William Kilbride is Executive Director at the Digital Preservation Coalition

•  Coda: a passage that brings a piece or a movement to an end.
• Canon: a theme that is repeated and imitated and built upon by other instruments with a time delay, creating a layered effect.

World Digital Preservation Day 2023 adopted a musical turn of phrase with the theme ‘A Concerted Effort’, emphasizing the need for collaboration and partnership to achieve a shared goal.  As the saying goes, ‘No one can whistle a symphony, it takes a whole orchestra to play it’.  It might be phrased less elegantly: if you’re doing digital preservation on your own, you’re doing it wrong.

In musical terms this blog post is the coda which brings our celebrations to a close.  It’s too early for me to take stock of all the different initiatives and outputs which have been shared over the course of the last 36 (ish) hours. I only have space for a few items which caught my eye so a very limited perspective.  But here are a few things that, if you didn’t already know about, are worth holding on to:

Julienne Pascoe is a Digital Archivist for Library and Archives Canada.

Digital Preservation is a collaborative effort, one that benefits from a variety of perspectives, expertise, and multifaceted participation. As a Digital Archivist at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), I work closely with my team in our section, Digital Integration, as well as colleagues in the Digital Preservation section, to perform a variety of tasks and services in ensuring that digital records are transferred, assessed, and preserved for sustainable access in the future. The stewardship of our digital legacy would not be possible without a collaborative, concerted effort with my colleagues who contain invaluable, diverse expertise and perspectives that combine to research and devise strategies for tackling the many nuanced digital preservation challenges. This collaborative effort to ensure continued access to our digital legacy extends to (and relies upon) the community that we are a part of, the digital preservation community, and it is this subject that I would like to discuss in my blog post today. More specifically I would like to discuss my experience as a ‘first-timer’ with the DPC this year, and the value that such a network brings to my role as a digital preservation practitioner. 

Nance McGovern is Associate for Digital Preservation Practice and Instruction at Global Archivist LLC and a DPC Fellow

Digital preservation at its best is a collaborative sport. As always, the theme for World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is timely and important.

Collaboration has been an important part of digital practice for me since I started preserving digital content in 1986 at the Center for Electronic Records at the U.S. National Archives. We regularly welcomed visitors from all over who were interested in hearing about our program and in sharing what they were working on with us. An open source approach – sharing, using, and contributing back – contributes to the sustainability of good practice for digital preservation. Welcoming visitors – virtually and in-person – is a relatively easy opportunity for organizations engaged in digital preservation to contribute and to be informed.

This blog post has been written by Laurence Brewer, Elizabeth England, Lisa Haralampus, Leslie Johnston, and Markus Most at National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Background

The U.S. federal government has signaled how important web content is to the public documentation and experience of government. According to U.S. government website tracking data, every 90 days there are over 5 billion visits to government websites. Enabling long-term preservation of government website content is critical to public understanding of the government and its history.

Adam Harwood is Research Data & Digital Preservation Technologist at the University of Sussex

I talk about digital preservation with IT colleagues regularly and I often feel like I am in a position of perceived weakness - lecturing them on technical matters relating to preserving data. Needing a little confidence boost, I used ChatGPT to see what it had to say about the difference between backup and digital preservation. I posted an interesting outcome of this conversation in the Digital Preservation jiscmail list. Its answers boosted my confidence and I no longer feel those nagging pangs of talking nonsense during technical conversations.

Marcus Nappier is Senior Digital Collections Specialist at the Library of Congress

This year’s DPC World Digital Preservation Day theme, “Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort” highlights the necessity of collaborative work to achieve digital preservation goals and ensure that our collective digital heritage stands the test of time. I’ve been thrilled to work alongside amazing colleagues at the Library of Congress to annually update and publish the Recommended Formats Statement, a digital preservation guidance tool and culmination of file format nerdiness.

Heather Tompkins is Senior Project Officer at Library and Archives Canada

As World Digital Preservation Day approached this year, I started to think about what might be worthwhile to share with our digital preservation colleagues across the world. One of the topics that came to mind is the work we are undertaking at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) to develop our digital preservation policies.  In 2022, our digital preservation area underwent an audit which resulted in several findings. One finding was to develop a digital preservation policy suite that defines our preservation priorities. Another finding was to have criteria for the acquisition and preservation of digital material that takes into account LAC’s ability to preserve and make them accessible.  While we had an overarching policy on preservation, we didn’t yet have clear documentation of these priorities or criteria as it relates to the unique aspects of digital preservation. We internally recognized we could improve how we work, in part, by clarifying these priorities and criteria.

Chris Prom is Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is proud to release the iPRES 2023 Proceedings on World Digital Preservation Day. We hope you find them profitable and useful for your work.

Doing so is a fitting capstone to the community effort that underpins digital preservation work so evident during the iPRES 2023 meeting, held from September 19 - 22, 2023. As conference co-chair, along with Tracy Seneca, I can truly say that organizing the conference was THE highlight of my professional career to date. The sense of welcome, collegiality, rigor, and fun that the entire conference planning team - our program committee, local organizers, peer reviewers, and supporters - brought to the table, was truly extraordinary and inspiring!  

Sally McInnes is Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales. 

As a small, smart country, we in Wales are well accustomed to undertaking concerted efforts for the common good, notably reflected by our Well-being of Future Generations Act. This Act is unique to Wales and requires public bodies to think about the long-term impact of their decisions and to work collaboratively. We have certainly delivered the Act in the context of digital preservation, influencing decision making through the creation of a national policy, advocating for investment, skills development and through many collaborative initiatives.

Antonio Guillermo Martinez is the Founder and Head of Product at LIBNOVA. 

Este blog está disponible en español a continuación: 

One more year we join the Digital Preservation Coalition's initiative to celebrate the World Digital Preservation Day. This year the central theme to reflect on is "Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort".

At LIBNOVA we firmly believe that a successful digital preservation project is the result of a joint effort between the institution and the provider, which is why we have always advocated a project approach based on cooperation, with the needs of our customers as the driving force for innovation and by engaging in collaborative research projects. But, what does this really mean?

Niamh Murphy is a Digital Archivist with the Royal Dublin Society.

In our community, optical media imaging is an essential yet challenging task to undertake. Despite the plentiful documentation available in support of this topic, establishing a workflow can leave you questioning: Where do I begin?

Ailie O’Hagan is the Digital Preservation Officer at Queen’s University Belfast. She attended the iPRES 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Starting with Digital Preservation is like making stone soup – the more we come together and pool our resources, the better we can sustain our staff and collections needs. 

This video was sent to us by Zandile Myeka, Metadata and Photographs Archivist at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in celebration of World Digital Preservation Day 2023.

Mark Schroeder is a solution architect in Iron Mountain's Digital Business Unit

We are living in most interesting times…

(Joseph Chamberlain, 1898)

When the collapse of the Soviet Bloc precipitated the breakdown of the German Democratic republic in 1989, the East German Secret Service (Ministerium für Staatsicherheit - Stasi), found themselves holding extensive archives of records. In the forty years of its existence, 91,000 employees of the Stasi and up to 180,000 informants had amassed thousands of linear metres of archive material.

Alice Austin is the Web Archivist for the University of Edinburgh.

October 1969 was a busy month. Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired for the first time; Steve McQueen, Trey Parker and PJ Harvey were born; and on a dark, dark night (or about 10.30pm on the 29^th), a 21-year-old UCLA student called Charley Kline started to transmit a message to the Stanford Research Institute using the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. He meant to send the word ‘LOGIN’ – but the receiving system crashed at ‘LO’. And thus, the internet was born.

Jenny Mitcham is Head of Good Practice and Standards at the Digital Preservation Coalition

Last month the DPC hosted a series of ‘Digital Preservation Futures’ events designed to showcase the work of our Supporter organizations. The event that kicked off this series was a panel discussion entitled “So I’ve finally procured a digital preservation system, now what?”. The session began with a representative from each Supporter organization giving a short lightning talk in answer to the question posed in the title, and this was followed by a lively discussion and Q&A with the audience. It worked well to benefit from the expertise of all of our Supporters together and in many cases to hear them effectively ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ and repeating and developing on the points that others had made. With representatives from Arkivum, Artefactual, AVP, boxxe, Libnova, Preservica, and consultant Simon Wilson, this really did feel like ‘a concerted effort’. Pulling together the key learnings from the session into a blog post for World Digital Preservation Day seemed an obvious next step. 

William Kilbride is Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition

Digits are born vulnerable.

