Right, now it's my pleasure, my real pleasure to introduce Donna Mitchell. Donna is a senior midwife at Birth Village in South Indian India, has been there since 2013, and she's the creative, creator of the Active Moments Fitness Programme. She's a veteran midwife practicing since 1998 in the deep south in the USA and has worked across all birth and midwifery settings in over five countries. She's a dynamic and committed midwife who stands for women's rights and choices and is a powerful advocate for the continuing evolution of the deeper feminine through birth and beyond. Being a part of a woman's journey in pregnancy and birth is a cornerstone to all the projects she has worked on. Over the past decade, Donna has designed the Active Momma Workout combining stretching, yoga, dancing, inner relaxation and meditation with a specific focus on labour preparation orienting specifically on women's bodies and pregnancy anatomy. This is now a certified course and is used by trainers for prenatal as well as postnatal fitness. Along with working for Birth for Change in India, she has worked with Tejas Home. This is a home for minor girls who are pregnant due to violence and need a safer, respectful atmosphere to wait out for pregnancy and birth. As a senior consultant midwife at Birth Village, she has been instrumental in setting up protocols and practices, mentoring and training the midwifery team in all aspects of midwifery at this independent birth centre for the past seven years. She also has special modules covering nutrition and fitness and also teaches reproductive health and preconception classes along with menopause health. Donna is mother to nine home birth children all living in the USA. She has homeschooled her children, runs a legal covering for home educators in Alabama as well as doing consulting work for parents wanting to understand a child-led education. So it's my great pleasure to introduce to you, Donna, just let me give her the presentation. Can I come find her? Can you hear me? Oh, I can hear you. Excellent. I'm just trying to find to give you to make you present. It was awesome, Chris. It was awesome. Oh, there we are. I don't think I knew that much about myself. There you go. I can't find you in the list. Oh, there you are. Right. You now have the slides. All right. Thank you so much to Chris and Janine and the IDM. Happy BIDM day to everybody. I'm going to echo, so I'll try to get over that. So I'm in India for the past seven years and I created this fitness class. So let's get into the presentation and see some pictures of some beautiful, beautiful women. The first thing that I want to start with is that women are the best care providers for their baby. Lost Donna's. Repair to have lost Donna's sound bear with us a second while we try and sort it out. Am I back? You are back. Yes, Donna. Okay. Thank you. My foundational belief was that women always have an intuitive ability to know what is best for themselves and their babies. So when I created this program, I wanted to create a safe and enjoyable framework from which they could work within this framework, listening to their intuitive voice to how they should move, where they should move, and when they should move. The problem is they have a huge external voices, pressures, beliefs, misinformation about movement in particular. But often overrides that internal voice. So that was my main goal, trusting women to know what is best for their babies. So as an American coming to India, of course, there's a huge cultural, societal, and religious beliefs that I don't understand that I'm just coming into. So I wanted to make sure that I created a fitness class that would benefit women no matter where they were coming from. All the women won a natural birth. So I really felt strong about including the somatic arts, relaxation, body and mind, yoga, stretching, dance, and movement. This is really, really important to me. A long history of exercise programs and theories going all the way back to the 1940s. So in 1940, Grant Lee Dick Reid basically talked about deep, abdominal breathing that can interrupt the fear, tension, and pain cycle in labor. In 51, Helen Herdman developed the first exercise program with the birth squat emphasis rather than the fitness squat. Elizabeth being like in childbirth to a 12-mile hike. In 1989, Sheila was the first woman to discuss women tapping into their own rhythm of labor. In 1995, Elizabeth Noble had exercises to benefit childbirth. And Karen Diffler in 1997 even combined Callison exercise with aerobics-like dance. And then there's numerous dance fitness programs that are offered for the last several years. With all that said, what does the latest research recommend? Because really when women come to us and their families in India especially, they want to know what is the research? Why are you having these women do all these crazy, crazy things? When we think it's unsafe, so we show them the research. Across the board, the studies say that regular exercise improves or promotes physical fitness. It prevents weight gain, decreases gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, operative vaginal birth, C-sections, and postpartum recovery time. It can also be essential in preventing or decreasing body pain, sciatic pain, reduces pain disability as well as depressive orders in the postpartum time. There is no credible evidence to prescribe bed rest for prevention of preterm labor and should not be routinely recommended, though a full fitness class may be modified. Women who engage in medium intensity activity before pregnancy can continue activity during pregnancy. We use a scale called the PRE, perceived rate of exertion. Six is sedentary, 20 is the athletic level, so we ask women to keep it between 11 and 15 on their perception. And again, giving women information, they will be spot on with where they should be. We can trust women to do that. And the recommendation is 150 minutes within three days, but also daily activity. You'll notice all these women doing this workout. The size is defined as a physical activity consisting of planned, repetitive, or even structured movements to improve health. And of course, modifications may be necessary accordingly. So that's something that we also look into. Range of men, center of gravity, all of these things are changing during the gestational time. So during workout, we always try to make sure that we have modifications available. And it's shown that women who even have no healthy lifestyle to be encouraged to be pregnancy as an opportunity to embrace a healthier routine for herself. Is everybody still okay? Everybody hearing me? So let's talk about what are some of the conclusions. And again, this is coming from ACOG, from American Journal of OB, from the British Journal of Sports and Medicine with the Canadian Study in 2019. So these are all pretty much across the board. So there are, in the absence of contraindications, research shows fewer newborn complications and improved maternal health benefits. So physical activity is not associated with increased risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, preterm birth, premature ruptured membranes, neonatal hypoglycemia, low birth weight, or birth defects. And that's a really important thing to remember because this is some of the issues that some prenatal and family members have shared. And more physical activity, especially duration, frequency, and volume is associated with greater benefits, especially if they start in the first trimester. There's evidence of less gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, depression, and weight gain. Prenatal exercise should be considered the frontline therapy for reducing the risk of all pregnancy complications and enhancing maternal physical and mental health. And this also includes women who are inactive, overweight, or obese. But the reality is less than 15% of women will exercise the 150 minutes in three minutes. Part of this is education, part of this is family, and especially in India that is a big hurdle that we have to get over is family being very, very negative towards that. These are the five things that are often studied in research to see how the fetus works with the maternal exertion. So they're assessing fetal cardio and hemodynamic responses for central function, birth weight, fetal movement, and how the fetus protects itself. And we're going to get more into that as we get further along. So the effects on newborns. It is shown that exercise during pregnancy can positively influence developing systems for the fetus, improve neuro and motor development, and thus leading to infants who are more adept at movement and presumed to be more active. It all suggests it reduces childhood risk of obesity.  