29 October 2020

Emmett Leahy Award Website

Warm greetings to all the dignitaries at C-DAC and those joining virtually! My sincere thanks to Dr Julie McLeod, the Chair of Emmett Leahy Award Committee (ELAC), Jason Baron (the former Chair), Dr. David Giaretta, and all the honourable committee members for finding me worthy of this recognition. The global pandemic has made this virtual award presentation very unique. Also, receiving such a prestigious honour in the presence of my colleagues and associates in India makes it very special for me.

I feel extremely proud to be a part of the glorious tradition of Emmett Leahy Awards that began in 1967, two years before I was born! Emmett Leahy continues to inspire us in the 21st century as we explore how to adopt his principles for managing the enlarging universe of big data. He was indeed a visionary, who not only foresaw the role of technology in records and information management but also emphasized the need to interpret recorded experience for value creation.

Let me briefly share my exciting journey with all of you. For the last 27 years, I have been involved in developing technology solutions in the field of “digital preservation and heritage computing” as the theme of my professional career. Eventually, this led me to envision the Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation to be established at C-DAC with funding support from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. This was the flagship project under the Indian National Digital Preservation Program. I was fascinated by the idea of the “Trusted Digital Repository”, a new entity, which I wanted to study and develop from scratch. When I formulated the proposal in 2010, neither the TRAC (Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification) metrics were accepted by ISO as a standard nor was the certifying body accredited. My commitment to establishing a trusted digital repository was indeed a leap of faith!

Most of the archiving institutions in India had not even heard of this standard. The challenge was not just multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional but it also required international collaborations. I had conceptualized the project with a user-centric focus, in the sense that it had to address the entire spectrum of activities - right from the development of digital preservation tools and solutions, to the establishment of pilot digital repositories in collaboration with archiving institutions, development of national standard and guidelines, training for archiving professionals and coordination for audit and certification. I was confident of good outcomes despite the struggle, impediments, and adventures during the journey. But I had never dreamt of my nomination for the prestigious Emmett Leahy Award! It came as a pleasant surprise to me! The award has hugely encouraged and inspired me.

I chose a unique approach for our project, which was to simultaneously implement multiple technical interpretations and adaptations of the OAIS reference model for various domains. This experiment resulted in a series of specialized archival systems named DIGITĀLAYA, which focused on the preservation of electronic office records, government archives, e-governance records, audiovisual archives, and digital libraries. “DIGITĀLAYA” is a fusion of English and Sanskrit words. It means to convey “an abode for the digital bits”.

The beauty of the OAIS model is such that, even though conceptually each archival system is similar, the technological implementation can be different. For example, we had to use distributed processing on the cloud to overcome the performance bottlenecks for ingesting massive volumes of e-governance records, which is different if compared with sequential ingesting of digital objects. It became clear that the “one-size-fits-all” approach to digital repository management may not do full justice to domain-specific requirements. This has made me curious to study and compare technical adaptations of OAIS in different domains. Presently, I am interested in expanding the capability of DIGITĀLAYA software to automate the generation of reports based on technical parameters that are necessary for ISO 16363 trustworthy digital repository audits.

I take this opportunity to reflect on the Indian scenario and share my insights for the field of digital records and information management. The Government of India has launched an ambitious “Digital India Program” to ensure that all citizen services are offered electronically by improving online infrastructure and connectivity. But, we need to recognize the fact that Indian government archives are still not geared to manage digital records, which will be produced in massive volumes through the “Digital India” initiative. The central and state-level archives have to be equipped in terms of technical competencies and infrastructure required for preserving the national digital assets. The threat of digital obsolescence is rampant across all domains. Therefore, a comprehensive national policy on digital preservation must be defined on top priority.

Our first-hand experience shows that ISO 16363 certification for Trusted Digital Repositories is capable of assigning priority, resources, and recognition for the digital assets needing long term preservation. Therefore, I hope that in the near future, certified digital repositories will emerge as the backbone of information governance. UNESCO has already adopted the standard-setting instrument on “preservation in the digital era” but we need to create greater awareness among policymakers.