Every single byte of data depends on a global infrastructure of technology, process and people for its meaning and purpose to be realized. Much data serves the moment: it is quickly forgotten in a continuous flow of process and interaction. Other data serve lengthier purposes, as evidence and outputs of transactions that have significant impacts and long duration, longer than the infrastructure and the institutions through which the data was created. Everything in the latter category falls into the scope of digital preservation—the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary, beyond the limits of media degradation, technical obsolescence, and organizational change.

The Bit List is not a paper exercise. It was originally conceived as a call to action based on the insight and authentic voice of the global digital preservation community, and it remains so.

Ellie Burnage works for Exact Editions based in the UK

“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it!” Halford E. Luccock 🎼

November has crept around again, and with it World Digital Preservation Day 2023 on Thursday 2nd November. Organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition, this annual celebration invites all data creators, archivists and curators to celebrate the benefits and opportunities enabled by the hard work of digital preservation community. 

The theme of this year’s celebration is ‘Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort’ — and a particular project Exact Editions took on during the last year encapsulates the collaborative work that digitising a magazine archive entails. Haymarket documented over 120 years of automotive history when they extended the archive of Autocar, the world’s oldest car publication, back to the first issue ever published in 1895. 

This blogpost has been written by St George’s, University of London (SGUL) Records Manager Kirsten Hylan, Research Data Support Manager Sarah Stewart, and Archivist Juulia Ahvensalmi.

‘Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort’ is the theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, celebrating how, by working with colleagues at our university and beyond, digital preservation allows us to both share and gain knowledge, which in turn supports our efforts at digitally preserving our digital records. 

Jon Tilbury is Chief Innovation Officer at Preservica

In the evolving realm of Digital Preservation, success hinges on collaboration. However, the dynamics of working together, exchanging knowledge and providing mutual support have seen significant transformations over the last few decades.

Since the late 20th century when Digital Preservation emerged as a distinct field, those engaged in it have recognized the importance of tackling its challenges through collaboration within a broader community. However, over that time the nature of those involved and the way information is exchanged around the community have fundamentally changed, and there are multiple communities with different problems and priorities. How do they support each other as Digital Preservation expands and evolves?

This blog post has been written by Francesca Mackenzie, Digital Archivist specialising in file formats for the The National Archives (UK) and Jonathan Isip, Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies (UPSLIS).

From our own experience starting out in the field of Digital Preservation, and conversations with each other on the subject we had found a recurring theme that the technical jargon can be off putting and often create a sense that the job is more complex than it is. Often glossaries can be quite daunting, so the goal of Digital Preservation for 5 Year Olds was to lower some of the language barriers of entry that maybe didn’t need to really be there in the first place.

Dr Miranda Barnes is Research Associate in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Books at Loughborough University

The Open Book Futures project, which began in May 2023 as an acceleration and advancement of the COPIM Project (11/2019-04/2023), continues to focus on the open access monograph, with an emphasis on Scaling Small. This principle “eschews standard approaches to organisational growth that tend to flatten community diversity through economies of scale” (Adema & Moore, 2021). Work Packages in both projects focus more broadly on infrastructure, governance, accessibility, financial models and revenue, metadata and dissemination, and experimental publishing, but also archiving and preservation. It is the combined approach and multifaceted, collaborative interaction of the work packages that leads to our best insights and outputs.

Somaya Langley is Digital Preservation Manager at the Science Museum Group

If you’d asked me two decades ago what managing and preserving the memory sector’s digital and audiovisual collections would look like today, the picture I’d have painted would’ve been one where the metaphorical sky contained far more radiant shades.

Katherine Mitchell is an AHRC-funded PhD Researcher, Design and Digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

For the last couple of years, I’ve been an embedded PhD researcher in the Design and Digital curatorial section at the V&A Museum, London. During my time there, I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside colleagues across different departments, both when conducting my PhD research and working on additional projects. So in response to this year’s WDPD theme of concerted efforts, I want to celebrate the value of researcher-institution collaborations, and the power of working at intersections. Because as an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Researcher, collaboration is quite literally in the name. And as someone working on digital collections care, I continually operate at intersections: between the museum and academia; between curatorial and preservation concerns; and between theory and practice.

Jake Bickford is a Web Archivist at The National Archives (UK)

Several members of the UK Government Web Archive team were fortunate to attend iPres 2022 in Glasgow, and we were all struck by the emphasis on the climate crisis and our community’s urgent need to address it. A particular highlight for me was James Baker, Rachel MacGregor and Anna McNally's workshop The Climate Crisis and New Paradigms for Digital Access, which challenged participants to identify concrete changes we could make to reduce the environmental harm caused by our work. This theme ran throughout the conference and several of the other interventions are summarised in Matthew Addis’s excellent blog post. We returned home determined not to leave these ideas behind as we resumed our normal routine.

This blog has been written by Carey Garvie, Senior Digital Preservation Specialist, Library Systems & Digital Preservation and Susannah Bourke, Digital Archivist, Description Original Materials at State Library Victoria

This year’s theme for World Digital Preservation Day - Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort feels extremely pertinent to our experience over the last year. In December 2022, State Library Victoria appointed two new Digital Preservation positions. Together these roles have been focused on setting up procedures and equipment for processing incoming and legacy digital acquisitions. One of the first steps has been to set up a working group of staff from across the acquisitions, description and library systems teams who process unpublished digital materials for the collection. This group has been working together to map out current workflows, identify opportunities for improvement and document procedures. While this was occurring a search was also underway for a location to set up the digital preservation equipment.

Fran Horner is an archivist at the University of Sheffield Special Collections, Heritage and Archives (SCHA)

My name is Fran and I am a new Archivist (or ‘musician’) at the University of Sheffield Special Collections, Heritage and Archives (my ‘orchestra’). Digital preservation (the ‘symphony’) falls under my remit in this new role.

It has been a really interesting experience over the last five months getting to grips with my new role and exploring this ‘orchestra’s’ ‘symphony’. I began by meeting my fellow musicians who manage digital archives and collections (or ‘notations’) which form the basis of the ‘symphony’, such as the Special Collections and Archives Managers, a fellow Archivist, the Library Systems team and the Digital Preservation Manager, Bryony Hooper, to name a few.

Helen Dafter is Archivist at The Postal Museum in the UK

The Postal Museum recently reached a significant step in its digital preservation journey, with the purchase of Preservica. I am celebrating this achievement, and thinking about what we need to do next to get it fully up and running. We wouldn’t have been able to reach this stage without the support and cooperation of many others along the way.

This blog was written by Claire Newing, Web Archivist at The National Archives (UK), Patricia Falcão, Time-Based Media Conservator at Tate, Sarah Haylett, Archives and Records Management Researcher at Tate and Jane Kennedy, Records Manager at Tate

In 2023 - and for the first time in either of our histories of collaborative practice - Tate approached The National Archives about supplying the first in-house captured microsite to the UK Government Web Archive. This was a near reversal of the usual process, by which the TNA regularly captures Tate’s website as part of their collecting remit to “archive central government information published on the web”.

Eve Wright is a Digital Archivist at National Records of Scotland

At National Records of Scotland, our current approach to digital preservation is to look outwards. We take small incremental steps to improve our preservation activities gradually, so we are continually dependent upon (and grateful to!) to our colleagues, who make open source digital preservation options available.

One challenge we have recently faced was how we could implement a regular process of integrity checking without any system automation. Our Digital Repository is file system based so there would need to be some kind of tool to look through digital objects and compare checksums against what we produced during ingest.

Barbara Sierman is a Digital Preservation Consultant and a DPC Fellow

Imagine digital preservation as a concerted effort and all digital preservationists worldwide as an orchestra playing one big symphony about digital preservation. This is the theme of the WDPD2023, but is it true? I have my doubts, as there is no conductor for the orchestra and no “Great Plan”, but OK, there are sure some good examples of concerted efforts in dedicated projects.

Lieve Baetens is Student Cultural Heritage/Former intern selection and preservation immersive media at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Heritage. She interned at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision where she researched strategies for the selection and preservation of immersive media.

During my internship at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision I conducted the research titled “Collaboratively Moving Forward: Exploring Strategies for the Selection and Preservation of Immersive Media in Cultural Heritage Institutions”.^[1] As the name suggests, the research emphasizes the importance of institutional collaboration for selecting and preserving immersive works.

