Slides from the first 'Getting Started in Digital Preservation' event in London on 4th Feb are now available online.  The next event will be in Glasgow on 28th Feb.  Feedback from the London event was very positive with participants noting that the presentations were encouraging and accessible, giving them confidence as well as practical soltions to start digital preservation planning in their own institutions.

What's New - Issue 33, February 2011

In this issue:

• What's on, and What's new
• Editorial: The Big Bamboozler (William Kilbride, DPC)
• Who's who: Sixty second interview with Dr Birgit Plietzsch, Arts Computing Advisor, University of St Andrews
• One world: Dr. David Giaretta, Director of the Alliance for Permanent Access
• Your view: Commentary, questions and debate from readers

The DPC will be holding a briefing day on Preserving Digital Art in London on 30th March.  The event is free for members and will include a range of speakers and an extended discussion session.  Details of the event, including the venue, the programme and how to register, will be published next week.

Following on from the very successful 'Decoding the Digital' conference, the British Library Preservation Advisory Centre and the Digital Preservation Coalition are undertaking a short programme of digital preservation roadshows across the UK in 2011.  We are delighted to invite you to the second stop on the tour, at Glasgow University on 28th February 2011.  Subsequent months will see us in Cardiff and York.  These events are designed to raise awareness of digital preservation issues, increase involvement with digital preservation activities and sign-post the support and resources available to help you on your way. They provide an introduction to digital preservation, build an understanding of the risks to digital materials, include practical sessions to help you apply digital preservation planning and tools, and feature speakers sharing their own experience of putting digital preservation into practice. 

The sessions are aimed at librarians, archivists and collection managers in all sectors and in all sizes of institution who want to find out more about digital preservation and the implications for their organisation of having to retain, manage and provide ongoing access to large quantities of digital material. Throughout the day participants will gain confidence in addressing digital preservation issues and knowledge of achievable steps to put theory into practice and safeguard vulnerable digital content.

More details including a draft programme and how to register are now available.

The DPC has today published a response to the second phase of consultation on electronic legal deposit which was submitted to the Department for Culture Media and Sport at the end of December. It notes the essential relationship between preservation and access. We note and welcome the proposal that extend legal deposit to include charged content as well as content to which access is restricted. This will create the conditions where a more rounded and more valuable national archive can be created.

The DPC offices were closed for the Christmas break between lunchtime on 23rd December 2010 and 4th January 2011.  During that time, followers of the DPC on Twitter were sent links to 12 different websites which contained different types of freely available digital resources that in some sense captured the the modern festive season.  This was not intended to be serious: but given the mission of te DPC it will be interesting to find out if these same resources can be accessed again in Christmas 2011. Each link has some claim to lasting value but we are not necessarily advocating that they should be maintained in the same place and in the same format: we invite readers to decide whether they think these are important enough to be saved for posterity.  But each one has some specific technical characteristic so, as a set, they represent different technical and organisational challenges for web archiving - challenges to ensuring that our digitial memory is accessible tomorrow.

The DPC wishes you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year. Our offices will be closed from lunchtime on 23rd December to 0900 on 4th January. Staff will mostly be offline but may pick up email in the interim.

Although the office is closed, we are going to use this period to draw attention to free online recordings and videos which capture the modern festive season and which form part of a digital legacy which we think future generations will also enjoy. We start with this recording of 'O Magnum mysterium' as composed by Morten Lauridsen in 1994 and performed by the Nordic Chamber Choir in 2008. This exquisite recording is freely available from YouTube (headphones essential):

We'll send a similar every day using the DPC Twitter feed between 23rd December and 4th January.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome the UK LOCKSS Alliance as its latest associate member.

The UK LOCKSS Alliance is a co-operative organization which ensures continuing access to scholarly work over the long term.  Its focus is on ensuring preservation and continuing access to electronic journals, but has interests and current research work on the preservation of all library collections, thus making it a natural fit within the DPC family.

 "We're really pleased to have the UK LOCKSS Alliance as members of the Coalition," explained William Kilbride of the DPC.  "They bring a distinctive and considerable degree of technical expertise into the Coalition. It strengthens our connections with academic libraries across the UK as well with the 'LOCKSS - Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe' technology which was developed originally in Stanford University Library."

Adam Rusbridge of the UK LOCKSS Alliance also welcomed the news. "We are delighted to join the Digital Preservation Coalition as Associate Members. We look forward to learning from DPC members, and believe the knowledge shared will improve our ability to respond effectively to the challenges faced by the UK library community.

 "We're keen to work together to coordinate an effective national strategy for at-risk scholarly material. We are also very interested in the DPC's web archiving and preservation task force, it's soon-to-be-established task force on audit and certification, and in learning about colleague's approaches to digital preservation more generally."

Following on from the very successful 'Decoding the Digital' conference, the British Library Preservation Advisory Centre and the Digital Preservation Coalition are undertaking a short programme of digital preservation roadshows across the UK in 2011.  We are delighted to invite you to the first stop on the tour, at the British Library in London on 4th February 2011.  Subsequent months will see us in Glasgow, Cardiff and York.  These events are designed to raise awareness of digital preservation issues, increase involvement with digital preservation activities and sign-post the support and resources available to help you on your way. They provide an introduction to digital preservation, build an understanding of the risks to digital materials, include practical sessions to help you apply digital preservation planning and tools, and feature speakers sharing their own experience of putting digital preservation into practice. 

The sessions are aimed at librarians, archivists and collection managers in all sectors and in all sizes of institution who want to find out more about digital preservation and the implications for their organisation of having to retain, manage and provide ongoing access to large quantities of digital material. Throughout the day participants will gain confidence in addressing digital preservation issues and knowledge of achievable steps to put theory into practice and safeguard vulnerable digital content.

More details including a draft programme and how to register are now available.

Appropriate and timely examination of the digital preservation plans of digitization projects can have a lasting impact.  Projects may not know or understand the risks they run. Simple assessment can help them identify and address these risks sooner rather than later.

The DPC and ULCC with the assistance of Portico and funding from JISC are pleased to announce the release of a new Case Note in digital preservation: Assessing Long-term Access from Short-term Digitization Projects.  This new case note, written by Patricia Sleeman of University of London Computer Centre provides a simple set of questions to which they used to evaluate the long term prospects of 16 digitization projects funded by JISC,  The survey questions will be useful to any funder wanting to test the durability of digital content that they are creating, and any digitization project manager keen to ensure that their work is robust.

Full text of the case note is available here.