So the babies are able to deal with the labor as well as it follows them into adulthood. So there is definitely a connection between increased blood flow because of a far faster heart rate and brain maturity for newborns. So these are the recommended, some of the recommended exercises. There's brisk walking, cycling, stationary, though there's a story we'll be telling you about non-stationary cycling, aerobic exercises, dancing, resistance with weight and bands, stretching, water aerobics, yoga, and swimming. Now bear in mind that there's going to be women who come to us with a higher level of activity so they may be doing more than this. So the main thing we do in our class is dancing. Because dancing is a pretty amazing release of four different hormones. Dopamine, which is pleasure, reward, and affect movement. Serotonin, which regulates anxiety and mood swings. Oxytocin, which we all know is love and bonding and well-being and endorphins, which is euphoria, general well-being, and minimized discomfort. So dancing releases all four of those really, really nice hormones for women. Outcomes. Regular exercising can enhance the fetal protective mechanisms providing there is no utero-procental insufficiency or any other contraindications. So this is low-risk women who have no contraindications. It also suggests that heart rate abnormalities, cord entanglement, and the presence of myconium is significantly reduced for women who are exercising. And women who participate in regular exercise report lower levels of perceived exertion during pregnancy and labor. Again, this is key. The body sees a work-out session and labor as exertion. And therefore, when women are challenged in work-out to know what their challenges are, how to deal with this challenge in labor, they actually do the very same thing. So they're definitely more, they're able to deal with labor a lot better. So there are some contraindications, and this is something that the women should be discussing with their care provider. Premature labor, rupture of membranes, bleeding, per centiprity after 28 weeks, preeclampsia, incompetent cervix, IUGR, uncontrolled hypertension, gestational diabetes, thyroid issues, cardiorespiratory disorders, and fever. That's not to say that we don't modify classes, but these will definitely be the ones that the care provider, whether it's a midwife or doctor, and the fitness person who ever is teaching, should know these are contraindications. Now, there are relative contraindications also. These are ones that may or may not create issues where they're doing a full fitness class, but we can modify or we can do something different. Maybe they don't come in for the full fledged cardio, but they would come in for yoga, stretching, and a definitely meditation. So meditation is definitely good all across the board. And these can occur before the pregnancy or during the pregnancy. And so this again is the woman is keeping a really good conversation with her care provider to know what she's able to do. And this is loss, spontaneous miscarriage, anemia, malnutrition, eating disorders, twins after 28 weeks, excessive overweight, sedentary life, and asthma. So there are some guidelines. So for the pregnancy class, we're very aware of individual tolerances. And I can look at a class of nine or 10 or 11 women, and I can tell how they're doing. How do I need to modify the class? What can I do for them because maybe they're 41 weeks or maybe they're not feeling well or they are stressed. So I have to understand what's going on with the individual women. The prior fitness and level training of the women, somebody who's a dancer or a yoga teacher who's coming into class is going to have a higher tolerance of what they're able to do. And then also making sure that each one has proper medical assessment, whether that's the midwife, whether it's her doctor, whatever it is. This is a really important aspect. And fitness professionals have a lot of questions for appropriate individual needs. How to make the work out safe, enjoyable and beneficial, which is the most vital thing for women. It's safe, enjoyable and beneficial. Effective and alleviating maternal discomfort and provide a good prep for birth. And then the fitness trainer and we tend to understand what is the interactions on the physiological systems. And then we also have internal exertion, metabolism and the respiration of the woman. And also one of the things that I really want to relate to women is that class, you know, is we want to do daily life. So when we're doing squats, I say women you're going to be squatting to pick up your child.  So we're doing squats, we're doing squats because we want to be powerful in walking. Strong core, strong PVA because that's the basis of walking, getting in and out of the car. And what I also tell the women in classes, you know, the fastest creature on earth is a toddler. If you don't have the agility and the strength to go after your toddler, then we need to work on that. This is what we're working towards. Let's be real, women have always been a part of my class. So I think for my classes, classes are abnormal ways of getting women the movements they need to make a healthy pregnancy and labor in birth. We have to do this because our society does not have women doing walking in the villages, taking care of their herds of cows, going to the river to wash clothes. We have very much a sedentary life. So this is why we have a class. This is why we have this daily life. Sorry, I'm okay. Is everybody else hearing it three or four times? Is everybody enjoying the pictures? I hope so. These are some pretty amazing women. I always tell the women, they are on the edge of India. The cutting edge of India making changes. This is the real main thing. So in designing a two-hour class, I do two hours three times a week. One is deep breathing, assessment. One thing I told women in class never say I can't do this. Always put it in what can I do today, which may include some modifications. We learn breathing and posture. To me, the two most important things is breathing and posture to make sure that their body is ready for whatever work they're about to do. We do warm-ups. It could be stretching yoga. It could be a dance song. We also do exercises with the medium intensity, which is 11 to 15 on the P-R-E. We often address specific areas of discomfort, whether it's upper strength, pelvic movements, glutes. The one thing I really want to make sure I do is do anatomical correct names for everything because really some women don't know anything about their pelvis. They don't know the parts of their pelvis, they don't know the parts of their abdominal really motivates them to keep going and come into class. We often have partner days, so then women are working extra hard when they have to bring their husbands in to see just how hard they've been working. So that's a pretty exciting thing. So there are things that can positively or negatively impact. Positively, somebody's already already active before pregnancy, loves social aspects of other women, communicates with others about her pregnancy. She's really excited. It's a fun and beneficial workout. And also another thing we see is sometimes women who've come with C-sections that may have been traumatic or they feel unnecessary, and then meet other women who are also going for V-backs. And they really, they really feel a connection. So they really, really want to come to the class, hear the stories, and then as women have babies, they hear those stories also. Negatively, we just be women who are not used to movement, who come to class new, they're overwhelmed.  I had women come in full burkas, and full kirtas, and duplatas, and it gets very hot really quick. Whether exercising during pregnancy is good, and traveling to class can be a huge barrier which causes negativity. Cultural restrictions often women don't go anywhere without their family. So coming to class may include their mother, their sister-in-law, their father, their brother. So we have to really keep that space sacred and safe just for women. But these can be negative things when women are not used to being in a situation like a day or a religious festival. And so they're not eating well, so they have low energy and dehydration. So these are all, often we have women come in. Sometimes they bring their older child with them to the workout because they want that bonding. They want to be part of it. And then other times women come by themselves because with an older child and being pregnant with the second one, they want that connection just with that baby because they had it with the first one. So both of them are valid reasons. And it's up to the woman, again, that intuitive voice, what do I need today? And this is really, really important to encourage. Here we have a woman who brought her second, her first child. And you can see she's still doing the workout. The child is, she may be modifying a little bit. And the thing about it is this is a huge release of obstetism for the whole class. Everybody loved it. Everybody thought it was cute. So it's good for her. It's good for the child and it's good for the class. So some of my class elements are affirmations to prepare for labor and birth. We again teach anatomy and physiology. I want women to know about their bodies, muscles, ligaments, fascia, how the pelvis moves, even the importance of the diaphragm, which is part of the labor process. The diaphragm helps get a baby out. So the breeding is really important. Building stamina with body movements because again, birth requires stamina. And understanding the parasympathetic rest or the sympathetic flight or flight or freeze nervous system and how to use each one of them in any situation and why they would use one or the other. And then proper posture and breathing technique. This is again, a number one thing that I try to teach women. Again, here's family and friends discouraged them often. They often say stop all yoga. Even if it's a yoga teacher or someone has been doing yoga for years, they tell them not to go swimming because the baby will drown, water will get into the vagina, the baby can't breathe, not let him go to the pool or the seat. So there's a lot of nips around water. Exercise and cardio will affect a premature baby or a small baby or a fetal demise. Do not bend or squat because your water will break and no sitting on a hard floor. I'm going to speed up a little bit just because we got a little bit of time for questions. Medical care providers say stop all exercise even for an SGA baby with no advice to calories. Do not climb the stairs because exercising will create an oxygen deficit to the baby, which we know is opposite. And often using the threat of premature labor or small baby. So this is a story of a woman. She's on her third trimester and I'm a cyclist here and she is a cyclist and she would come to classes on her cycle. So we actually did a 21 kilometer cycle marathon. Really a lot of fun and you see her blue ribbon finishing award. And actually when she came into the birth center, she actually she gave us at least two minutes to get her baby because as soon as she walked in, we got our gloves on baby is born. So that was a really nice thing for her to do. So here's a class and we brought Halloween to India. And of course women just jump into it. So if you look really closely, you see the avocado, you can see the soccer ball. The woman, the third woman is just a very ghost story that's here in South Carolina. We have a superhero, a sleuth. We have all sorts of things and I'm in my rainbow big. So women really enjoy a fun class. And then Hannah meditation with Hannah is always a really nice way for women to relax when there's a lot of stress going on in their life. That's really, really important. So the women who have birthed their first baby without exercise and did with the second one basically said they felt babies were in a better position. They understood better what labor actually was because nobody had told them what it was. They felt more confident about their body. They felt more confident about that they could birth their baby and again enjoyed working out with like minded women with a common goal.  