As part of the research, I interviewed fourteen experts in the field from ten institutions in total. I was very pleasantly surprised about how willing everyone was to contribute to the research. From listening to the interviews with these experts on one of my favorite podcasts called “Art & Obsolescence” hosted by Cass Fino-Radin, to being able to meet these experts and talk with them about immersive media made me very happy. As a young professional it was wonderful to experience how welcoming the digital preservation community is. It made me realize that digital preservation truly is a concerted effort.

Corinne Frappart is Digital Archivist at the Publications Office of the EU

Introduction

As we recently celebrated World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) in 2023, we find ourselves standing at the crossroads of history in the field of digital preservation, tasked with the challenge of safeguarding the ever-increasing number of digital artifacts that define our past, inform our present, and shape our future.

The theme for this year's WDPD, "Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort," underscored the collaborative nature of the digital preservation community's mission. One of the most emblematic examples of this collaboration is the development of open-source software. In this blog post, I will delve into the specific case of the long-term preservation open-source software RODA, and the impact of its use by public administrations leading to improvements that benefit the digital preservation community at large.

Daniel Greenberg is Director of Product Management at Ex Libris, part of Clarivate

The challenges of digital preservation are constantly evolving. New file formats emerge, old ones become obsolete, and the quest to ensure the longevity of digital assets never ceases.

In this changing landscape, one principle remains constant at Ex Libris, part of Clarivate: the power of community-led development. This credo is more than just a philosophy; it's the core of our digital preservation efforts. For us, working with the community is the only way to guarantee a real-life, use-case-oriented system.

Emily Clarke is Digitisation Lead at Monash University Library. She attended the iPRES 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

As a first-time attendee to iPRES, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I don’t have a background in the technical aspects of digital preservation. I am not a digital preservationist. What was waiting for me in Champaign, Illinois? My concerns that I would be overwhelmed by technical jargon, foreign concepts, and subtle specificity were not to be met. In this blog, I reflect on some of what I learned from the iPRES 2023 conference, particularly how it connects to this year’s WDPD theme of ‘A Concerted Effort’: The importance of a holistic view of digital preservation, and what are we actually doing it for?

This blog was written by Tara Majoor and Allison Graycon at Museums of History New South Wales

Museums of History NSW manages and preserves the State Archives Collection for the State of New South Wales, Australia, as well as place-based collections of objects and materials associated with our portfolio of historic houses and the Caroline Simpson Collection of publications, objects and materials related to homes, gardens and domestic life in Australia.

This blog was written by Linda Shave for the Records and Information Management Practitioners Alliance (RIMPA)

Australia like many countries around the world is struggling with the rise of a data rich metaverse world, the rise of Quantum information processing and navigating the pitfalls of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation.  Traditional approaches for identifying digital archives for digital preservation are not necessarily agile in today’s world.  Traditional approaches are not designed for ploughing through the metaverse nor in identifying what is the truth or not the truth.  Our future depends on a universal concerted effort to find a way forward in collecting, archiving and preserving digital assets now and into the future or we could risk entering a digital dark age. 

Martin Gengenbach is Digital Preservation Policy and Outreach Specialist, National Library of New Zealand

| Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

Since the inception of the DPC Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) in 2019, the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa has used the framework annually to identify strengths and gaps in its digital preservation programme, and to adjust resources and initiatives accordingly. However, there was little direct comparison of RAM results between organisations. We were unsure who else was using the RAM within the region, and then COVID-19 related lockdowns proved challenging to many local collaborative initiatives. (But not all of them --  We see you, Australasia Preserves!)

Paul Meredith is Pou Ārahi – Deputy Chief Executive, Māori, for Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision in Aotearoa New Zealand

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision has been engaged in an unprecedented programme of community based magnetic media digitisation within indigenous communities. Rokirokitia (a Māori word that can be translated as “to preserve or care for”) was devised and carried out by Aotearoa New Zealand’s audiovisual archive between 2021 and 2023.

William Kilbride is Executive Director at the Digital Preservation Coalition

World Digital Preservation Day takes a musical turn this year. Recognizing the many roles and skills which are required to preserve digital materials, our theme is ‘A Concerted Effort’. 

It’s a wonderful metaphor which invites all manner of variations: we will be striking chords, keeping the beat and mostly all singing the same tunes. We will be hitting high notes, developing themes, and calling for all manner of improvisation. It will reach a crescendo (for DPC at least) with the release of the Bit List. There may even be actual music involved at various points. I am looking forward to the complimentary puns and witticisms that will certainly follow.

This blog post has been written by Jaye Weatherburn, Program Manager, Digital Preservation and Elise Bradshaw, Digital Curation and Archives Specialist at the University of Melbourne.

In honor of World Digital Preservation Day 2023 on Thursday 2 November, the Digital Scholarship (Research) team responsible for digital preservation at the University of Melbourne is planning a day of reflection and self-directed learning. This will include advocacy work and watch parties of conference recordings and webinars, as well as a team lunch. 

The Earth spins. The Sun rises. It’s Friday 4^th November which means World Digital Preservation Day 2022 is now over. The Earth will keep spinning and the Sun will keep rising, so the question is what will we do with all those new connections and insights which have been so generously shared? This post is a bit like the morning after election night: it’s too early for the final count but there’s enough to ‘call’ the result.  And I am therefore ready to announce World Digital Preservation Day 2022 a success.  Maybe even the best yet.

Nathan Tallman is Chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Coordinating Committee

The NDSA held its 10th annual Digital Preservation conference on October 12-13 in Baltimore, Maryland, you can read some highlights from NDSA Leadership on the NDSA News blog. During the opening ceremony, while sharing my remarks as Chair, I mentioned that NDSA Leadership worked over the summer and fall to refresh our foundational strategy. What better day to talk about our refreshed strategy than World Digital Preservation Day!

Our mission statement now reflects that NDSA fosters and incubates communities of practice who advocate, support, and provide expertise in digital preservation through their work, to benefit practitioners, service providers, and memory organizations, as well as the creators, owners, and users of digital content. These changes reflect a more dynamic and engaged NDSA that supports the community in furthering our collective goals.

Ellie Burnage works for Exact Editions based in the UK

Exact Editions is thrilled to be celebrating World Digital Preservation Day once again this year alongside the community of data creator, curators and consumers. 

This theme of this year’s event, organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition, is ‘Data For All, For Good, Forever’. With that in mind, we are focussing on some of Exact Editions’ significant events over the past year that have enabled publishers and libraries to improve access to their digital resources both in terms of readership and longevity. 

This blog post was co-authored by Jess Farrell, Educopia and the BCC, and Sharon McMeekin, DPC.

Happy World Digital Preservation Day! 

Today, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the BitCurator Consortium (BCC) are excited to announce the transition of the BCC’s Python Study Groups pilot to a program and a new benefit for DPC and BCC members hosted by the DPC.

The BCC Python Study Groups were launched in 2021 by Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez, David Cirella, Jess Farrell, Shira Peltzman, Dorothy Waugh, and Sara Day Thomson in response to  a conversation at the 2020 BitCurator Users Forum. Their primary goal was to create a welcoming study space that focused specifically on the cultivation of Python skills in order to support library and archives’ tasks and workflows, empowering practitioners to use Python in their everyday work. Many of us have attempted to learn coding languages independently using online resources, and many have reported that a lack of confidence and time has often derailed these efforts. The BCC Python Study Groups aimed to help overcome these obstacles by building intentional space to learn from each other regardless of where we were starting from.

Janet Jennings is Digital Curation Lab Coordinator at the University of Salford in the UK

Tucked into a corner of the University of Salford’s MediaCity Campus, the Digital Curation Lab (DCL) houses an array of equipment which indices both nostalgia and possibility. Super 8 and 8mm projectors sit alongside reel-to-reel tape recorders, cassette decks, mini disc players and a copy stand, amongst an array of other devices. It is a space caught somewhere between the past and the future, providing opportunities for revealing hidden histories and creating digital treasure. I recently started my new role here and am excited and intrigued by the possibilities that lie ahead.

On this World Digital Preservation Day of 2022 I wanted to celebrate file format identification. It is a topic that is central to digital preservation ingest workflows and close to many of our hearts. We are so lucky within this community to have a number of different tools that can carry out and automate file format identification at scale, and of course the amazing resource that is PRONOM that underpins so many of those tools.

Leading up to World Digital Preservation Day I started thinking about what we would do if we didn't have those tools, and also what happens when we have to investigate and interpret each file individually. These thoughts were also triggered by a tweet from Helen Dafter of the Postal Museum about a double file extension that she had recently come across. It was great to see the file format enthusiasts of the digital preservation community piling in to try and help solve the mystery...!

