Blog

Adam Harwood is the Research Data & Digital Preservation Technologist at the University of Sussex Library.

We all know that there are some policies in our policy portfolio languishing in review limbo. To my surprise, I received an email from Jenny Mitcham at the DPC recently, pointing out that the review frequency of our digital preservation policy at the University of Sussex Library had been pretty constant over the last few years. Since 2020 our policy has been reviewed every year as planned. I didn’t realize we had been that consistent!

Trigger warning: This blog post addresses issues relating to mental health and sexual harassment

The DPC’s organizational motivations for carrying out the Digital Preservation Community Mental Health and Wellbeing Survey are mentioned in its introduction. However, as the member of staff leading on this work, I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about why it is important to me, personally. To share some experiences that I have had that have made awareness raising and good mental health important priorities for me.

In March 2023 I was invited to speak to the International Advisory Committee of the Memory of the World Program at the UNESCO Offices in Paris.  The text that follows is the text of my presentation which is published the following day and with the consent of the Committee.

Ladies, gentlemen and friends and colleagues: the memory of the world should be off limits for cyber-warfare.

Chris Knowles is Digital Archivist at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, UK. He recently participated in the DPC's Digital Preservation Workflow Webinars Series and has written up his presentation.

This blog hopes to demonstrate some simple digital archiving procedures that can be done with base Windows CLI utilities run from PowerShell, without needing additional 3^rd party software, and is aimed at archives with lower resources, or who are unable to use certain software due to institutional policies.

Laura Giles is the Academic and Library Specialist at the University of Hull.

Last November, I was asked to speak at the DPC Ram Jam about our approach at the University of Hull to the section C of the Rapid Assessment Model, which focuses on the Legal Basis.

Speakers who had undertaken multiple RAM assessments and who had moved their organisation from level 2 – Basic to level 3 – Managed in a section were asked to talk a little about their journey. What had changed, what steps had they taken and what might their plans be to move their organisation to the holy grail, level 4 – Optimized?

Louise Preston is a Project Officer at the National Archives of Australia. She attended FDO2022 with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Writing systems developed in Mesopotamia and other ancient societies to manage information because human memory simply could not store all information. It was a new and specialised field that began with only partial script. As writing and recording became more complex, the amount of information stored grew, becoming difficult to find and retrieve. Ancient scribes learnt to use catalogues, dictionaries, tables, forms and calendars to access and retrieve information (Harari, Yuval Noah, Sapiens, 2015).

Today, we are still grappling with how to manage and retrieve information but with the additional tier of machines to store our information. We have developed inexorably large repositories to store vast amounts of digital information kept in different formats in different systems. The 1st International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects (FDO2022), held from 26 to 28 October in Leiden, Netherlands, hosted by the Fair Digital Objects (FDO) Forum, focused on how to apply the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) guiding principles to managing that increased volume and complexity using computational systems. The principles, which apply to data, metadata and the infrastructures maintaining them, were developed in Leiden for the management and stewardship of scientific and scholarly data and published in 2016 (Wilkinson et al., 2016). An international set of principles, they do not prescribe any technology, standard or implementation method.

Last Thursday I took part in an OPF panel debate "Do unacceptable file formats exist?" It was great fun to debate file format policies and preservation approaches with Valentijn Gilissen from DANS. And we had amazing moderation from Sam Alloing who had to get to grips with a text chat that exploded out of control as 200 audience members all dived in with loads of fascinating insight. The exported text chat was 50Kb long!

Email continues to be one of the most commonly used communication methods for business and personal purposes. Therefore, capturing a  complete record  of our interactions, of planning, and of decisions made, both in the recent past and for the foreseeable future, must include the preservation of email. If this is to happen it is imperative that the archives sector upskill to meet that challenge. It was with this in mind that The National Archives (UK)
has chosen email preservation as the focus for the latest training course in the “Novice to Know-How” (N2KH) series. 

Our last DPC event of 2022 was a #DPClinic session on the topic of Designated Communities. The event began with a brief introduction from Herve L’Hours and was followed by a lively and interesting community discussion. Often our #DPClinic topics are generated by the community, but this one was my own idea. I had a particular interest in organizing this session as I had been doing some work on this topic and had some questions in my own mind that I wanted to discuss. I understood the theory of designated communities (which originates from the OAIS Reference Model) but what I really wanted from this session was to understand how this theory translates into practice.

Zoë Hollingworth is Collections Systems Lead at V&A South Kensington and part-time PhD student in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She recently attended FDO2022 with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

With a grant from the Digital Preservation Coalition, I was fortunate enough to attend the 1^st International Conference of FAIR Digital Objects (FDO2022) held in Leiden, Holland, 26^th to 28^th October 2022. The conference was hosted by the Fair Digital Objects (FDO) Forum, which hopes to ‘achieve a better coherence amongst the increasing number of initiatives working on FDO-based designs and implementations.’