They appreciated the energy they have, especially when they're running after their second one. Sometimes they weren't as well about coming into class with their second babies, but they always said that they missed it and they really did try to come. Now my observations is a midwife. There's a lot of things about this, but the main thing what I wanted to get across is their ability to meet the challenges of whatever the labor woman has with stamina, commitment, focusing and strength. This is my main goal. No matter what the labor throws at them, no matter what the labor is, they have the stamina and the ability to finish it in their support team. Again, another class and there's various gestational weeks, different parodies, variety of languages, cultures, backgrounds. But the goal is they all want a natural birth. They all want to exercise. They all want to feel good. And this is really the binding that creates so many friendships within this class. So then we had a lot of women asking for me to teach them this unique class so that they could bring this class into their communities because people from all over India were coming to my class and they wanted to offer this to their pregnant ladies in their community. So we decided to create the Master Active Mama's class. It's a three day intensive course, 12 hours a day with a three hour test. You'd be amazed how everybody is just astounded at the test. I don't know what it is. Women from all over India attended. They had we have doulas, childbirth educators, older teachers, physiotherapists, midwives, nurses, and they all enjoyed it. And they all learned something about how to work with pregnant women, individually, as well as in a big huge group. And to me, that was the most important thing. So you saw this woman Conchin in several of my pictures. She is a third trimester, Kalari student, which is the modern martial arts originating in Kerala, her and her husband. And she just took some amazing pictures to show that she was doing this before the birth, for her pregnancy. And she continued in her pregnancy. And it's just an it's just an ideal picture of a very strong woman who knew what she wanted to do with her body and she continued doing it. So this is a quote that I really, really love. Laughter, song and dance create emotional connections. They remind us of the one thing that truly matters when we are searching for comfort, celebration, inspiration and healing as we are not alone. This is by Brené Brown. And the women on the left or the midwives of birth village that I work with, we're at a beach party actually. And the first class that we had on the teacher training courses on the right. So this was their first class and we even have a 10 year old child there who's one of my best assistants ever Eva. So thank you for listening. And is there any questions that I can answer? I think we have a little bit of time. Thank you, Donna. That's that's wonderful timing. We certainly have a good 10 minutes or so if people would like to ask any questions in about 10 minutes time, I will wrap up the session with a couple of closing slides. So if you have any questions, type them in the chat box and Donald answer if you would like to actually voice yourself, we'll see if we can sort your microphone out. And I have to say I really enjoyed the presentation too, Donna. It was it was really inspiring and excellent to see how you're empowering women. Chris, I have a question. Yes, go. So thank you, Donna, for a absolutely amazing presentation. Some comments are very, very positive. They're saying that you bring women alive and they're desperate to get online class details and they would like your guidelines. But I'd like to ask you one question. How difficult was it to convince partners, male partners to support their women to access their classes in the first place? Well, I have to say we have, for the most part, a captive audience. Most of these women are coming to birth village to do a natural birth. So exercise is a high recommendation and their husbands are supporting them. So if their husbands are there, I mean, they don't necessarily want to come to class, but they're there to support their wives. And once they get there, they're actually enjoying it. So I don't think it's that hard. Even some of the ones that husbands did actually horrible in class, they came there to support their wives. So I don't think it's that big of a deal. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Janine. There's a couple of questions in the chat here. So one firm from Red Miller, which is how can we get this program help to get this program happening throughout the country rather than just birth village? That's what we've been doing is we've had a class and coaching and Goa. And we really wanted to have one, of course, this year and a couple other places that that's not been there. So we're just trying to figure out when's the next time we'll be doing a teacher training and definitely keep track of birth village on the Facebook and they will announce any dates as far as the reaction of medical providers. I don't know. I mean, there's still a lot of providers that are wanting women to exercise. I don't think they're understanding it, the level of exercise that we're doing. They're thinking really small walking, a little bit of yoga. But we really haven't seen a lot of medical providers as far. I know they're discouraging women when they will mention that they will discourage them. I think a lot of times we even have mothers who the mothers of the client who've been very much against everything until they'll actually bring them to class. And we've actually had mothers come to class with their daughters and do the workout with us. And so sometimes their exercise class is a game changer because women, they maybe remember their grandparents moving a lot. They remember that, you know, there's always been activity. And so it brings out that intuitiveness about movement is good for pregnancy. So sometimes we get a lot of converts from the parents of the client by then coming to the exercise class. Well, that's good, because if you can get to that generation, then there's hope for the generation of mothers themselves if their parents are interested. Jean asked another question. Are you are you going to visit other countries back to the USA or maybe Europe or whatever to encourage other providers on your technique? We would definitely love to bring it outside of India. That's been always been on the books as far as taking it to countries where people want it. I have to say in the US, I don't know how well that would go because as a midwife in the US, I don't see my clients doing this kind of class, mainly because the distance, the distance is so far. But we're always open to going to other countries and teaching this. We have a few more minutes if anyone has any more questions. I know that during during the labor off and then remember the words I've said, the affirmations I've given, they ask for the workout song so they can do movement on the stairs. They can do all the all the medium intensity during their labor. So these are things that are really embedded into their minds and into their bodies so that in labor they're able to bring forth that intuitive voice of movement. And this is really, really important. Thanks everybody. It was easy to start classes because the women coming to birth village wants the best optimal pregnancy and movement is part of it. So we didn't have a lot of problems getting people to classes. We've had more problems getting people outside of that mindset who are still seeing medical care providers to come into class. It's also really nice to see testaments from people who know your work, who have attended this presentation. That's really, that's really good. Yes, a lot of women have. It's been amazing. I really am thankful to them that they stepped outside of their comfort zone and societal beliefs and really decided that they were going to do this and everybody just really goes to the occasion to make this exactly what it is. Excellent. There's a technical question from Rubio there. Can they do, can you do deep squats for a long time if the baby's head is not engaged? This is not, I can't answer that because it has to be an individual case. So that's something that I'd be able to give information on. Do I find demographics? Yeah, all societal levels, religious levels, everything.  So definitely it's there and it's been very nice to see them. And it was, yeah, it was easy to start a class. Excellent. That's good. Thanks. Probably time for one last question and then we'll, we'll wrap up the presentation. I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask them because it was quiet.  I think that I have made a difference in the women who have come to me and I'm hoping in by training and they can take it into their communities because really that's my goal is I want to bring it to them so that they can take it in their communities because that's the way I think it should be. But I think I've definitely given a lot of people a lot of things to think about when it comes to movement and exercise and fitness. And I think from talking to women that have been in my class, they definitely will bring that down to their children. They will bring it into their families, they'll bring it into their communities. Whether they teach it or not, they are talking about it and that's where the change is going to come in India is these women who are so brave coming into class and they'll take it to their communities with their conversation. That's your legacy then. And what a fine place to finish. So I'm going to take back the presenter and say thank you very very much Donna for a really interesting presentation and obviously lots of people were interested in the audience as well so thank you very much for that. A couple of credits from Donna and some references.