The annual review of The Bitlist, the Global List of Digitally Endangered Species, has been a fixed point for World Digital Preservation Day since its inception.  This year's revisions are the work of a small task force and have been compiled and edited by Dr Amy Currie, general editor of the list.  The following excerpt, the Director's Introduction highlights the major trends and offers a call to action.  The full list can be found here: http://doi.org/10.7207/dpcbitlist-22 

The BitList 2022 is the third interim review of the list since its initial publication in 2017. It builds on the work of previous BitList juries, and in particular the comprehensive review in 2021.

The BitList 2022 offers a brief update and reflection on the state of the art since the last year. The list was assessed by a Taskforce on behalf of the DPC’s Advocacy and Community Engagement Sub-Committee which guides DPC’s advocacy work on behalf of the DPC’s global membership.  The Taskforce were briefed to identify and comment on trends towards increased or reduced risk against every entry on the list as published in 2021. There are no new entries to the list nor has the Taskforce substantially changed, rescoped or restructured entries in the 2021 BitList.

Johanna Gallego Gutiérrez is responsible for digital deposit for the Collection Development Group at Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

[la versión en español sigue]

The National Library of Colombia joins in the celebration of Digital Preservation around the world. This year one of the reflections is about what an image tells us about the story. An image can mean a lot or really nothing without a context, in a different year, country or culture.

Sally McInnes is Head of Unique and Contemporary Content Department at the National Library of Wales

Today is World Digital Preservation Day and an opportunity to highlight the work undertaken by the National Library of Wales to ensure that digital content is preserved for the future.  In order to raise general awareness of issues relating to enabling on-going access to  digital content, which affect personal as well as organisational data, I would like to introduce you to Wilf.

This blogpost has been written by St George’s, University of London (SGUL) Archivist Juulia Ahvensalmi, Research Data Support Manager Michelle Harricharan, and Records Manager Kirsten Hylan.

‘Data for All, For Good, Forever’ is the theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, demonstrating how digital preservation allows ‘digits to flourish’.  What an apt theme for a university that has been transforming health and medical care since 1733! Whether it is developing the earlier practices of variolation into vaccination (introduced by Edward Jenner in 1798) that eventually eradicated smallpox or transforming health practice though our pioneering work in infection and immunity, population health and molecular and clinical research, for St George’s data has always been for good, for all and, with proper care, forever. This post will consider how by preserving records and data regardless of format that are held in the archives and currently being developed by our staff, we are not only ensuring we maintain our history, but that St George’s continues to contribute to ground-breaking medical research by allowing digits to flourish.

Karin Haveman is Acting Manager Government Archives and Preservation at the Tasmanian Archives and Digitisation Services Coordinator

In February 2021, Libraries Tasmania launched the Preservation Digitisation Project – a major collaborative project that brings together Digitisation Services, System Support and Delivery, Government Archives, and the Community Archives teams. The aim of this project is to digitise our Tasmanian film, sound, and video collections for long-term preservation and to provide greater access to our collections for the public. Our priority is our magnetic tape collection which is at great risk of being lost forever if not digitised before 2025 (NFSA paper: Deadline 2025 | National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (nfsa.gov.au))

It is always good to be able to release new resources on World Digital Preservation Day and this year is no exception. The resource I’m going to talk about isn’t exactly a ‘new’ resource, it was originally published and promoted by the Archives and Records Council Wales (ARCW) back in August, but they generously agreed that the work could be repackaged and re-released on the DPC website to ensure that a wider and more international audience could also benefit from it.

Why am I so excited to get this particular resource out on World Digital Preservation Day? Well the theme of World Digital Preservation Day this year is particularly inclusive - ‘Data For All, For Good, Forever’. Much of the work that I do at the DPC tends to have a focus on working with people who are already part of our community, and are already sold on the idea that digital preservation is ‘A Good Thing’. This is all good, but sometimes I am aware of the echo chamber within which I tend to reside.

Natalie Baur is Program Director for DPOE-N

Happy World Digital Preservation Day from your colleagues at the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N)! We are excited to celebrate this important day with you, and we wanted to share some of our resources and funding opportunities that are available to the community. 

DPOE-N was created by the Library of Congress in 2010 to provide digital preservation training across the U.S. The program transitioned to Pratt Institute School of Information and New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program in 2018 to further develop it and support it into the future. In 2020, DPOE-N received a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its operations. In 2022, DPOE-N received two more years of grant funding from the Mellon Foundation.

Andy Jackson (@anjacks0n/@This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) & Paul Wheatley (@prwheatley) have shared this post on behalf of all the digipres.org contributors.

Calling All Digital Preservers!

The digital preservation community is small and under resourced. This means we must work together if we want to make the biggest impact. To this end, a small group of us have been attempting to help the members of the digital preservation community better support each other. On World Digital Preservation Day, we'd like to encourage you all to (re)discover what we've built so far:

Martin Gengenbach is Digital Preservation Policy and Outreach Specialist, National Library of New Zealand

There are many resources to help an organisation draft its first digital preservation policy, including the excellent guide provided by the DPC. There is less information about reviewing and revising policy documentation - though most policy guides recommend a regular process for doing so. Announcing an existing policy revision probably doesn’t sound as exciting as promoting a new digital preservation policy. Once completed, should policy review simply become an unheralded act, subsumed into business as usual?

Libor Coufal is Assistant Director for Digital Preservation at the National Library of Australia

We are very mindful that it has been (not quite all, but mostly) quiet on the NLA communication front in the last several years, while we have busily worked on implementing our digital preservation program. Our attendance at this year’s iPres (our first since 2014) was a great opportunity to pause and reflect on the progress we have made. We would like to update the community on what we have been up to and the things we have achieved.

World Digital Preservation Day 2022 has arrived.

You might be looking at your watch and thinking it’s still only Wednesday 2^nd and not even close to midnight wher you are, but World Digital Preservation Day is a global event.  So as the working day begins across the Pacific Ocean, so it's time to get this show on the road.

The theme of World Digital Preservation Day 2022 is ‘Data for all, for good, forever.  I am looking forward to a global outpouring of blogs and presentations and tweets and songs and cakes which celebrate and interpret this theme.  Almost anyone working in or thinking about digital preservation can have something to say about a theme as open as this.  The day has two broad purposes: to raise awareness about the digital preservation challenge; and to help a growing but widely distributed community connect with each other.

Tom J. Smyth (Manager, Digital Preservation) and Maxime Champagne (Digital Preservation Repository Supervisor), Library and Archives Canada

Early this year, it became a priority for LAC’s Digital Preservation unit to reconsider the context of (and affect a major update to) our policy statement on the file formats we accept for transfer of digital library and archival documentary heritage.

In the course of examining the existing documents, a few issues arose for discussion among the preservation divisional staff:

Leo Konstantelos is Senior Assistant Archivist (Digital) in Archives & Special Collections at the University of Glasgow

The Digital Preservation Working Group (DPWG) at the University of Glasgow is a cross-University collaboration working to implement the University’s digital policy and strategy. Established in 2015, the group oversees the delivery of digital preservation services, with representation from the University Library, IT Services and the Data Protection & Freedom of Information Office.

We’ve been busy DP bees recently, assessing Archivematica as a production-level DP platform; reviewing and elaborating on our digital archiving workflow; testing said workflow with born-digital acquisitions at the University Archives; and working on setting up an archival forensics lab. Check our #WDPD2021 posts on Twitter @UofGlasgowASC to see what we’ve been up to!

I had the happy task of opening World Digital Preservation Day about 40 hours ago: but I get the fuzzy end of the lollipop too. Today I have to encourage you back to work. Those Excel spreadsheets aren’t going to screw up the date columns on their own. Oh hang on…

The original idea for World Digital Preservation Day was very simple: to help our far-flung community connect, and to raise awareness about our work. In 2021 we added a theme – we didn’t have themes in the early years – about Breaking Down Barriers to Digital Preservation.  Linguists will spot a verb in there, and it’s in the active voice too. So, at least thematically, 2021 has been the most ambitious World Digital Preservation Day yet, with action at its core. There’s a renewed urgency and confidence represented by this theme, growing partly from the many connections and case studies (not to mention cakes and crafts) which have come before.

Urgency and confidence are needed. This last year might be remembered as the year of the great deletion; as the year of obfuscation, misinformation and denial. As technology has become more and more critical to our lives so it has become the means and theatre of division, exploitation and harm.  The fragility of digital media has given cover to those who would hide their actions, and misdirection to the gullible who think data loss is inevitable, perhaps even reasonable.

