Jenny Mitcham is Chief Digital Preservation Officer for the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)
The iPRES conference was held in the beautiful city of Copenhagen last week and I was lucky enough to be able to attend in person. Among various other more formal contributions, myself and colleague Dorothy Waugh facilitated a ‘Birds of a Feather' session on the preservation of e-Theses - an idea that was supported by our collaborators from the Open Book Futures project, Gareth Cole, Jenny Fry and Paul Stokes. I don’t think either of us had ever delivered a Birds of a Feather session before, but it seemed like a nice counter to the more formal presentations, posters, panels and workshops that we were already committed to, and an appropriate way to continue the conversation on e-Thesis preservation with the community. It wasn’t so much about sharing our thoughts on the topic, but rather more to provide a space for community members to talk about their own challenges and pain points.
Open Book Futures (which built on the work of the COPIM project) completed in April this year and was funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development Fund. One of the DPC’s contributions to the work was to survey the community to understand the current state of play with e-Thesis preservation. This led to the creation of an open educational resource to address some of the gaps that were highlighted.
The Open Book Futures project team had shared some of the findings of the scoping work at the IDCC conference in Croatia earlier this year, and were keen to also discuss this topic at iPRES. The scoping work had mainly focused on the UK (due to funder requirements), but we hoped to engage with a more international and digital preservation focused audience at iPRES.
Our session was scheduled for the last day of the conference – a 45 minute session just before the lunch break. We were aware that we probably had a few too many questions to ask, and we were hoping for a small group to ensure we could have an open discussion with lots of time for everyone to speak. We were pleased to have 9 attendees representing organizations from a range of different countries. We noted that the session was relaxed and informal and that we would share the learnings (but not who said what) through a blog post. In a round of introductions participants shared a little about e-thesis preservation in their own institutions and we heard about familiar challenges that tallied with the findings of previous scoping work.
Issues included:
- The range of file formats and inclusion of embedded files
- Challenges around provenance and copyright
- Handling embargoed materials
- Issues meeting national accessibility requirements
- Incomplete metadata received with theses
- A push to take e-only (at the time of Covid pandemic) without the necessary infrastructure and workflows in place
- Unclear roles and responsibilities
- Challenges associated with broken links and link rot
Perhaps one of the strongest themes that emerged related to where and how preservation fits into the submission workflow. Preservation was considered by one participant to be “at the end of the food chain”, and it was noted by another that although the library is responsible for looking after the e-thesis long term, the submission process as a whole is not owned by them. Digital preservationists sometimes feel that they have little influence on a process that is largely managed elsewhere within the institution, and that preservation outcomes will be poorer as a result. Preservation of e-theses is typically an afterthought, as compared to the priorities of awarding a degree, and making a copy of the thesis available in the institutional repository.
We discussed the difference between making an e-thesis available in a repository and actually preserving it. For one participant, who was moving e-thesis content into their preservation system, challenges arose with keeping the content in sync. If a student submitted an updated version, or the cover sheet needed to be updated, there was a challenge in replicating these changes into the preservation version.
We asked participants how the preservation of e-theses differed from the preservation of other types of born digital content at their institutions. For several participants there were differences noted, with preservation workflows for theses considered to be “a work in progress” or described as “less rigorous”.
It was noted that other colleagues involved in the submissions workflow may not have a complete understanding of what preservation really entails and may have a misplaced trust in their institutional repository (even if all the processes considered to be good practice for digital preservation are not in place). Digital is at times treated much like the printed copy, with a focus on checking that it looks right visually (for example, are the margins the right size?) rather than whether the file itself is suitable for long term preservation. Those working in digital preservation (typically with high workload anyway) have limited power to influence the process and ensure that the different needs of physical and digital are understood.
One participant was considering the development of an online service to allow research students to pre-submit their thesis so that it can be reviewed and any preservation issues identified. The work of the institution to raise the awareness of research data preservation has laid the groundwork for initiatives like this. However, without a step like this being compulsory (and without the additional resource that it might require) a service like this would likely be little used. Some success was noted with a similar service to review metadata to make sure it’s sufficient, though again, this was noted as being “a lot of effort”.
Given that only one of the participants was aware of the Preserving e-Theses Resource Pack, we spent the last 5 minutes of the session describing it. This followed on quite well from the discussion points that had been raised about upskilling both students and other staff involved in the submission workflow, and the challenges of link rot within e-Theses. The pack consists of the following elements:
- Staff Orientation Guide
- Quick Guides for students on the topics of choosing file formats, copyright and permissions, link rot, and web archiving.
- Future Proof Your Thesis: Five Principles to Support Long-Term Use
- Staff Reference Guide
- Introductory video
We noted that participants were free to adapt these to suit their own needs and that the quick start guide on copyright was written for a UK audience so was likely to be less applicable elsewhere. Given the international audience at iPRES we also noted that translation is welcome and that the DPC are happy to receive translated versions of our resources so that they can be shared back with the community.
I think we all felt that the conversation could have usefully continued, but not wishing to keep people from their lunch, we ended it on time. Several participants expressed a wish to pick up the conversation again, so perhaps this is a topic we will return to in the future.
As well as being an enjoyable and interesting chat, this session has reminded us that we shouldn’t just assume that the wider community is aware of the resources that we produce and share with the world. We intend to consider further ways of disseminating these materials to the communities who might benefit from them the most.
In the meantime, do have a look at our resource pack (http://doi.org/10.7207/ethesesresource26-01) and let us know if you have any feedback.