto a flexible, rubber- silicone substance. This creates a material called piezo-rubber, which is compatible with biological tissue and approved in the US for use in cos-metic implants and medical devices.

Piezoelectric ceramics produce an electric current when flexed or subject to pressure. The mechanical energy that the stress produces cre-ates voltage that can be converted into electrical current. PZT can con-vert 80 percent of any mechanical energy applied to it into electrical energy, which is more than other flexible piezoelectric materials.

A first application for piezo-rubber might be placing the material in

at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

Digital preservation can be so complex that it often requires a col-laborative effort among experts in multiple disciplines, including cura-tors, project managers, archivists, software engineers, system adminis-trators, and researchers, said Olson.

Libraries face challenges such as hiring computer-savvy archivists, also in demand by private compa-nies, to catalog material; developing new metadata standards; creating ways to access data stored on obso-lete technologies; guarding against accidental alterations or deletions of digital files; and forecasting schol-ars’ future needs, explained Naomi L. Nelson, interim director of Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL).

Also, libraries must decide whether

to simply save the contents of files in modern formats or try to salvage their original look and organization. In some cases, Nelson said, Emory has done both.

Stanford has become a digital-content-preservation pioneer and is the only US academic research library with a digital forensics lab-oratory (https://lib.stanford.edu/ digital-forensics), opened in fall 2009.

The lab’s heart is the Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device, a workstation that lets archivists dig out data, bit by bit, from current and antiquated storage media while protecting files from corruption. According to Olson, FRED works via technologies such as write blockers, which allow read commands but block write commands.

Emory has given its Robert W. Woodruff Library $500,000 for its

born-digital program, some of which will be used to create a digital foren-sics lab.

Oxford’s Bodleian Library began using forensics several years ago and opened a forensics lab in 2008, noted Thomas.

The US National Science Foun-dation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—which provides grants for educational and cultural proj-ects—have funded a Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preserva-tion and Access. The Task Force held a symposium on the subject in late March.

Ongoing challenges include the continuing proliferation of devices and media formats, said Olson.

Also, added Nelson, users are cre-ating and storing records on sites such as Facebook and Second Life, which complicates preservation.

NEWS BRIEFS

COMPUTER 18

From the analytical engine to the supercomputer, from Pascal to von Neumann—the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing covers the breadth of computer history. The quarterly publication is an active center for the collection and dissemination of information on historical projects and organizations, oral history activities, and international conferences.

www.computer.org/annals

shoes. A user could produce enough power by simply walking to keep a music player or phone charged.

Eventually, the Princeton research-ers want to develop a flexible power

generator that could be implanted in a person’s body. The device could generate energy by using natural body movements such as breathing or walking.

They are currently working on a fully functioning prototype.

According to McAlpine, his team’s greatest challenge was making their piezoelectric material flexible enough for implanting in bodies or cloth-ing. Piezoelectric ceramics are rigid because growing the crystals requires conditions, such as high tempera-tures, that preclude the use of flexible rubbers or plastics.

The researchers solved this problem by making PZT nanorib-bons: strips of material 1/100th of a millimeter thick. The team then transfer-printed the PZT ribbons onto the flexible, rubber-silicone material at room temperature.

The crystals are covered with polydimethylsiloxane to protect them and to shield wearers from the lead the material contains. Tiny wires are deposited on the surface so that the electricity can be harvested.

Several challenges remain before the technology can be commercial-ized, McAlpine said. For example, he explained, someone must develop smart electrodes to effectively access the electrical energy that the new materials generate.

T he Alzheimer’s Association has unveiled a new Web-enabled, GPS-based appli-

cation called Comfort Zone that works with mobile devices to help track patients suffer-ing from dementia who may wander away from where they’re supposed to be.

The association worked with Omnilink Systems to design an application speci� -cally for Alzheimer’s patients based on the company’s FocalPoint location-manage-ment platform.

Several features designed speci� cally for Comfort Zone include a user-friendly inter-face, a panic button that noti� es caregivers, and multiple access levels for di� erent users, said Beth Kallmyer, the Alzheimer’s Associa-tion’s senior director of constituent services.

The service can locate patients in from two to 30 minutes.

