This blog post was co-authored by Andrew Martin, Digital Preservation Coordinator, Ashley Gregory, Digital Preservation Technician, Candice Cranmer, Senior Changeable Officer and Asti Sherring:, Changeable and Digital Manager at the National Museum of Australia.
This month marks the first-year anniversary for the Changeable and Digital team at the National Museum of Australia (NMA). The team are now embedded in the Collections Platform Business Unit within the Growth and Engagement Division. Digital collections specialists have been brought together to ensure the Museum’s collections are discoverable, managed and preserved, by leveraging innovative digital technologies and strategies to connect our diverse audiences.
Digital Collections at the NMA
One of the functions of the Museum, as set out in the National Museum of Australia Act 1980 (NMA Act) is to develop and maintain the National Historic Collection. Comprised of over 250 000 objects, this collection includes an extensive range of AV material (film, magnetic tape, wire recordings, wax cylinders) and born digital carriers. As these objects are highly significant but susceptible to legacy format challenges, the need to develop robust digital preservation and access initiatives has become increasingly urgent.
Some of these initiatives include:
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A New Digital Preservation Policy: Replacing the first policy published in 2012, this DPP aims to build a sustainable framework for all digital preservation practices including developing Indigenous data sovereignty practices with the NMA’s First Nations Division as well as guiding principles and metadata practices.
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A Digital Preservation Lab and Equipment Uplift: To build digital preservation capacity, we transformed what was the Museum’s Broadcast and Media Studio into a dedicated space for digital preservation activities and AV/digital collection access. This includes a private viewing space to facilitate access to culturally sensitive material as well as the implementation of specialist equipment to digitise, transfer, image, verify and/or QC digital files.
 Image 1. NMA’s Broadcast and Media Studio 2005. |
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 Image 2. The newly transformed Digital Preservation Lab 2025, Acton, NMA. Changes include reducing the IT server footprint to give us more physical space, replacing carpet with Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) flooring, adding a vinyl wall covering for ESD workstation, adding acoustic panels and adjusting the lighting (LED 6000K) |
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A Changeable framework: Was also embedded at the NMA to conceptually guide preservation processes and cultural practices for some of the Museum’s most complex and dynamic objects. Positing change as a positive enabler for preservation practices, this framework has embedded a shared language to discuss authenticity and variability to build broader access models.
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Digitisation Program: The NMA has initiated a digitisation strategy across AV formats leveraging the opportunity to digitise magnetic media through the NFSA’s Audiovisual Australia (AVA) project as well as our at-risk collections for wider access, research and re-use.
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Collaboration – joining the EaaSi network: The NMA has also joined the Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSi) project in partnership with Swinburne University and 30+ organisations that are partners to the EaaSi ARC LEIF research project. EaaSi will give the Museum access to a browser-based, emulation tool, as well as a network of practitioners to preserve and make accessible a range of optical and floppy disks as well as born digital collections currently rendered inaccessible on contemporary systems.
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| Image 3. Disk Ripper 7000 for optical disk imaging. | Image 4. Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device. | Image 5. Iris QC Pro featuring scopes, waveforms and meters, and hardware capable of playing back full resolution preservation files. |
Next steps
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Build an AV Conservation Lab: to condition check and maintain the NMA’s analogue media collection.
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Develop our digital preservation workflows for audio visual QC, disk imaging, hard drive triage, bit level preservation and expanded documentation practices.
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Implement a Trusted Digital Repository for the storage of and access to our preservation files.
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Expand our Changeable framework with case study examples
Get in touch with us:
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Andrew Martin: Digital Preservation Coordinator
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Ashley Gregory: Digital Preservation Technician
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Candice Cranmer: Senior Changeable Officer
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Asti Sherring: Changeable and Digital Manager
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Also supported by the wider Collections Platforms team and Growth and Engagement division
Please feel free to reach out to us at: digitalpreservation@nma.gov.au