The proposed reliability evaluation model considers the limited storage period and multi-stage degradation of self-recovery products. It incorporates the competitive failure concept, shock process, and self-recovery feature. Additionally, the difficulty of adding variables to a reliability model was addressed by using the Steelech's integral. The model's parameters were analyzed and its feasibility and theoretical reference values were demonstrated. This article was authored by Xinhang Wang, Baoyan Wang, Yichun Nio, and others.


Okay, I'm Dave Rosenthal from the LOX. Lots of copies keep stuff safe program at Stanford University Libraries. As with all my talks, you don't need to take any notes or ask for the slides because the text of the talk with links to all the sources will go up on my blog shortly. Okay, one of the preservation networks that the LOX program runs is the Clocks Archive, a large dark archive of e-journals and e-books. We operate it under contract to a not-for-profit organization jointly run by publishers and libraries. Earlier this year we completed a more than year-long process that resulted in the Clocks Archive being certified to the Trusted Repository Audit Criteria track by CRL. We equaled the previous highest score and received the first ever perfect score for technology. At documents.cox.org you'll find all the non-confidential material on which the auditors base their assessment. And on my blog you'll find posts announcing the certification, describing the whole process we went through, discussing the lessons we learned, and describing how you can yourself run the demos that we put on for the auditors. Although CRL's certification was to track, the documents include a finding aid structured according to ISO 16363, which is the official ISO standard that's superseding track. If you look at the finding aid or at the voluminous ISO 16363 documents you'll see that many of the criteria are concerned with economic sustainability. Among the confidential material the auditors requested were budgets for the last three years and projections for the next two showing revenue and expenses. We actually gave them five year projections. This is an area where we had a good story to tell. The LOX program got started with grant funds from NSF, the Andrew Mellon, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Sun Microsystems. But grant funding isn't a sustainable basis for long-term preservation. In 2005 the Mellon Foundation gave us a two-year grant which we had to match and at the end of which we had to be off grant funding completely. The LOX software is free and open source. The LOX team charges for support and services. So achieving this economic sustainability, which we've been off grant funding for more than seven years now, has required a consistent focus on minimizing the cost of every aspect of our operation. Because the LOX systems lots of copies trades using more disk space for using less of other resources such as lawyers, I've been researching in particular the cost of storage for some years. In what follows I want to look at the big picture of digital preservation costs and their implications. And it's in three sections. The current situation, cost trends and what can we do. So the current situation. How well are we doing at the task of digital preservation? So attempts have been made to measure the probability that content is preserved in some areas, e-journals, a thesis and the surface web. So in 2010 the ARL reported that the median research library received about 80,000 serials. Stanford's numbers support this. Keeper's Registry, across its eight reporting repositories, reports just over 21,000 preserved in about 10 and a half thousand in progress. Thus under 40% of the median research library's serials are at any stage of preservation. So Louis Farrier and his co-authors compared information extracted from journal publishers websites with the Keeper's Registry and concluded that more than 50% of all journal titles and 50% of all attributions were not in the registry. The Hyperlink project studied the links in 46,000 US E-theses and determined that about 50% of the link to content was preserved in at least one web archive. Scott Ainsworth and his co-authors tried to estimate the probability that a publicly visible URI was preserved as a proxy for the question how much of the web is archived. They generated lists of random URLs using several different techniques including sending random words to search engines and random strings to the bitly shortening service. Then they tried to access the URI from the live web and they used Memento to ask the major web archives whether they had at least one copy of that URI. The results are somewhat difficult to interpret but for their two more random samples they report URIs from search engine sampling have about a two-thirds chance of being preserved and bitly URIs about one-third. So are we preserving half the stuff that should be preserved? Unfortunately there are a number of reasons why this simplistic assessment is wildly optimistic. First, the assessment isn't risk-adjusted. As regards to scholarly literature, librarians who are concerned with post-cancellation access not so much with preserving the record of scholarship have directed resources to subscription rather than open access content and within the subscription category to the output of large rather than small publishers. Thus they've driven resources towards the content at low risk of loss and away from content at high risk of loss. Preserving Elsevier's content makes it look like a huge part of the record is safe because Elsevier publishes a huge part of the record but Elsevier's content is not at any significant risk of loss and is at very low risk of cancellation. So what have those resources achieved for future readers? Very little. As regards of web content, the more links to a page the more likely the crawlers are to find it and thus other things like robots.txt being equal the more likely it is to be preserved but equally the less at risk of loss. Second, the assessment isn't adjusted for difficulty. A similar problem in risk aversion is manifest in the idea that different formats are given different levels of preservation. Resources are devoted to the formats that are easy to migrate but precisely because they're easy to migrate they're at low risk of obsolescence and the same effect occurs in the negotiations needed to obtain permission to preserve copyright content. Negotiating once with a large publisher takes a certain amount of work but it gets a large amount of very low risk content. Negotiating with a small publisher takes not much less work and gains a small amount of high risk content. Similarly the web content that's preserved is the content that's easier to find and collect. Smaller less link websites are less probably less likely to survive. So harvesting the low hanging fruit directs resources away from the content at risk of loss. Oops, some notes have gone missing. Sorry about this. They've stuck together. I got coffee off. So third, the assessment is backwards looking. In regards scholarly communication it looks at the traditional forms, books, theses, papers. Ignores not merely the published data but also all the more modern modes of communication such as workflows, source code repositories and social media which are mostly at higher risk of loss than the traditional forms because they lack well established business models and they're more difficult to preserve because the legal framework is unclear, for example, research data and the content's either much larger or much more dynamic or both. And as regards the web it looks only at the traditional document centric surface web rather than including the newer dynamic forms of web content and the deep web. And it's likely to suffer measurement bias. The scholarly literature are based on bibliographic metadata which is notoriously noisy and apparently the metadata was not deduplicated so there's some amount of double counting going on. And Scott Ainsworth's paper is full of caveats about how the measurement bias that involves. So Cliff pointed out in his summing up of the 2014 IDCC conference, scholarly literature and the surface web are genres of content for which the denominator of the fraction being preserved, the total amount of genre of content is fairly well known even if it's difficult to measure the numerator, the amount being preserved. For many other important genres even the denominators becoming hard to estimate as the web enables a whole variety of different distribution channels. So books used to be published through well-defined channels that assigned ISBNs so you could count ISBNs but now e-books can appear anywhere on the web and most of them don't have any ISBN. YouTube contains a lot of things that used to be movies. It contains a lot of music publishing these days. There's example is Pompamuse which is a YouTube phenomenon by a couple of Stanford grads. Of course what we're preserving is a judgment call but clearly even purists who wish to preserve only stuff that future scholars will absolutely undoubtedly require access to would be hard pressed to claim that half of that stuff is preserved. So overall it's clear that we're preserving much less than half the stuff that we should be preserving. What can we do to preserve the rest of it? Well we can do nothing. In which case we needn't worry about bit rot format obsolescence and all these other risks because each of those only loses a few percent. The reason why more than 50 percent of the stuff won't make it to future readers is can't afford to preserve. Or we can double the budget for digital preservation. This is so not going to happen. We'll be lucky to sustain current funding levels. Or we can more than half the cost per unit content. Doing so requires a radical rethink