I have always felt that publishing digital resources online can only reduce the darkness in archives as we still don’t have access to the vast knowledge implicitly treasured in records. By and large, common citizens are unable to fully access and use the civilizational memories preserved in archives. Therefore, the archives should be further developed into reservoirs of civilizational knowledge and wisdom. Presently, researchers and scholars have to invest decades of manual and intellectual efforts to tap into this knowledge. Therefore, advancements in the emerging field of digital humanities is certainly a way forward, wherein we can deploy computational methods for interpretation, analytics, and mining into digital archives.

Convergence between digital archives and artificial intelligence can create opportunities to offer knowledge services for various user communities. The UNESCO World Report on “Knowledge Societies” underlines the need to migrate from memory-based to knowledge-based societies while deliberating on the preservation of digital heritage. Thus, we can unleash the wisdom of many generations to integrate and connect the digital archives with our daily lives.

I find many parallels between the working of human memory and records management. Short-term memory and long-term memory are in fact the implicit records retention policies functioning inside the human brain. Our instinctive decision to preserve an experience in the long-term memory is made on the basis of emotions, uniqueness, need, and value associated with it. On the contrary, conventional records retention schedules depend on pre-defined record types and durations. In the future, big data repositories will need intelligent tools to perform content-based analytics, to automatically identify the preservation-worthy information. We require new techniques and standards for making the records intelligible by machines and humans both. Meaningful and content-based discovery from massive big data archives is yet another challenge.

Globally, the governments and businesses are pushed into accepting digital workplaces, online citizen services, virtual courts, virtual meetings, and online transactions as the new normal due to the COVID19 pandemic. The pandemic has accelerated the production of electronic records by leaps and bounds, but without much preparedness for digital preservation. As we know, electronic evidence is amorphous, unlike physical artefacts. The legal admissibility, preservation, and e-discovery of electronic evidence are posing major challenges before the judiciary. Internationally, many of these issues might have been dealt with in different ways, but the documented case studies are scattered all over the Internet. There are some national and regional initiatives to share information but I feel that, as a global community, we should come together to create a “Digital Preservation Body of Knowledge” for shaping the profession.

I would love to work on some of these challenges in my humble capacity.

I would like to pay my tribute to C-DAC for encouraging me to pursue research and development in the field of “Digital Preservation & Heritage Computing”. The ecosystem of C-DAC has always driven me to innovate technological solutions in my domain. Due to C-DAC, I am able to dream, conceptualize and lead the digital preservation mission for developing Intelligent Archiving Tools, Semantic Digital Archives, Cloud-based Large Scale Data Processing and Data-driven Knowledge Services (DKS). Such achievements are possible because of my team’s strong support and their belief in my vision. Therefore, I accept this award on behalf my digital preservation team in the Human-Centred Design and Computing Group at C-DAC.

As I conclude, I wish to thank and acknowledge my mentors and collaborators.

I am deeply indebted to late Dr. Ashok Chakravarti, former Group Coordinator (GC) of R & D in the IT Group, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), who gave me the opportunity to envision the Indian National Digital Preservation Programme. He helped me in realizing the calling of my life. The progress in digital preservation was not possible without the support from successive leaderships in the Ministry, who offered the much-needed continuity and funding support to our project. My sincere thanks to MeitY.

I am extremely grateful to Dr. Mukul Sinha for his invaluable guidance and unwavering support as the chairman of the project steering committee. As my mentor, he was always available to rescue me out of difficult situations and inspire me with his words of wisdom and advice.

I express my profound gratitude to Dr. David Giaretta for being the beacon of knowledge and inspiring me throughout this journey. He not only welcomed me into the Alliance for Permanent Access, which had predominantly European participants, but also made me an integral part of the discussions related to ISO standards and ongoing digital preservation research. It helped me in keeping pace with the international developments.

My special thanks to IGNCA for collaborating with us and using DIGITĀLAYA, the e-Library & Archival System for establishing the NCAA Trustworthy Repository. I am thankful to all the stakeholders and collaborating institutions for their cooperation and support.

Thank you!

Dinesh S. Katre