As Richard Ovenden has argued, it’s time to Undelete the Government. My only qualification: not just the UK and not just the government. If I can mix my metaphors, we started World Digital Preservation Day with the idea of breaking down barriers, but perhaps we need to end it by taking to the barricades.

Data loss may seem like a small issue considering the many challenges ahead but rest unassured: corruption, maladministration, disaffection, and incompetence are the inevitable consequences of an entirely avoidable digital dark age.

Kelly Stewart is Chief Archivist at Artefactual Systems Inc. 

There are many ways to describe the value of digital preservation, but for me it’s fundamentally about enabling memory in the modern world.  Whether we want to  hold those in power to account for  the actions they have taken or use those records in new, previously unimagined or impossible ways as science, culture, and technology evolve, access to reliable and trustworthy digital records is a cornerstone to our collective memory. 

Eilzabeth-Anne Johnson is Electronic Records Archivist at University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources. 

At the University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources (LCR), we're in the process of developing our digital preservation program. As part of this undertaking, we've been breaking down the barriers of the ways we communicate with each other and with our colleagues, patrons, and donors outside the institution. Acquiring, cataloguing, migrating, and sharing our digital material all comes with challenges. Learning how best to communicate with colleagues in different departments and with different areas of expertise has been crucial for our projects. While digital preservation can seem like the domain of only archives and libraries, LCR operates eight University of Calgary libraries on campus and across the city. Included in LCR are two art galleries: the Nickle Galleries and the Founders' Gallery at The Military Museums, as well as Archives and Special Collections, the University of Calgary Copyright Office, Research Data Centre and the University of Calgary Press. All these units create born-digital material.

Angela Beking is Data Policy and Research Analyst/Analyste des politiques et de la recherche en les données at Privy Council Office/Bureau du Conseil privé (Canada).

We often speak of the critical importance of upstream engagement in digital preservation work. If we wait until the end of the records lifecycle to begin speaking with Producers about the opportunities provided by digital preservation, we are often too late. That box of unreadable floppy disks. Those files in a format that is not recognizable, let alone readable. That information that was stored on a social media platform, thinking it would be around forever (looking at you, Google +).  All of these examples speak to the need for active and engaged digital preservation practice.

But how do we actually “do” upstream engagement? What value can we deliver to Producers, and what can we learn in return? I suggest that there are lessons to be learned in breaking down barriers through upstream engagement that will encourage – or even require – our discipline to reflect on its core assumptions.  

Christopher Zaste is a Digital Archivist at the University of Manitoba.

On September 30^th of this year, Canada held its first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.  Throughout the nation, one could see people wearing orange shirts wherever they went.  Old, young, Indigenous, non-Indigenous, people of all backgrounds donned this shirt to remember residential school Survivors.  While the number of orange shirts are plenteous, the number of residential school Survivors are not.  Each year, their number steadily decreases.  While archivists preserve the written record in archives, society loses the firsthand experience of those who went to residential school.  Human knowledge has a shelf life, and it is the lifespan of the person holding it.

With the loss of this knowledge, people will lose the opportunity to learn about what happened from those who experienced residential schools firsthand.  The same can be said for the loss of knowledge for other marginalised groups as their truths often vanish when one of their number passes away.  This is a perspective that is not present in the written record, which non-community members often wrote.  With its loss, entire communities can lose their voice in history.

Euan Cochrane is Digital Preservation Manager at Yale University Library.

As part of the EaaSI program of work we are aiming to make it as easy as possible to use emulation for long term digital access. One goal we’re trying to achieve is to enable users to automatically open digital objects in their original interaction software. We hope this will break down barriers to the use of emulation and preserved software in long term access contexts.

We currently have a prototype of the Universal Virtual Interactor (which is what we call the tool that automates the automated opening process) that uses file format information and other metadata to match digital objects to interaction software. It assumes that a file matching a specific file format signature (when scanned with a format identification tool), should be opened with the software for which that format was the default, and which was available when the file was created. Even then it reports multiple matches and attempts to order them by best fit/most likely to be “original” (based on dates, etc). 

Emily Monks-Leeson, Russell White and Kevin Palendat from Library & Archives Canada. 

On September 20, 2021, Canada held its 44^th federal election following a 36-day campaign. As Canadians turned to their preferred news and social media outlets, Library and Archives Canada's Web and Social Media Preservation Program began crawling and preserving election-related websites as events unfolded online. This was the sixth election LAC had captured through web archiving, and when it comes to the dynamic nature of such a task, we’ve found that frequency is a friend. We had a background of knowledge and experience to draw on, dating back to 2006 when we archived a modest 21 websites totaling 23 GB of data. Our efforts have intensified with each election to the point where, in 2021, we have crawled over 300 seed URLs totaling around 1.5 TB of data (and counting).

Claudia Muñoz López is a student of the master’s degree in Library and Information Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. 

The following blog is available in Spanish below.

Non-governmental organizations are non-profit associations that provide services to society on the most diverse purposes: education, culture, human rights, environment, hospital aid or support to vulnerable communities, among many others. Their activities have an impact on society and the communities with which they work.

As organizations, documents recording their activities are useful both for the efficiency of the organization itself and for society so that it can understand its history and social, cultural and political influence. However, what happens when most of these documents are digital and do not have a digital preservation plan? E-mail, websites, databases and multimedia files are widely used documents that reflect the day-to-day work of organizations and do not have a paper version.

Ana Yuri Ramírez-Molina, Alberto Castro Thompson, Lisandro Pablo Olivares, Coordinación de Innovación y Estrategia Digital de la Biblioteca Nacional de México.

Due to the events of the pandemic, in Mexico and all around the world, people have modified the way they work and communicate and have turned to new technologies that facilitate digital connections. These technologies are important in the teaching and learning process and can have a significant social impact if used in education as a means of achieving social development. Institutions in charge of safeguarding the knowledge generated by the society play a key role in this permanent process of human development, as they are holding responsibility of ensuring continuity of digital heritage materials as long as they are needed.

Nancy McGovern is Director of Digital Preservation at MIT. 

WDPD’s theme Breaking Down Barriers is perfect for this year! I know I’ve been working on all kinds of barriers this year. These are some of my barrier busting examples from this year:

ICA Managing Digital Archives course: This one comes first because it’s the most recent – it’s launching today! It’s been so rewarding to collaborate with Margaret Crockett at ICA, my co-creator, with significant contributions from Kari Smith of Global Archivist. One of our objectives was to help organizations with limited resources, a common barrier, to build their capacity by providing an accessible and comprehensive course that is lifecycle-based and grounded in standards and good practice. More info here: https://www.ica.org/en/ica-online-course-managing-digital-archives 

This post was written by the team of the Time Machine Organisation.

This year´s World Digital Preservation Day’s theme “Breaking Down Barriers” points to how digitisation is the road into the future and holds numerous opportunities in various areas. Moreover, “the aim of World Digital Preservation Day is to create greater awareness of digital preservation that will translate into a wider understanding which permeates all aspects of society – business, policymaking, personal good practice” (cited from dpconline.org) – a conviction that is shared by the Time Machine network and that we would like to outline for you on this occasion.

Dan Noonan is Associate Professor/Digital Preservation Librarian at The Ohio State University and the Coordinating Committee Chair at NDSA.

This year as we celebrate World Digital Preservation Day, we contemplate how we can break down barriers to enable success, not just for ourselves and our personal institutions and organizations, but for the greater global community. Digital preservation is not a state that is achieved; rather it is a comprehensive set of managed activities that are necessary to provide continued access to digital objects, beyond the limits of media failure or technological change. These managed activities do not happen within one division, department or unit of an institution or organization, nor do they necessarily happen solely within one particular entity. Therefore, it is appropriate to consider the framework for this collective work as an ethos, which is described as the characteristic spirit of a people, community, culture, or organization as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations.

Karen Hanson is Senior Research Developer at Portico.

The scholarly community continues to experiment with new ways to present research. Today’s publications may include features such as interactive visualizations, data-driven experiences, extensive multimedia integrations (often with media hosted on third party platforms), user annotations or comments, non-linear navigation, and more. Meanwhile, keeping pace with preserving this increasingly complex network of born-digital materials is ever more challenging. To preserve these forms of scholarship effectively and at scale, one path forward is for preservation experts, platform developers, and publishers to work together to break down technical barriers for preservation.

Jeanne Kramer-Smyth is Digital Archivist with the World Bank Group Archives. 