of our preservation processes and technology. And such a radical rethink requires understanding of where the costs go in our current preservation methodology and how they can be funded. So as an engineer I'm used to using rules of thumb. The one I use to summarize most of the research into past costs of preservation is that ingest takes about half lifetime cost, preservation takes about a third and access takes about a sixth. So on this basis one would think that the most important thing to do would be to reduce the cost of ingest. It's important but it's not as important as you might think. The reason is that ingest is a one-time upfront cost. As such it's relatively easy to fund. In principle research grants, author page charges, submission fees and other techniques can transfer the cost of ingest to the originator of the content and thereby motivate them to explore the many ways in which ingest costs can be reduced. But preservation and dissemination costs continue for the life of the data forever. Funding a stream of unpredictable payments stretching into the indefinite future is hard. Reductions in preservation and dissemination costs will have a much bigger effect on sustainability than the equivalent reductions in ingest costs. So on to cost trends, cost trends for preservation. So Crider's law held for three decades which is an astonishing feat of exponential growth. For 30 years this prices, this storage prices drop 30 to 40% a year. This meant that if you could afford to store the data for a few years the cost of storing it for the rest of time could be ignored. Because of course Crider's law would continue forever. The second is that as the data got older access to it was expected to become less frequent. Thus the cost of access in the long term could be ignored. But can we continue to ignore these problems? Well something that goes on for 30 years gets built into people's model of the world but as Randall Munro points out in the real world exponential curves cannot continue forever. They're always the first part of an S curve. And this graph from Pre-Degupta of UC Santa Cruz plots the cost of per gigabyte of disk drives against time. And we can see that in 2010 Crider's law abruptly stopped. In 2011 the floods in Thailand destroyed 40% of the world's capacity to build disk drives and prices doubled. Earlier this year they finally got back to 2010 levels. Industry projections are for no more than 10 to 20% a year going forward. Those are the red lines on the graph. This means that disk is now about seven times as expensive as it would have been expected to have been had the pre-2010 trend continued. And in 2020 it will be between 100 and 300 times as expensive as people would have expected up to 2010. So these are big numbers but do they matter? After all preservation is only about one-third of the cost and only about one-third of that is media costs. So our models of the economics of long-term storage compute the endowment, which is the amount of money that deposited with the data and invested at interest would fund its preservation forever. This graph, which is from my initial rather crude prototype economic model, is based on hardware costs from bank blaze and running costs from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which are much higher than bank blazes, and from Google. It plots the endowment needed for three copies of 117 terabyte data set to have a 95% probability of not running out of money in 100 years against the crater rate, the annual percentage drop in dollars per gigabyte. The different curves represent policies of keeping the drives one, two, three, four, five years. Up to 2010 we were in the flat part of the graph where the endowment is low and doesn't depend much on the exact crater rate. This is the environment in which everybody believed that long-term storage was effectively free. But suppose the crater rate were to drop below 20% a year. We would be in the steep part of the graph where the endowment is both much higher and also strongly dependent on the exact crater rate. We don't actually need to suppose pretty's graph and industry projections so that now and for the foreseeable future we are in the steep part of the graph. So what happened to slow criders rule? There are a lot of factors. We outline many of them in a paper for UNESCO's memory of the World Conference. But briefly, both the disc and tape markets have consolidated to a couple of vendors, turning what used to be a low- margin competitive business into a one with much better margins. And each successive technology generation for discs and for tape requires a bigger investment in manufacturing. So requires bigger margins, so drives consolidation. And the technology needs to stay in the market longer to earn back the investment, which reduces the rate of technological progress. So thanks to aggressive marketing, it's commonly believed that their cloud solves this problem. Unfortunately, cloud storage is actually made of the same kind of discs that local storage is. And it's subject to the same slowing of the rate, which it's getting cheaper. In fact, when all costs are taken into account, cloud storage is not cheaper for long term preservation than doing it yourself. Once you get to a reasonable scale, you don't have to get to the same scale as Amazon, because Amazon is keeping most of the economies of scale for Amazon. What you have to do is to get big enough to gain the economies of scale that Amazon is leaving on the table for its customers. Cloud storage really is cheaper, if your demand is spiky, but digital preservation is the canonical base loaded application. So as I mentioned in the previous session, you may think that cloud is a competitive market. In fact, it's dominated by Amazon. So all these discussions about the hypothetical cloud vendor, you can substitute Amazon for. When Google really recently started to get serious about competing in this market, they pointed out that Amazon's margins may have been minimal when Amazon started, but by then they were extortionate. Notice that, yes, Google triggered a major price drop from Amazon, but it's a one time event. It was a signal to Amazon that they couldn't have the market to themselves and to smaller players, such as Rackspace, that they were going to find it very difficult to compete in the future. So in fact, commercial cloud storage is a trap. It's because it's free to put data into a cloud service such as Amazon Earth 3, but it costs to get it out. For example, getting your data out of Amazon's Glowshare without paying an arm and a leg takes two years. If you commit to the cloud as long term storage, you have two choices. You either keep a copy of your original, you either keep a copy of everything outside the cloud, in other words, you don't actually commit to the cloud, or you stay with your original choice of provider no matter how much they raise the rates. Unrealistic expectations that we can store the vastly increased amount of data projected by consultants such as IDC within current budgets place currently preserved content at considerable risk of economic failure. Here's a graph that illustrates the looming crisis in long term storage. It's cost. The red line is the criders law at IHS I supplies 20% a year. The blue line is the IT budget, which computer economics.com estimates to be increasing at 2% a year. The green line is the annual cost of storing the data accumulated since year zero at the 60% a year growth rate projected by IDC all relative to the value in the first year. 10 years from now, storing all the accumulated data will cost over 20 times as much as it does this year. So if storage is 5% of your IT budget this year, in 10 years it will be more than 100% of your budget. If you're in the digital preservation business, storage is already way more than 5% of your IT budget. So even if you're not growing 60% a year, you still may have a serious problem. Yes, so yes, what I'm saying is that even if you're even if you're if you're growing at anything less than the crider rate and anything more than the crider rate, you're in trouble. And the crider rate may be as low as 10%. Okay. So I think there are very few digital preservation systems whose content is growing only 10% a year. So the storage part isn't the only part that's going to be much higher than people expect. Access will be too. So the Blue Ribbon Task Force pointed out the only real justification for preservation is to provide access. Well, with research data in particular, this can be a real difficulty because the value of the data may not be and thus access to it may not be evident for a long time. My favorite example is that Shang Dynasty astronomers in China inscribed eclipse observations on animal bones. About 3,200 years later, researchers use these records to estimate that the accumulated clock error was about seven hours. And from this, they derived a value for the viscosity of the Earth's mantle as the continents rebound from the ice age. So in most cases so far, the cost of an access to an individual item has been small enough that archives have not charged the reader. Research into past access patterns to archive data show that access was rare, sparse, and mostly for integrity checking. But the advent of big data techniques mean that, going forward, scholars increasingly don't want to access a few individual items in the collection. They want to ask questions of the collection as a whole. For example, the Library of Congress announced that it was collecting the entire Twitter feed and almost immediately had 400-odd requests from scholars for access to this collection. The scholars weren't interested in accessing individual tweets. They were interested in mining information from the entire history of tweets. Unfortunately, the most the library could do with the feed was to write two copies