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. 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 softwares
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? 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 data set. Several common risks to 3D
content that we found were software obsolescence, large files which are difficult to open the file
formats 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. 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 not proprietary. We will also be using a combined
metadata model from various schemas so 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.
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. 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.