A Comfort Zone user with Alzheimer’s carries a stand-alone GPS locator or one

integrated into a mobile device that runs on most platforms, said Steve Hudson, Omni-link’s vice president of strategy and business development. The locator can also be mounted in a car, if the patient is in the early stages of the disease and still driving.

The locator communicates with the Com-fort Zone system via cellular technology.

As the patient’s disease progresses, Kallmyer said, caregivers can change the level of service provided, such as receiving more frequent location reports.

Caregivers can work with Comfort Zone by accessing a page on a website via a pass-word. They could then, for example, set zones within which patients should be at a given time of day or enter the times when they are supposed to arrive at home or work.

The system sends alerts to caregivers when the patient is out of a predetermined

zone or arrives when scheduled at a home or workplace.

The technology can locate people with Alzheimer’s via GPS or triangulation among cellular towers.

Any device manufacturer can contact the Alzheimer’s Association at julie.sipchen@alz.org to � nd out whether its products will work with Comfort Zone.

Hudson said Comfort Zone costs about the same as most cellular telephone services.

Alzheimer’s is a progressive, incurable, fatal brain disease a� ecting about 5.3 mil-lion people in the US and many more worldwide. The disease causes memory loss as it destroys brain cells.

Six of 10 people with the disease will wander o� at some point, and only 4 percent of them can return home unassisted, accord-ing to the Alzheimer’s Association.

USING GPS TO HELP ALZHEIMER’S PATIENTS

19MAY 2010

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runs concurrently with software to detect when deadlocks appear likely to happen and use various techniques to try to keep the problem from occurring, he explained.

Dimmunix’s key weakness, Candea said, is that a machine some-where in a system must experience a bug-related deadlock before the tool can establish defenses.

Also, he noted, the approach doesn’t work with deterministic bugs, which always cause crashes under specific circumstances regardless of thread schedules. However, he added, these bugs are generally easy to fix.

The EPFL group plans to release Dimmunix as an open source application.

News Briefs written by Linda Dailey Paulson, a freelance technology writer based in Portland, Oregon. Contact her at ldpaulson@yahoo.com.

avoid conflicts that can deadlock a system.

In a network, Candea sa id, administrators can install copies of Dimmunix on each machine. The copies communicate and exchange bug signatures so that the host com-puters can be inoculated against deadlocks, even those machines that haven’t experienced the problem yet.

So far, the researchers have shown Dimmunix to be effective on several systems, including the MySQL and SQLite databases, the JBoss appli-cation server, the Apache ActiveMQ message broker, the Limewire peer-to-peer file-sharing client, and the Java Development Kit.

Candea said his team has built Dimmunix to work with applications written in Java, C, and C++ but that the technique could work with almost any programming language.

Typically, developers have used static analysis to detect a propensity for deadlocks in code before it runs, noted Bielefeld University professor Peter Bernard Ladkin. This analysis

Scientists at a Swiss research institution have created a prototype tool that keeps software bugs from caus-ing system deadlocks.

The Dimmunix tool (http://dslab.epfl.ch/proj/dimmunix), which a team at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s Dependable Sys-tems Lab developed, lets individual machines or networks of computers avoid the deadlocks that many bugs can cause.

Researcher George Candea, assis-tant professor and director of EPFL’s Dependable Systems Lab, said the tool’s novelty is its ability to help pro-grams build immunity to deadlocks without intervention from program-mers or users.

Dimmunix doesn’t require a cen-tral server. Instead, users install it on individual computers. The research team has built a prototype that it has verified to work on Linux machines. However, Candea said, their tech-nique is platform-independent and could even run on mobile devices.

On an individual computer, the tool starts working after the first time a bug causes a deadlock.

On an ongoing basis, Dimmunix observes the method calls that pro-gram threads make and the order in which they occur.

The system looks for specific method-call sequences that end with the host machine deadlocking. Dimmunix then creates and stores as a signature the method calls and program-execution processes that led to the problem.

By watching a program’s method-call sequences, Dimmunix recognizes when the bug is about to cause a deadlock again. It then changes the sequence in which threads run, to

Research System Controls the Effects of Software Bugs

Editor: Lee Garber, Computer; l.garber@computer.org