of each tape. There's no way they could afford the computer infrastructure to do the data mining. So we can get some idea of how expensive this is by comparing Amazon's S3, which is designed for data mining type access, with Amazon's Glacier, which is designed for traditional archival access. S3 is currently at least two and a half times as expensive, until recently it was five and a half times. So ingest. Almost everyone agrees that ingest is the big cost element in preservation. So where does the money go? The two main cost drivers appear to be the real world and metadata. In the real world, it's natural that cost per unit content increases through time for two reasons. The content that's easy to ingest gets ingested first. So over time, the difficulty of ingestion increases. And digital technology evolves rapidly and mostly by adding complexity. So for example, the early web was a collection of linked static documents. Language was HTML. It was reasonably easy to collect and preserve. The language of today's web is JavaScript. And much of the content you see is dynamic. This is much harder to ingest. In order to find the links, much of the connected content now needs to be executed as well as simply being parsed. And this is already significantly increasing the cost of web harvesting, both because executing the content is computationally a lot more expensive and because elaborate defences are needed to protect the crawler against the possibility that the content might be aligned. It's worth noting, however, that the very first US website from 1991, which Stanford's web harvest team has just restored, was in fact a dynamic content, because it was front end to a database. So the days when a single generic crawler could collect pretty much everything of interest had gone. Future harvesting will require more and more custom tailored crawling, such as we need to collect subscription journals and books in the LOPS program. This per site custom work is expensive in staff time, so the cost of ingest seems doomed to increase. And worse, the W3C's mandating of DRM for HTML5 means that the ingest costs for much of the web's content will become infinite because it simply won't be legal to ingest it. And metadata in the real world is widely known to be of poor quality, both format and bibliographic kinds. And efforts to improve the quality are expensive because they're mostly manual and inevitably reducing entropy after it's been generated is a lot more expensive than not generating it in the first place. OK, so all three phases are going to get more expensive and we're already preserving less than half the content that needs preservation. We need to change our processes to greatly reduce the cost for unique content. So what can we do? Well, as far as preservation is concerned, it's often assumed that because it's possible to store and copy data perfectly, that only perfect data preservation is acceptable. And there's two problems with this expectation. To illustrate the first problem, let's examine the technical problem of storing data in its most abstract form. Since 2007 I've been using the example of a petabyte per century. Think about a black box into which you put a petabyte and a century later out of which you take a petabyte. Inside the box there can be whatever you want, as much redundancy as you want, whatever media you choose, whatever anti-entropy protocols you like. You want to have a 50 percent chance that every bit in the petabyte is the same when you take it out as it was when it went in. Now consider each bit in that petabyte like a radioactive atom subject to a random process that flips it with very low probability per unit time. You've just defined a half-life for the bits. That half-life is about 60 million times the age of the universe. Think for a moment about how you go about benchmarking a system to show that no process with a half-life less than 60 million times the age of the universe was operating in it. It simply isn't feasible. Since at scale you're never going to know that your system is reliable enough Murphy's law will guarantee that it isn't. And note that the 10 to the minus... So Amazon's state-of-the-art storage system has a design goal of an annual probability of loss of a data object of 10 to the minus 11. If the average object is 10 K bytes the bit half-life is somewhere around a million years which is way too short to meet the requirement but it's still really hard to measure. And note that that 10 to the minus 11 is a design goal not the measured performance of the system. There's a lot of research into the actual performance of storage systems at scale and it all shows them underperforming expectations based on the specifications of the media. Why is this real storage systems a large complex systems subject to correlated failures that are very hard to model? Worse the threats against which they have to defend their contents are diverse and almost impossible to measure model. Nine years ago we documented the threat model we used for the lock system. We observed that most discussion of digital preservation focused on these threats but the experience of the operators of large data storage facilities was that the significant causes of data loss was quite different. To illustrate the second problem consider that building systems to defend against all these threats combined is expensive and it can't ever be perfectly effective. So we have to resign ourselves to the fact that stuff is going to get lost. And this has always been true of archives. It shouldn't be a surprise and this is subject to the law of diminishing returns. So coming back to economics how much should we spend reducing the probability of loss? So consider two storage systems with the same budget over a decade. One has a loss rate of zero the other is half as expensive per unit content but which loses one percent of its content each year. Clearly you would say that the cheaper system has an unacceptable loss rate. But each year the cheaper system stores twice as much and loses one percent of its accumulated content. At the end of the decade the cheaper system has preserved 1.89 times as much content at the same cost and after 30 years it's preserved more than five times as much at the same cost. So adding each successive nine of reliability gets exponentially more expensive. How many nines do we really need? So the canonical example of this is the internet archives web collection. Injust by crawling the web is as everyone can understand a lossy process. The archive storage system loses a small proportion of its content every year. Access via the way back machine is not totally reliable. Yet for US users archive.org is currently the 150th most visited site on the web whereas the Library of Congress which is a lot more careful is the 1,519th. For UK users archive.org is 131st most visited site whereas the British Library is the 2,744th. Why is this? Because the archives collection was always a series of samples of the web the losses merely had a small amount of random noise to the samples but the samples were so huge that the noise is insignificant. This isn't actually something about the internet archive it's something about very large collections of data. They always have noise in them. Questions asked of them are always fundamentally statistical in nature. The benefit of doubling the size of the sample in this case and in many cases vastly outweighs the cost of a small amount of extra noise. In this case more really is a lot better. So unrealistic expectation for how well data can be preserved make the best be the enemy of the good. We spend money reducing even further the small probability of even the smallest loss of data. That money could instead preserve vast amounts of additional data albeit that a slightly higher risk of loss. So within the next decade all the current populace storage media disk, tape, flash will be up against extremely hard technological barriers. A disruption of the storage market is inevitable. We should work to ensure that the needs of long-term data storage will influence the result of that disruption. We should pay particular attention to the work underway at Facebook and elsewhere that uses techniques such as erasure coding geographic diversity and custom hardware based on mostly spun down storage to achieve major cost savings for cold data at scale. So every few months every few months there's another press release announcing some new quasi-immortal medium such as fused silica glass or stone DVDs has solved the problem of long-term storage. But the problem stays resolutely unsolved. Why is this? Long-lived media are inherently more expensive and they're a niche market so they lack economies of scale. Seagate for example could easily make disks which have archival life 25 years or so but they did a study of the market for them and discovered that no one would pay the relatively small additional cost. The fundamental problem is that long-lived media only makes sense if the crider rate is very low. Even if the rate's only 10% a year after 10 years you could store the same data in a third the space. Since space in the data center or even at Iron Mountain isn't free this is a powerful incentive to move old media out. If you believe that crider rates will get back to 30% a year after a decade you could store 30 times as much data in the same space. So the reason that long-lived media is such an attractive idea is it suggests you can be lazy and design a system that ignores the possibility of failures. You can't. Media failures are only one of many many threats to store data but they're the only one that long-lived media addresses. And long media life does not imply that the media are more reliable only that their reliability decreases with time more slowly. As we've seen current media are many orders of magnitude too unreliable for