Ali Hayes-Brady is Digital Archivist at Records and Archives Services, Monash University
A little over a year ago, when the world began to shut down, the DPC Australian and Asia-Pacific Office had its launch party. It was the last real “event” I attended in person for almost an entire year and it was wonderful. When asked to write a blog for DPC from Monash University’s perspective I thought it would be a nice time to reflect on the year that was – both joining this wonderful community and what we’re hoping to do in the future.
Around the time of the launch party we were working on our DPC application. There had been discussions and conversations in both the Library and the Archives for a little while about joining the DPC and, upon hearing that a “global south” office was being opened (in our own city, no less), it made sense to us to finally take the plunge. At Monash, the Library and the Archives are in 2 different areas of the University’s administration and so it was important for us to come together and work collaboratively on our application as our membership will be a membership for the whole University. After working on our application under new COVID-19 restrictions and despite Zoom growing pains - we became the 10th member of the DPC in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region!
After joining the DPC we continued our mini-community Library-Archives chats about where we are with our individual digital preservation activities and what we could do and work on together. We decided to celebrate our new collaboration for World Digital Preservation Day by creating a digital book of the diplomas and certificates of Sir John Monash and thought that WDPD was the perfect time to launch it. These diplomas and certificates are contained within 2 bound volumes that were donated to the University by the Monash family and are held by the Archives. The Library digitised them and then published a curated set of documents online (with explanatory notes) for all to browse through. We also took part in the wonderful #BitListBakeOff and hosted our own #RetroByte campaign, asking folks to share photos or memories of their oldest technology relic!
Since joining DPC we have been lucky enough to attend a number of the excellent events that are hosted (some in more favourable timezones than others!) and look forward to going to many more webinars, launches, talks, and collaborations. We have also used the DPC RAM Tool in a number of areas to take the pulse of where we are at as an institution - and where we need to improve! Establishing our own mini-community within Monash in order to join this larger global community has really allowed us to look at digital preservation as a university-wide project, and not just something for each individual area to focus on. We decided that we wanted to include more key stakeholders from around the university. And so, our mini-community has begun to grow to include members from MUMA (Monash University Museum of Art) and we’re beginning to bring in folks from our research data teams. We hope that eventually we will have spokespeople from all over the University who can advocate for digital preservation and help in the creation of a robust University-wide digital preservation ecosystem.
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