Tackling the digital preservation challenge at the University of Glasgow 

Clare Paterson is Senior Archivist (Business & Digital) at the University of Glasgow. 

The digital preservation challenges we face at Glasgow will be familiar across the DPC community: increasing volumes of digital data which do not fit the well-honed record-keeping procedures of our long-familiar paper-based systems; expectations of quick, if not immediate, availability of digital information to support our work, research, and learning; and the ever-shifting landscape of technology to name just a few.  

Since 2015, teams across the University have been collaborating through our Digital Preservation Working Group (DPWG) and building the case for capacity, resource, and expertise.  This collaborative approach benefits us greatly.  Through our DPWG we bring together colleagues from the Digital Library Team, IT Services, Research Information Management (RIM), Data Protection and Freedom of Information Office (DP&FoI), Archives & Special Collections (ASC) and the Digital Curation Centre to share expertise, discuss challenges, and work together on our shared priorities.  Beyond the University, we are always eager to engage with the digital preservation, archival, and open research communities to learn from others experiences and expertise.  

Whilst aware of the scale of the digital preservation challenges we face; we are making progress, both as a working group and as individual teams working in our own areas.  These are some of our highlights:

We have some good foundations: 

• A Digital Preservation Policy and a DPC Rapid Assessment flagging some priorities for our next steps.  

• Digital preservation technical infrastructure: our RIM team offer a fantastic service to support the University’s researchers manage their research outputs with Arkivum facilitating preservation processing and storage of research data since 2014.  We have recently added JISC Preservation with Archivematica to support preservation of our born-digital collections (such as University theses and archival collections).  

• Priority data, records, and services requiring action have been identified: the RIM team have long been well-attuned to the needs of the University’s researcher and funder communities, in ASC we are looking to focus on the long-term preservation of the University’s committee papers and exam papers to ensure the continuity of these long-established records series in the University Archive, and an options appraisal for the University’s Web Archive is in progress.  

• The knowledge, skills, and expertise of our team is growing: conferences, workshops, and training programmes have been taken up, and we’ve assisted in the development of the DPC’s Novice to Know-How training programme and Electronic Document and Records Management System Preservation Taskforce.

We are also processing digital collections for preservation:

• Our research data repository, Enlighten – Research Data, provides access to the research data, with Arkivum sitting behind for processing and storage.  

• Our first born-digital theses from 2008 – 2010 are being preserved using Archivematica and NextCloud through JISC Preservation.

• First stage processing of the born-digital archives of two of ASC’s archival collections has been completed, and planning of the workflow and model for preservation actions in Archivematica is underway.

• Maintaining the archive of the University’s web presence is developing; we are currently using tools including Conifer, Webrecorder Desktop and ArchiveWeb.page to capture the University’s website, social media, and internal communications around our response to Covid-19.

We have developments ahead:

• We are excited to welcome our first digital preservation specialist, Leo Konstantelos, to the ASC team in July.  Leo is joining us from his role as Lecturer in Digital Cultural Heritage within Information Studies at the University and will bring a fresh perspective and focus to our digital preservation activities within ASC.  

• We are revisiting our digital preservation roadmap, ensuring we have right priorities for the year and beyond ahead, and the right mix of people and resource to bring effective action.

Certainly, there’s no shortage of work to be done, solutions to be explored, and partnerships to develop, so an exciting period of building in breadth and depth to our digital preservation services is ahead.  We look forward to sharing more of our journey with you all.