the task ahead. And even if you could ignore failures it wouldn't make economic sense. As Brian Wilson, CTO of Backblaze points out in their long-term storage environment double the reliability is worth one tenth of one percent cost increase. Moral of the story designed for failure and by cheap components. Okay so cutting dissemination The real problem with dissemination in the future is that scholars are used to having free access to library collections and research data but what scholars now want to do with archive data is so expensive that they must be charged for access. This in itself has costs since access must be controlled and accounting undertaken. Further data mining infrastructure at the archive must have enough performance for the peak demand but will likely likely be likely used most of the time which increases the cost for individual scholars. A charging mechanism needed to pay for this infrastructure. Fortunately because the scholars access patterns are spiky the cloud provides both suitable infrastructure and a charging mechanism. So for smaller collections which are public Amazon provides free public data sets. Amazon stores a copy of the data in no charge and charges scholars accessing the data for the computation rather than charging the owner of the data for the storage. And even for large and non-public collections it may be possible to use Amazon. Suppose that in addition to keeping the two archive copies of the Twitter feed on tape the Library of Congress kept one copy in S3's reduced redundancy storage the cheap version of S3 simply to enable researchers to access it. For this year it would have cost about $4,100 a month or about $50,000 for the year. Scholars wanting to access the collection would have to pay for their own computing resources at Amazon and the per request charges. Because the data transfers would be internal to Amazon there are no bandwidth charges. And the storage charges could be borne by the Library or charged back to the researchers. If they charge back the 400 initial requests would each need to pay about $125 for a year's access to the collection which is not an unreasonable charge. Because the Library's preservation copy isn't in the cloud they aren't locked in to Amazon as a supplier or this strategy for access. So in the near term separating access and preservation copies in this way is a promising way not so much to reduce the cost of access but to fund it more realistically by transferring it from the archive to the user. In the longer term architectural changes to preservation systems that closely integrate limited amounts of computation into the storage fabric have this potential for significant cost reductions to both preservation and dissemination. They're encouraging early signs that the storage industry is thinking along these lines. So cutting ingest cost. Well there are two parts to the ingest the content and the metadata. So as I've said the evolution of the web that poses problems for preservation also poses problems for search engines like Google where they used to pass the HTML of a page into its document object model in order to find the links to follow and the text to index. They now have to construct the CSS object model including executing the JavaScript and combine the OM and the CSS OM into the render tree to find the words in that context which is the context of the words is something that Google cares about. Preservation crawlers such as Heratrix used to construct the DOM in order to find the links and then preserve the HTML. Now they also have to construct the CSS OM executing the JavaScript and so on. It might be worth investigating whether preserving a representation of the render tree rather than the HTML or CSS JavaScript and all the other components of the page as separate files would reduce costs. It's also becoming clear that there's much important content that's either too big, too dynamic, too proprietary or too DRM for ingestion into an archive to be either feasible or affordable. In these cases where we simply can't ingest it preserving it in place may be the best we can do creating a legal framework in which the owner of the dataset commits for some consideration such as a tax advantage to preserve their data and allow scholars some suitable access. Of course since all the data will be under a single institution's control it will be a lot more vulnerable than we would like but this type of arrangement is better than nothing and not ingesting the content is certainly a lot cheaper than the alternative. Metadata is currently considered essential for preservation. For example of the criteria in ISO 16363 section 4 of which there are 52 29 of them are more than half are metadata related. Creating and validating metadata is expensive. Manually creating it at the scale that we operate is simply impractical. Extracting metadata from the content scales better but it's still expensive since considerable per site work is needed and as far as format metadata is concerned it's computationally expensive to generate and validate and in both cases the extracted metadata is sufficiently noisy to impair its overall usefulness. So we need less metadata so we can have more data and two questions need to be asked when is the metadata required? We had some very interesting discussions in the preservation at scale workshop contrasting the pipelines of Portico and the clocks archive which ingest much of the same content. Portico's pipeline is much more expensive because it extracts, generates and validates metadata during the ingest process. Clocks because it is a dark archive has no need to make the content immediately available implements all its metadata operations as background tasks which can be performed as resources are available. And the other question is how important is the metadata to the task of preservation? Generating metadata because it's possible or because it looks good in voluminous reports is all too common. Format metadata is often considered essential to preservation but if format obsolescence isn't happening or if it turns out the emulation rather than format migration is the preferred solution it's a waste of resources. If the reason to validate the formats of incoming content using error prone tools is to reject allegedly non-conforming content it's actually counterproductive because the majority of format content and formats such as HTML and PDF fails validation but renders perfectly allegedly. Resources should be devoted to avoiding spilling milk rather than cleaning it up. For example, given how much the academic community spends on the services publishers allegedly provide in the way of improving the quality of their publications it's an outrage that even major publishers cannot spell their own names consistently cannot format DOIs correctly get authors names wrong and so on. So the alternative is accept that metadata correct enough to rely on is impossible. Downgrade its importance to that of a hint and the hint can be very useful and stop wasting so much resource on it. One of the reasons that full-time search dominates bibliographic search is that it handles the messiness of the real world much better. So attempts have been made for various kinds of digital content to measure the probability of preservation. The consensus is about 50%. Thus the rate of loss to future readers from never preserved will vastly exceed that from all other causes such as bit rot and formative adolescence. This raises two questions. So we're persisting with current preservation technologies improve the odds of preservation. At each stage of the preservation process current projections of cost per unit content are higher than they were a few years ago. Projections for future preservation budgets are at best no higher. So clearly the answer is no. And if not what changes are needed to improve the odds? At each stage of the preservation process we need to add at least half the cost per unit content. I've set out some ideas. Others will have different ideas but the need for major cost reductions needs to be the focus of discussion and development of digital preservation technology and processes. Unfortunately any way of making preservation cheaper can be spun as doing worse preservation. Jeff Rothenberg's Future Perfect 2012 keynote speech is an excellent example of this spin in action. Even if we make large cost reductions institutions have to decide to use them and no one ever got fired for choosing ABN. We live in a marketplace of completing preservation solutions a very significant part of the cost of both not-for-profit systems such as clocks and portico and commercial products such as Preservica is the cost of marketing and sales. For example, track certification is an effect of marketing check-off item these days. The cost of the process that clocks underwent to obtain this check-off item was well in excess of 10% of the annual budget. So making the trade-off of preserving more stuff using worse preservation would need a mutual non-aggression marketing pact. Unfortunately the pact would be unstable because the first product to defect and sell itself as better preservation than those other inferior systems would win. And as private interests work against the public interest in preserving more stuff. To sum up we need to talk about major cost reductions. The basis for this conversation must be more and better cost data. I'm on the advisory board for the EU's 4C project the collaboration to clarify the costs of curation. They're addressing the need for more and better cost data by setting up the curation cost exchange. Please go there and submit whatever cost data you can come up with for your own curation operations. We need a lot better data to understand the problem well enough to achieve the cost reductions that we need. Thank you and I've left plenty of time for questions.