There are so many cliches about how hard it is to get from “almost done” to “done”.  Cliches like, “the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time” and  “the last mile is the longest” can feel all too real. The barrier I am most obsessed with these days is the “last mile” between transfer and ingest of digital records.

At the World Bank Group Archives’ digital preservation program we are diligent in our efforts to work on all the traditional components of archival work with digital records, including appraisal, transfer, ingest, description, preservation, and access. Each component presents its own challenges, but getting from transfer (which I define as “bringing digital records into archival custody”) to ingest (which I define as “moving digital records into the Digital Vault, our digital preservation platform”) often feels larger than all the others.

Kate Murray, Digital Collections Management & Services at Library of Congress.

The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Audio-Visual Working Group, a collaborative group of US federal agencies led by Library of Congress since 2007, has had a busy year! We’ve released three updated projects in September to support its ongoing work with developing good practice guidelines and open source tools for digital audiovisual content and digital preservation practices.

Elizabeth England, Digital Preservation Specialist and Leslie Johnston, Director of Digital Preservation both from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

As part of its Digital Preservation Strategy, the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has goals associated with the ongoing review of its program and with ensuring that agency staff have appropriate training. Discussions with our internal digital preservation advisory group confirmed the findings from our ISO 16363 self-audit in 2019 that NARA staff in a variety of roles are unfamiliar with the goals and activities that are part of digital preservation, as well as the technologies used, NARA-specific activities and programs, and the regulations and guidance that NARA produces and abides by to ensure that the permanent born-digital and digitized records of the federal government are managed, preserved, and made accessible.

Teresa Soleau is Digital Preservation Manager and Alexis Adkins is Institutional Archivist. They work at the J. Paul Getty Trust.

As one of the newest members of the DPC we are thrilled to start working more closely with others in the digital preservation community, hearing about their work and sharing ours. As a first step in that direction, we’re going to share with you some web archiving work we’ve done in the past year. At Getty we don’t have a specific person dedicated to web archiving so the work is done collaboratively between staff in Institutional Records and Archives and Getty Digital.

Gabriela Andaur Gómez, Archivera del Archivo Electrónico del Archivo Nacional de Chile // 

Gabriela Andaur Gómez, Archivist of the Electronic Archive of the National Archive of Chile

[ENGLISH FOLLOWS]

Quienes trabajan en instituciones comprometidas con el patrimonio documental, saben que puede resultar desafiante transmitir la relevancia y urgencia de la preservación digital como área de desarrollo permanente. La complejidad del trabajo técnico y la necesaria inversión de recursos que implica, pueden ser difíciles de justificar cuando los resultados no son visibles de manera inmediata. Por el contrario, sabemos que el valor de la preservación digital se revela con particular fuerza en la medida en que transcurre el tiempo, mucho más allá de lo que el corto plazo nos permite anticipar.

Amarílis Corrêa is an Academic Librarian and Researcher on digital preservation in São Paulo, Brazil / Amarílis Corrêa, Bibliotecária acadêmica e pesquisadora em preservação digital

[PORTUGUESE FOLLOWS]

For some of us, there seems to be no barriers to digital preservation; for others, too many. Is the grass always greener on the other side of the fence? For me it is, considering I haven’t had the opportunity to implement any part of the digital preservation process in the institution where I work.

13^th June 2021 was the 10^th anniversary of my first day with the DPC, the point where I made the switch from practitioner to a focus on workforce development. Such a significant milestone has naturally led to time spent reflecting on years past and hopes for the future.

As with any experience in life, my decade with the DPC has brought a combination of highs, lows, and plenty places in between. But thankfully I can report that the highs massively outnumber the lows. In my family, our unofficial motto is that “it’s all about the stories” and I can say with all confidence that my time with the DPC have given me more interesting stories to tell than I could possibly count. So, overall, I think that my time with the organization has been a success.

Miguel Ángel Márdero Arellano is Cariniana Network Coordinator at IBICT and José Carlos Abbud Grácio is President of the Permanent Commission for Digital Preservation UNESP.

A network of digital preservation services

In many countries, experiences in the implementation and actions of digital preservation have aroused the interest of heritage institutions, which seek to formalize preservation strategies through policies and action plans in different infrastructure contexts and aimed at digital collections of different natures and scenarios. In Brazil, the work area of ​​digital preservation is still little known, despite this, the practices of digitization and creation and repositories in the country converge in digital preservation actions in spaces where norms, tools and digital archiving systems are formalized.

Digital preservation in Brazil as an institutional practice is still linked to relatively restricted experiences. The perspective of expanding procedures and institutionalizing policies in this field involves the structuring of archive networks, or libraries, which contribute to disseminate technologies and support services, promote the sharing of collections and expand the possibilities of exchange between dedicated researchers to the same themes.

[la version française suit]

Since 2019, France has had a Cellule Nationale de Veille sur les formats (National Formats Watch Unit), under the aegis of the French association Aristote and its working group on the Preservation of Digital Information (PIN). The Cellule currently brings together a dozen private and public partners. Its main objectives are to share monitoring activities on formats, to raise awareness among professionals on the subject, and to contribute to or influence the associated tools. It aims to be a recognised French-speaking interlocutor in international work on these subjects.

This blogpost has been written by St George’s Records Manager Kirsten Hylan, Archivist Juulia Ahvensalmi, Records Manager Kirsten Hylan and Research Data Support Manager Elizabeth Stovold.

The World Digital Preservation Day theme for 2021 is ‘Breaking Down Barriers’ and focuses on how digital preservation supports digital connections, unlocks potential and creates lasting value.  In this post we’ll look at the work we’ve been doing to identify areas in the university holding records of interest for long-term preservation.  By connecting with people and areas of the university who previously were not involved in the project we are unlocking the potential of the records and creating lasting value.   

You can engage with the day and find out more about our work on the Museum and Archives Twitter account, and using the hashtags #WDPD2021 and #SGULwdpd2021.

Laura Giles is the City of Culture Digital Archivist at The University of Hull, UK

We’ve blogged before about our work on the City of Culture digital archive and now in keeping with the Breaking Down Barriers theme of this World Digital Preservation Day we’re now thinking about the ways that the City of Culture digital preservation work can help us open doors across the university to build relationships and embed good practice around the creation, storage and eventual preservation of digital records.

John Pelan is the Director of the Scottish Council on Archives

The digital archives of community groups were added to the DPC’s Bit List under ‘Critically Endangered’ in 2019 due to a number of identified aggravating conditions. These included: poor documentation; lack of continuity funding; dependence on small number of volunteers, conflation of backup with preservation; and distrust of official agencies, e.g., local authorities and national collecting bodies.

Caylin Smith is Head of Digital Preservation at Cambridge University Library.

This post was originally published on the Cambridge University Libraries Digital Preservation blog and can be found at this URL: https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/hello-world-fa267483a86d

Welcome to the first Digital Preservation at Cambridge University Libraries (CUL) post!

CUL is a network of libraries at the University of Cambridge comprised of Cambridge University Library, the main research library for the University, as well as faculty and departmental libraries.

Digital preservation is incredibly important to the Libraries. This discipline is fundamentally about ensuring access to digital materials for as long as necessary — and that’s what staff working in this area at CUL help achieve for digital materials created or acquired for library collections. We’re keen to share news of what we’re working on because the impact of our digital preservation work will extend right across these libraries.

Peter Judge is Archivist for the Lloyds Banking Group Archives & Museum

Prior to 2020 at Lloyds Banking Group Archives we had been making plans to digitise parts of our collections. Then, like so many other organisations, we found ourselves in a situation where lockdown restrictions were limiting our access to the archives. Given how much of our work is tied to a physical space, this added extra impetus to our plans for digitisation.

Christy Henshaw is Digital Production Manager at Wellcome Collection in London

Wellcome Collection, like many archives, has a tape problem. Video or audio, good condition or bad, tape archives present a major challenge for preservation and access. We hold hundreds of unique and distinctive works on tape formats, and regularly acquire more through our acquisition programme.

Sue Trombley is the Managing Director of Thought Leadership at Iron Mountain.

Modern civilisation is becoming more and more defined by the rapid evolution of technology, and its equally rapid obsolescence. The cultural heritage we create for future generations now largely exists in the form of ones and zeros found in myriad formats and in countless data storage systems. On top of that is the fact that we generate exponentially greater volumes of data every year.

