Alex Kinnaman  0:00  
Hello, everyone, my name is Alex Kinnaman, the Digital Preservation Coordinator at Virginia Tech University Libraries. And I'm here to give you a quick rundown of our work on creating a 3D preservation model for cross-disciplinary use. 

Alex Kinnaman  0:11  
So a bit of background, we have these really cool bugs, and the Library received a CLIR grant for our project Entomo-3D to digitize the Virginia Tech Insect Collection. These insects are used for educational purposes, but they're very fragile, and it's difficult to interact with them. So we are using photogrammetry and multiple software's to digitize a portion of this collection in 3D, and the rest in still images to help increase interaction with this collection. So how do we preserve all of these bugs? 

Alex Kinnaman  0:35  
The goal here is reproducibility. I worked with three different 3D experts on the Virginia Tech campus who work with three types of 3D and VR data and formats to get an overview of what an expert in the field would need to open, understand, and manipulate an unfamiliar dataset. Several common risks to 3D content that we found were software obsolescence, large files, which are difficult to open. The file format support and updates for the popular OBJ format ceased about 15 years ago. There's a heavy reliance on proprietary software and hardware and also a lack of community standards. And that it is essential that we have documentation on provenance to ensure open ability and reproducibility. 

Alex Kinnaman  1:12  
So our initial results from these interviews are that first we will be using X3D as the preservation format. X3D is an ISO standard, it's open, it's non-proprietary. We will also be using a combined metadata model from various schemas so that we can pick and choose what we can reasonably collect. We will also be capturing provenance at every step and capturing granular technical metadata. And finally, we are beginning to understand that the purpose of the object determines what metadata and documentation is really necessary for understanding and reproducibility. 

Alex Kinnaman  1:41  
So now I am reaching out to the greater digital preservation and 3D/VR community with an IRB-approved research study to investigate community-adopted workflows. We invite any digital preservation professionals and those who produce and or curate 3D and VR content to participate in a 15-minute web based survey. We're really excited for this feedback, and we'll publish the anonymized results and our final workflow when it is implemented. 

Alex Kinnaman  2:04  
Thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoyed the sneak peek of the amazing work our 3D Texture Artist has done on these bugs. See more info on our initial interviews and more 3D bugs at these links!