My brothers and sisters, today we celebrate the construction of a new ball field and walking path in this community. How blessed it is for brothers and sisters to come together. One foot in this environment three years ago, we started a dream. We actually had a little football team, but there was more to be offered in this community. We wanted our children, of course in excess of about 3,000 children in this community, to enjoy the same recreational activities we offered anywhere. Of course, this ballpark represents a ballpark that is and has not been a part of a ballpark system, so we're here today to celebrate. And I think it would be to your advantage and to my advantage, of course, is give yourselves a hand and some applause because we aren't through yet. We got a resemblance of what could be. This project is becoming a reality thanks to all of those persons in the community. In the community who said we want something for our children. And of course today represents that time, that day where we celebrate this recreational activity facility. Persons have given of their time, their talents, their gifts, and their service to make this community, again, great. Not just mediocre, but great. Several of you who are here today, I just want to recognize. James Sanders, one of our community leaders with persons from this community, we want to say thank you. Thank you for your leadership, sometimes very fiery, but thank you for your passion and your gifts. We want to say thank you to Randy Davis, director of our parks and recreation and staff. Randy, thank you so much for giving of your time and staff, just raise your hand if you would. Lisa Hamero, president and Lee Hamero, vice president with the hammer construction. Where are you? But we see what they've done, right? Thank you so very much. Alan Wilson with Wilson and Associates Sports Turf. Where are you? There they are. Thank you for doing what you've done and it's going to be great when we're finished. Randy Bundrick with Electrical Services, Inc. Randy, are you here? Okay. Roscoe Wilson. Roscoe is here. Jason Rouse with him. Prowse, where are you, Jason? Thank you. And all of the other persons whose names we didn't call, thank you so much for your gifts and for what you're doing for this city of ours and of course for this community. Imagination is a gift, I think that is instilled upon each one of us, giving us each smile and face. Every time you walk into this park, you're going to smile because it brings smiles, laughter and a real true sense of competition, playing basketball, baseball. The whole nine yards, it gives us an opportunity to share our gifts. It's my honor and my pleasure today to recognize this space and the many benefits that baseball has for our youth and our community. We've come this far by faith and we're leaning on the Lord. So thank you for being here. Thank you for allowing this field to perpetuate itself. Thank you for allowing our children to not only just meander around during the summer, but to have something for them to do. Thank you so much. We encourage your prayers, your thoughts. We encourage all of the energy that you have within you so that this baseball field will just be a part of a larger phase. This is phase one of what's going to take place from here to West Beltlight. Thank you. Thank you. I want to thank you. Give Ed McDowell a hand now. I want to call my brother and my friend, Dr. Jamie Graham, to come and give to us our invocation. Good morning. We're about with me in prayer. Oh God, our help and ages pass, our hope for years to come.  We come to you, oh God, in the name of Jesus, thanking you for the gift of community, the gift of leadership, the gift of recreation and fun and fellowship. God, we thank you now for allowing us to come to the ceremonial baseball field and allowing us to be able to see the fruit of our labor, the reality of our dreams and our visions. We thank you for Parks and Recreation, for the Randy Davis. Thank you for Brother Ed McDowell, our city council leader, for Senator Scott and all of those who represent our state. We thank you, oh God, for the colony apartments, north point apartments, for Brother James Sanders and all the community representatives today. We thank you, oh God, that you've allowed all of us as a village to come together to make this a reality, for our voices have been heard and Lord God, you're allowing this to come to pass. So bless now these services, this ceremony, that as we to come together as a community, that we may see the fruit of our labor, that our children may grow up in a safe environment and that they may benefit from these, your gifts. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Regina Williams is our president for the Booker Washington Association. She's going to come now and bring a welcome. Good morning. I'm Regina E. Williams and I am honored to welcome you to the historic Booker Washington Heights neighborhood where we stand on the positive side of change. This day has been a long time coming. On behalf of the neighborhood, I thank our state legislative delegation for thinking of Booker Washington Heights and the thousands of children in our area. When they were deciding where to allocate funds. I thank Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin, City of Columbia City Council and City Manager, who have generously added additional funding because this is not an inexpensive venture, but our children, our future, they're all worth it. We thank our quietly tenacious City Councilman, Councilman Ed McDowell for mentoring me, I don't know if he wants to admit it, but also for navigating this project along with Randy Davis and his staff at the City of Columbia Parks and Recreation. Finally, I thank our neighbors, especially James Red Sanders, who trust me as president to take their visions and usher Booker Washington Heights to greater and better. Again, welcome and the best is yet to come. Welcome to our field of dreams. I do want to recognize Senator John Scott. John talked to John earlier, and of course with his schedule and all of the things that John does, not only in this city and for this area and statewide, he could not be with us this morning. And of course he made real, he's on a tight schedule right now. So John, I want you to come, say a word. This guy three years ago, three years ago, John and I started talking about the possibility of what we've got out here today. Of course, John said to me, Ed, I said to John, John, I don't have any money. And John says, you let me worry about that. And of course, John, in his own due diligence and his own tenacity came back some months after that conversation and simply says we're going to make this happen. So of course, $341,000. I was going to pick it up by $6,000. $341,000, John got for us, and we were able to do what we're doing here today. So please welcome my friend and my brother, Senator John Scott. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Reverend McDowell. You know, they say community organization and structure is something of the past. I will say to you that it's truly not the truth. I can remember on the meeting we had that Saturday and the conversation we had with Reverend McDowell. But across the room, across the table was one James Sanders who looked at me and had basically said they've given up hope that anybody would do anything for this community. They then later on the next Saturday had an event, and they bought all the kids at the Collin apartment to that event. And they came and they talked about the things they wanted and they wanted done for this community. Reverend McDowell and I sit there and we talked and I said to James, we're going to get it done. And there was a funny look on his face because he had heard that before. James, this is your day. Community work, community organization does work. Then I went on to another event. And your president was there. Regina had not gotten the word that we were going to get it done because Reggie had not let the cat out of the bag. Reverend McDowell was doing a good job trying to make sure that the city came up with its portion to make this day a success. And Regina was jumping up and down. I said, Regina, we got money. We're going to get something. No, no, no. Well, Regina, this is your day. We got it done. And as I take my seat, Reverend McDowell, let me make another commitment to this organization, to this community and to the children of this community. The best is yet to come. This is just the start. If other communities can have community centers and gymnasiums and all the kind of things that young children deserve to have, this community certainly can have the same thing. I do apologize to you. And I told Reverend McDowell I could not make it. I'm supposed to be in Bambert on another program. So I'm going to be good and late. But I thought about it as security picked me up. There was a sound in his voice I did not like. So I'm here this morning, Reverend McDowell, this is your day. This is the beginning of the new beginning for this community. Thank y'all so much. When I talked to John this morning, and of course I said, John says, I've got to be in Bamberg at 10 o'clock. I said, okay, he said, man, what is that sound in your voice? I said, it was a sound of anguish. I said, oh, Lord, the man who gives me the money won't be here. But of course he made it here and I'm certainly appreciative of all that you've done. Bishop Mack, Bishop James Mack, one of our pastors in addition to the other pastors in the Bufa Washington Association. Brother Mack, come and say a word to us.  We now have renewed confidence in your words that they're not just empty words with empty promises. So we are excited. This community is excited. As pastors, we are excited. I must say to Dr. Tammy Graham and to the Pastor Cleese Memorial, Pastor Hicks, as well as the Bible Way Church that we have stepped out of our pulpit and we walk in and talk to the residents in this community because we want to be a part. We believe that God is concerned about the total man. No one can hear what I say spiritually until you pick me up out of degradation. And so this is an opportunity for us to put action, not just action, but passion behind what we say. And so we're excited about what is going on, and we're looking to the future. It cannot stop here. This must be only the beginning, and we will celebrate, participate, and support you in all of your efforts to the pastors of the community. Thank you for not just preaching, but becoming an instrument of the very words that you preach. Thank you. Just before we close, I do want to recognize some of our coaches who coach our children. Where are they? There they are. Come around. Come around. On the first now, I want to throw out the first pitch. It won't be a fastball or a curve. It'll just be close to the plate in the mid. How about that? That's fine. Thank you all so much. I want to thank everyone on the program. I want to thank everyone for taking time out to be a part of this ceremony. Thank you all so much for being who you are and who you are. And of course advancing the programs for our children. Thank you all so much.