When it comes to physical media, a book that is centuries old is fundamentally the same as one we print and publish today, and if preserved properly, is equally accessible today. When it comes to digital media, however, it is a very different matter. Devices and formats have changed almost beyond recognition in the last couple of decades, many are wholly incompatible with one another and many files can no longer be read due to platform obsolescence. This gap will only widen if we fail to pay attention to the importance of digital preservation in enabling lasting value.

Emma Hancox is Digital Archivist at the University of Bristol.

As well as digitising two dimensional materials, at the University of Bristol we have been experimenting with three-dimensional scanning methods. We are actively engaged in digital preservation and the creation of 3D scans creates its own set of challenges. In terms of access, we have started working on ways of increasing interaction with the 3D models we create breaking down barriers, giving our collections a wider reach and unlocking their potential in the long-term.

Charlotte Armstrong is Project officer for the Open Preservation Foundation

In 2020, amid a global pandemic that isolated many people from their professional communities, the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF)’s Spring Hackathon brought together an international group of contributors to enhance open source digital preservation tools and documentation relied on by digital preservation practitioners around the world. 

Jon Tilbury is Chief Innovation Officer at Preservica

Institutions and individuals working in Digital Preservation are rightly concerned about the long-term sustainability of the technology or service providers they trust to look after their material. However, the meaning of “sustainability” is much broader than often appreciated.

Olivia Foster is Digital Archives Officer at the Archaeology Data Service in York, UK

Staff at the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) have been busy over the last year archiving the data deposited with us, collaborating with partners and rolling out the new OASIS online archaeological reporting system. Digital preservation is one of the core activities of the ADS and as a digital archive we preserve and make publicly accessible archaeological and heritage data in our archives and the ADS library.

Kirsten Arnold is Service Owner for Digital Selection and Transfer at The National Archives in the UK

Hi. I’m the Service Owner for Digital Selection and Transfer (DST), working within Digital Archiving at The National Archives (TNA). DST works closely with records creators to help them understand, provide advice and facilitate the transfer of their selected digital public records to The National Archives. These record creators specifically are public record bodies, and in the main UK government departments.

David is a senior digital archivist at The National Archives in the UK.

Original development

With DiAGRAM (the Digital Archiving Graphical Risk Assessment Model) we are trying to break down barriers to digital preservation in two ways: firstly, to help archivists make progress with digital preservation by showing them which interventions will have the greatest impact in reducing the risks to their digital materials; secondly by making sure that the tool itself does not present barriers to being used by anyone who needs it.

Sally McInnes is Chair of the Archives and Records Management Digital Preservation Group at the National Library of Wales

In Wales, we have been working for many years to break down barriers to digital preservation through working collaboratively to increase capacity and skills. The publication of the National Digital Preservation Policy and accompanying Technical Appendix, on Digital Preservation Day in 2017, aimed at ensuring digital resources of enduring value would be selected for preservation and remain authentic and accessible in the future and to raise awareness of the importance of digital preservation for stakeholders and decision makers. The policy framework is supported by the development of a technical solution, which links Archivematica, Fedora and the National Library of Wales’s Digital Archive, whilst providing access to content through the discovery systems which are managed by the partners.

Rachel MacGregor is Digital Preservation Officer at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick

Making connections with people is always important when working in digital preservation – without connecting with our creators and our users (potential and actual) there is nothing to preserve and no one to preserve it for. We can sometimes get too focussed on our digital collections as a bunch of bits and bytes but in very real terms what we have is stories and experiences, told through a dizzying variety of file formats, content types and platforms. It’s our job to make sure those stories are preserved – and the context around them – to make them meaningful and accessible for future generations.

Sean Rippington is Digital Archives and Copyright Manager at the University of St Andrews

Photogrammetry – taking overlapping photographs of an object and converting them into 3D digital models – has become business as usual for the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums. Driven by the push to provide more, different, and better types of online access to our collections for teaching and learning during the pandemic, we now have over 170 examples on our IIIF-based Collections site. Many of the models have already been used in our Exhibit teaching and engagement tool, developed to provide new, curated, almost tactile encounters with digital objects. Some of our favourites include:

Jaana Pinnick is Grants Manager and Research Data and Digital Preservation Manager at the British Geological Survey

A.K.A. a brief timeline of the digital preservation journey at British Geological Survey (BGS) and National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC) over the last few years

Around this time in 2016, the initial thoughts I had had to explore digital continuity and preservation needs at BGS were starting to develop further. I had finished my MSc thesis on “Exploring digital preservation requirements: A case study from the National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC)” which led to my first peer-reviewed article being published in the Records Management Journal. During my studies I had discovered that our parent body UKRI (then still RCUK) was a member of the DPC, so I approached Juan Bicarregui, Chair of the DPC who works at the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to ask if I could join. I soon got in the habit of attending DPC events, meeting William, Sarah, Paul and others, not forgetting other digital preservationists from around the world and learning a lot from them. Their jobs sounded fascinating so I took a Post-Graduate Diploma in Digital Preservation at the University of Aberystwyth with Sarah Higgins, and learned some more. But what next?

World Digital Preservation Day is a chance to talk about our digital preservation challenges and some of the progress we have made, both individually, and as a community. Of course, it is also a chance for the community to come together and have a bit of fun in the name of awareness raising.

One of the things I enjoy most about World Digital Preservation Day is the musical contributions. There is no doubt there is some talent in our community of digital preservationists. 

But this year I wondered what would happen if we invited our file formats to take to the floor and have a go at singing. As you can see, they embraced this challenge with great enthusiasm.

There’s a paradox about World Digital Preservation Day this year.  2021 might well be marked as the year of the great deletion.  Barely a day has passed without a news story about some curious deletion or obfuscation which has inhibited prosecution, denied transparency, disrupted science or defeated accountability.  And yet, the digital preservation community has grown in number and in skills over this same period.  What’s going on?  How can both of these statements be true at the same time?  The BitList provides something of an answer: that capability is ahead of policy.

Matthew Addis is Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum. 

The theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day is ‘Breaking Down Barriers’.  A great example is recent work on how digital preservation can help ensure scientific data will remain accessible and usable for decades to come.   The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is bringing together the communities of scientific research and digital preservation to break down the barriers that currently jeopardise the long-term access to hugely important scientific datasets and results.  

This is happening both at a strategic level, for example through EOSC’s working group on sustainability that includes a task force on long-term digital preservation (LTDP), and on a very practical and technical level, for example through the ARCHIVER project that is developing new LTDP services for EOSC.  Arkivum has been privileged to work in ARCHIVER to find new ways to do cost-effective, scalable, and environmentally friendly digital preservation at scale (more on that below).

Lee Hibberd is Digital Preservation Manager at the National Library of Scotland.

For many years the National Library of Scotland has talked about joining the great and the good and certifying our digital preservation and access activities against CoreTrustSeal (https://www.coretrustseal.org/). If you’re unfamiliar with Core Trust Seal it is a certification scheme for trustworthy data repositories. Sixteen core criteria are assessed and it's up to you to provide evidence of how your institution satisfies each of them.

Part 1 of this blog is an account of our positive experience up to the point of submitting our application for review in summer 2021. Part 2 will cover “what happened next” and some of the challenges we faced along the way. This will come shortly after gaining the seal. We’re not being presumptuous here – we are simply committed to undertaking any additional work we need to do to demonstrate our competence to the reviewers. The point of the application is not to gain a shiny badge but to improve what we do, and this sentiment is well shared in blogs by other DPC members (see box below with some links).

Kunika Kono is Technical Lead for Digital Humanities at the Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advance Study, University of London

Over the last year, many universities in the UK faced organisational restructure, departmental closures and job cuts. The School of Advanced Study and its institutes were no exception, and in February 2021, the Digital & Publishing department in the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), where I worked, effectively closed.

Garth Stewart is Head of Digital Records Unit at the National Records of Scotland

As a practical discipline, tending to a garden feels quite similar to digital preservation: it can never be considered ‘done’. Whatever the season, wherever you are in the world, there’s always something to do; whether it’s the laying of a new lawn (or the installation of a new piece of digital storage infrastructure), the sowing of a new flower bed (or the ingest of new image files), applying fertiliser (or using characterisation tools to enrich metadata), or the odd bit of dead-heading (or the rare act of de-accessioning). Gardening - and digital preservation - are engrossing, progressive, life-long activities.

Laura Peaurt is Digital Preservation Officer at Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham Libraries.

World Digital Preservation Day always provides a welcome prompt to pause and reflect on our digital preservation journey over the last twelve months. This year we have been asked to consider how digital preservation supports digital connections, unlocks potential and creates lasting value.

