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At the end of March 2023, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Australasia and Asia-Pacific held a series of events around Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand as part of a regional Relaunch Roadshow. The Roadshow was held to replace the planned launch of the DPC’s first international office in 2020 which was cancelled due to the Covid pandemic. The DPC Executive Director, William Kilbride came out from the UK for the events and traveled with Robin Wright, Head Australasia & Asia-Pacific to conduct a series of public events in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Wellington NZ and Adelaide. The roadshow sessions attracted around 200 attendees and were supplemented by a packed schedule of smaller face-to-face meetings which introduced the DPC – and digital preservation more generally – to decision makers and managers in a host of institutions and agencies. The roadshow provided a fantastic opportunity for DPC members and non-members alike with an interest in digital preservation in the Australasian region to come together to meet each other, to find out more about the DPC’s local activities, and to share their experience addressing key challenges affecting those engaged with digital preservation in our region.

Sara Day Thomson is the Digital Archivist at the University of Edinburgh Library as well as a member of the DPC's Web Archiving & Preservation Work Group (WAPWG) Steering Committee. This blog was first posted on the Universtiy of Edinburgh's Website and Communications blog. 

The University of Edinburgh has appointed its first Web Archivist to capture and preserve important University web pages. The University has in fact appointed the very first dedicated Web Archivist of any non-legal deposit university in the UK!

Since early 2022, the University Library has been archiving health-related websites as part of the Wellcome-funded Archive of Tomorrow project. Along with the National Library of Scotland, Cambridge University Library, and Bodleian Libraries, we’ve been building a ‘research-ready’ collection of materials to support current and future research into how information (and misinformation) about health is shared online. As the project draws to a close this month, the team reflects on the achievements of the 12-month pilot as well as the daunting challenges it helped to articulate and bring to light.

First things first – archiving websites? Yes!

Time has felt a bit elastic over the last few years for all of the obvious reasons; a year has either felt like a decade or 10 minutes. But I can assure you that despite it feeling like the latter, it IS time to relaunch our community call for nominations to the Bit List again! …all in time for our next full revision of the list which will be published on World Digital Preservation Day, 2^nd November 2023.

Over the course of these elastic years, we have welcomed many new members of our digital preservation community, many of whom might be wondering what on earth this Bit List business is all about. There may be some long-standing members of the community thinking the same. So, for you, this blog post is a whistle stop tour of how this all came to be…and what to do with it!

Why do we so often talk about ‘best practice’ in digital preservation when we don’t always have clarity on what that actually looks like? Indeed, if it is our policy to try and carry out digital preservation best practice are we simply setting ourselves up for failure? How is it possible to comply with something that is so hard to pin down? What if what is ‘best’ for one organization is suboptimal for another? 

I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a while as these are questions that have popped into my head frequently since joining the DPC as Head of Good Practice and Standards 4 years ago. I didn’t have any say over the job title I was assigned when I joined the team, but I very much appreciated the foresight my colleagues had when they established the post. It already felt like a daunting role to fill, but if it had been ‘Head of Best Practice’ I might have had serious reservations!

There was a time in mid-March where I felt like I’d never get to write the following words, but they are finally true: the new Novice to Know-How (N2KH) learning pathway on Email Preservation is (nearly) done! I add the ‘nearly’ caveat for two reasons. First, there is a little work still to do on the additional resources that will accompany the main content (more on those later). Second, I don’t think I ever consider an online course truly completed until it’s in the Learning Management System (LMS) and the first learners have started! But a completed set of modules has been passed over to N2KH’s originators and funders, The National Archives (UK), so close enough…

Yesterday was the first meeting of DPC’s Reading Club…I’m hoping the first of many!

A group of DPC Members met over Zoom for a friendly chat to discuss a recent article by Thorsten Ries - Digital history and born-digital archives: the importance of forensic methods.

Michelle Donoghue is the Information Governance Manager at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. 

For the past four years, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has been working closely with colleagues from the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) to leverage good practice amongst the international digital preservation community, developing advice, guidance, and policy to support the NDA’s work in this vital area.

To mark the end of the project and share and celebrate the outcomes, we held a short internal event in March providing a summary of the challenges facing the NDA, and presenting the recommendations and outputs developed as a result of this collaborative work.

Whilst digital preservation isn’t yet a ‘solved problem’, we discussed how this project and the NDA have moved forward with tackling some of the key challenges of safeguarding future access to records that are essential to the UK’s nuclear industry and beyond.

Two of our major DPC resources - the Preservation Policy Toolkit and the Digipres Business Case Toolkit have just been significantly revised and relaunched, keyed in with our broader (re)launch of the DPC Australasia Office. In this blog post I'd like to give a few thoughts on sustainability of these (and other) DPC resources.

The digipres community does not have a great track record on sustaining its own digital outputs. The noughties were dominated by digital preservation projects with short term funding that churned out all sorts of resources, many of which have fallen by the wayside. I hold my hand up here and take some of the criticism as I worked on a number of those projects! At the same time I recognise that building in sustainability is not an easy thing to do. Short term funding focused on innovative R&D is by its very nature difficult to build in a way that will last. Ownership and responsibility is also a key challenge. Who will be the custodian over time and take the difficult decision to take down an old resource if it has genuinely become outdated or obsolete, or invest in the resource to bring it up to date?

In February 2023 I was invited to speak at a workshop organized by the AEOLIAN Network entitled ‘New Horizons in AI and Machine Learning’ Circumstances, including a postponement of the workshop on account of industrial action meant I was not able to attend and present in person. Therefore I have shared this text of my presentation for publication afterwards, with the consent of the organizers.

It’s time we built the basis for a new digital preservation. Emerging technologies, including AI, invite us to rethink what we have been taking for granted for too long.

This may sound like a dramatic development but to those familiar with both disciplines it’s probably a statement of the obvious. Artificial intelligence is, of course, the next big thing in computing: you cannot hide from the hype cycle. Also, AI has been the next big thing for at least four decades. So perhaps this time it will get over the inflated expectations and head for something productive and routine: perhaps it really is the next big thing.

Regardless of how the current headlines about AI pan out, we’ve also, already, and always been needing to imagine a new digital preservation.

Preoccupation (noun) - an idea or subject that someone thinks about most of the time (Cambridge Dictionary)

I guess this is a fair description of my relationship with digital preservation policies over the last week or so as we have been working on a revision of the DPC’s Digital Preservation Policy Toolkit.

What has been so good about having a bit of time to focus on this subject is the extent to which community resources and organizational policies already exist and can be easily located and accessed and more so the fact that many organizations have recently published new policy documents that we can look at for inspiration.