New Members

The University of Liverpool has become the latest organisation to join the Digital Preservation Coalition as Associate Member this week.

Currently exploring digital preservation best practice, the University’s interest in digital preservation is concentrated around the Libraries, Museums, Galleries and Records Management functions which hold institutional records, research articles and theses, research data, born digital archives and archival items in a large range of electronic formats.

A working group from the Library and Computing Services at the University is currently focused on the development of improved workflows and infrastructure to ingest ‘born digital’ material within its institutional and deposited archive collections, and to convert and manage archival material in a range of electronic formats to ensure access in perpetuity.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome Chester Beatty in Dublin as Associate member.

Chester Beatty has been described as the finest collection of manuscripts and books assembled by a private collector in the 20th century. It includes representative samples of the world’s heritage (artistic, religious and secular) from about 2700 BC to the present century.

The museum is beginning a major in-house digitisation programme with the long term goal of digitising the entirety of its collections. This growing body of digital assets will be recognised as a valuable part of Chester Beatty’s organisational holdings and will need to be managed as such.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome the University of East Anglia (UEA) as its newest Associate Member today.

Through its teaching and research activities, the University of East Anglia (UEA) creates and collects a wide range of digital content, much of which needs to remain accessible and usable over time. The driver for the University of East Anglia joining as a Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Associate at this time is for its Archives to develop better workflows and infrastructure to ingest ‘born digital’ material within its literary archive collections.

The University has a number of archives, such as the University Archives, the British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) and the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA), which are each engaged in digitisation and are beginning to collect born digital content. Steps are already in place to transfer and secure the files, but we wish to develop a more robust strategy for dealing with this content.

The Digital Preservation Coalition is delighted to announce Bacardi-Martini Ltd as its second new Associate Member today.

Bacardi is an international company consisting of several well-known drinks brands including Grey Goose, Bombay Sapphire and Dewar’s, with a dispersed archival system across the UK, Europe and the United States. The company’s core business and brand records are increasingly born digital, and as these will need to be archived for the future, Bacardi is taking steps to ensure their long-term survival.

Global Archives Manager Jacqui Seargeant said, “Bacardi is delighted to be joining the DPC at this important time in our digital archive development. The DPC brings together a wide variety of organisations for the benefit of digital preservation and we believe that this expertise and experience will be a great addition to our own knowledge.”

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) as its newest associate member. Based in the United States, the DPN is a membership organization focused on identifying and solving the difficult digital preservation challenges in order to make sure that the digital academic and cultural heritage content from US institutions persists for the next generation of scholars and beyond. Collectively they develop solutions that address the issues of scale, cost, workflow, and legal agreements needed for the persistence of this content.

With more than 50 members across the USA, collaborators include academic institutions, foundations, non-profits, corporations, repositories, federal and state agencies and any other organization interested or in need of long term digital preservation.

The Digital Preservation Coalition is pleased to announce the University of Birmingham as its newest Associate and seventieth member.

The University’s Library Services manages digital publications, primary research data and other research outputs generated by researchers at the University of Birmingham, as well as a digital archive, rare books and the University’s institutional archives at the Cadbury Research Library.

The University of Sussex has joined the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) this week, becoming its newest Associate member.

Established to expand University research into how digital technologies are shaping culture and society, the Sussex Humanities Lab focuses on digital history and digital archives, and the outputs present challenges in terms of long term preservation and access. The University Library and its Special Collections are committed to providing long-term access to this digital content.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome University College London (UCL) as its latest Associate Member this week.

As well as holding significant digital collections, ranging from longitudinal primary research data to reference data and accompanying materials, and offering research data storage and preservation services to researchers, UCL is one of a small number of UK universities that teaches digital curation.

“UCL Library’s Strategy specifically mentions ‘the long-term curation of ‘born-digital’ special collections’ as a priority, and we feel that the DPC’s collective experience will be of significant help in developing strategy and planning for this area,” explains UCL’s Digital Curation Manager, Matt Mahon.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) welcomes University of the Arts London (UAL) as its latest Associate Member this week.

UAL is strategically committed to digital preservation prioritising its historical and contemporary archives and special collections, both digitised and born-digital.  As an art and design institution, the university’s collections are many and varied, including documents, books, photographs, costume, and object collections – many with national and international significance. Having recently completed a discovery and procurement process for a digital preservation system, UAL sees digital preservation as an essential activity that will also provide a platform for increased visibility and use of their unique collections for teaching and research, as well as collaboration beyond the university and into the wider art and design academic community, and other areas of community collaboration.

The Digital Preservation Coalition welcomes Lancaster University Library as its newest Associate Member this week.

Currently establishing its digital preservation policy specifically to look after the long-term preservation of research outcomes, the Library’s key aim is to ensure that future generations can benefit from the scholarly digital outputs created by the world-class research and teaching undertaken at Lancaster University. One of the Jisc RDSS pilot institutions, Lancaster University brings extensive experience of working with shared services, interoperability between systems and applying this expertise to digital preservation.