At Nottingham Manuscripts & Special Collections we have been begun to realise the opportunity provided by our digital preservation system to encourage broadening access to and use of our digital collections. This includes both our previously hard to access analogue materials (such as VHS and cassette tapes) as well as newly acquired born digital content collected on CDs, DVDs, and floppy disks over the years.

Elisabeth Thurlow is Digital Preservation and Access Manager at University of the Arts London. 

Whilst the first phase of the University of the Arts London (UAL) Digital Archives and Collections project aimed to introduce a digital preservation programme including the implementation of a new digital preservation system, the second phase focused on increasing access to the University’s growing digital collections. This led us to the development and recent launch of a new Digital Collections portal. 

The university-wide Project focused on digital materials found in its archives, museums and special collections - which include images, video and sound recordings, and an increasing number of born-digital artworks.

Alexander Roberts is the Digital Humanities and Research Data Manager at Swansea University. 

Over the last 3 years, Swansea University Library has been on a digital preservation journey to increase access and engagement with two important world-class physical collections currently held in the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin, and the Huntington Library, California.

Daniel Greenberg is Product Manager for Digital Resources Management at Ex Libris.

The theme for World Digital Preservation Day this year is “Breaking Down Barriers,” highlighting how digital preservation supports expanding horizons for libraries and other institutions. For national libraries, this expansion comes with some unique considerations and best practices.

But let’s take a step back and look at the basic challenges national libraries face in managing preservation of their digital assets.

Lamia Sassine is Digital Curation Lab Coordinator at the University of Salford

As a relative newcomer to digital preservation the theme Breaking Down Barriers really spoke to me. My background is in archaeology and museum studies, but I started to get attracted to digital curation during my PhD. My research investigated perceptions of Phoenician collections from 20 different museums, and I envisioned the best way to bring them together would be through a digital platform, but this is a story for another time.

Micky Lindlar is Digital Preservation Team Leader at Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB).

A few weeks ago I watched the recording of Helen Hockx-Yu’s excellent presentation on “The obsession with checksums”. In one of the slides Helen talked about “A matter of where to spend energy”, listing her top 5 priorities. One of those priorities is “overlooked things that have lead to data loss”, e.g. “not collecting content”.  This really reminded me of the current work we – that is  TIB’s digital preservation team – are doing around e-journals and completeness of metadata as well as content.

You might ask yourself now “what does digital preservation have to do with completeness checking and why should I care?”. Life is easy when you interact with a data producer who signs responsible for the completeness of a deposit. But what if you’re tasked to interact with a repository that you harvest data from? Or if you deal with really large deposits (e.g. more than 5 million articles)? And, as a collecting institution, do you blindly trust a manifest given to you by a publisher or do you need to cross-check? Things were easy in the analogue days. The library would receive a journal issue, all articles would be contained within that printed publication and at the end of the year all issues would be bound together in a volume. Not today, my friend!

Almost a year ago now, the DPC published a Technology Watch Guidance Note from Matthew Addis entitled ‘Which checksum algorithm shall I use?’. It was really helpful at the time to summarise and condense advice and good practice on checksums and their use in digital preservation (and of course help people to make that all important decision on which checksum algorithm to pick).

Without a doubt, checksums are of key importance to our work in digital preservation. Use of them is regarded as good practice (as encapsulated in models such as the NDSA Levels of Preservation and DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model and certification standards such as CoreTrustSeal and ISO16363), but there is still a gap in our knowledge.

How do we know exactly when to create them, which tools to use, how frequently to check them, which events would trigger their use, what to do in the event of a failure...and of course, which algorithm we should use to create them? Where is the step by step handbook to provide all the answers?

Of course, there isn’t one.

Dr Deborah Thorpe is Education and Outreach Manager for the Digital Repository of Ireland

This autumn, the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) held an online introductory training programme in digital preservation for our members, with a particular focus on the training and community-building needs of community archivists. This course has been helping with breaking down barriers to digital preservation, by making topics such as appraising your digital collections for preservation, data protection, and metadata preparation understandable, relatable and accessible to all. ‘Understandable’, because we recognise that every individual who attends DRI training has a different level of existing knowledge of digital preservation processes; ‘relatable’, because sometimes it can be difficult to identify how the intricacies of topics such as GDPR or anonymisation relate to a particular digital collection; and ‘accessible’, because many community archivists are volunteers who do not have expanses of time or resources to spend on either undertaking training or preparing their collections for digital preservation.

Kate McCarthy is Special Collections Librarian and manager of digitisation projects at the Houses of the Oireachtas Library

It’s late in the evening. Do you know where your children are? And by children of course I mean all those digital files you’ve happily brought into existence in recent years. The documents, images, and datasets. The hundreds of thousands of tiffs, jpegs, pdfs, mp3s, mp4s and xml files. Are they under the supervision of a digital preservation system? Hanging out on a Cloud account? Loitering on a local server? Idling on an LTO? Waiting to be collected from an external hard drive in a desk drawer that you haven’t opened for two years?

Tom Wilson is Associate Archivist (Digital Preservation) at the UN High Commission for Refugees

Breaking down barriers is something that often appears in the day-to-day work of UNHCR albeit, more often than not, in the metaphorical sense. Whether it’s providing shelter for refugees, access to healthcare, informing the public of the plight of refugees and other persons of concern or one of the many other activities that UNHCR carries out, UNHCR seeks to remove the barriers that can prevent people fleeing from conflict from reaching safety. Part of this work is done on the internet and by amplifying the voices of refugees or advocating on their behalf and this is where UNHCR’s web-archive comes in to help preserve this content for posterity.

Karin Bredenberg, Marjolein Steeman, Tracy Meehleib are part of the PREMIS Editorial Committee

First of all, thank you for the feedback you have given us in response to last year's call to action! We also want to express our big thank you for the Brazilian Portuguese translation of “Understanding PREMIS” and the updates made to all of the other translations! We’ve been busy putting your feedback recommendations into effect and it’s fair to say that 2021 has been a very productive and--at the same time--a very strange year for the PREMIS Editorial Committee! We’ll start with the productive and end with the strange.

Antonio Guillermo Martinez is the CEO and founder of LIBNOVA. 

Este blog está disponible en español a continuación: 

Last year, in our guest post on the DPC blog we wrote about the challenges of the digital preservation of research datasets, and unknowingly it was slightly related to this year's chosen topic: Breaking Down Barriers.

This year, we want to focus on some of the technological barriers that LIBNOVA has broken down to make digital preservation more accessible to the community by simplifying it.

Historically, digital preservation systems have been complex to use and complex to set up. When we first met this community, everything was complicated, everything was difficult to do. LIBNOVA has focused every single day since its inception on breaking down those barriers, empowering the community to do more with less, and optimizing its systems to help them achieve that.

Ya’qub Ebrahim and Thandokazi Maceba are both Data Curation Officers at University of Cape Town Libraries, Digital Library Services.

For a number of years now we have planned and strategised and now it’s time to implement. Implement what you ask? Well, it all started in 2015 when UCT libraries had the vision of creating two Data Curator positions in the Digital Library Services department. Fast forward to 2018 and we have successfully scoped and motivated for implementing a digital preservation system. Finally in 2021, this system, which we have named Izolo (isiXhosa for ‘Yesterday’) is installed and set to store not only historic, or ‘special,’ collections at the University, but all data requiring preservation at UCT^[1]. But, policies aside, as the data curators and preservation experts we see our job as being to ensure that data gets preserved, period.

Ansie van der Westhuizen is Non-commercial Digital Developer (Institutional Repository) and Anri van der Westhuizen is Manager of Archives. They both work at the University of South Africa (Unisa).

The Unisa Institutional Repository (UnisaIR) was launched in May 2009.  Challenges and barriers were the order of the day. During a conference in Senegal, Nkosi (2008) rightfully called these barriers by name: mistrust, resistance and lack of skills. At present the UnisaIR is still operating as a “traditional institutional repository”. However, it became and remains a flagship service offered by the Unisa Library and Information Services and is continuously breaking down barriers.

Svenia Pohlkamp Runs the nestor office at the German National Library

When asked to write a blogpost to be published on this year’s WDPD I started thinking about the motto “Breaking down barriers”, digital preservation and my work at nestor. In the end I had a disturbingly long list of barriers in my mind, that I needed to order and bring into perspective. This text is the result (though it does not deal with every barrier I could think of) and it tries three things at once: Relating my experiences of working in a network while people are advised not to meet, looking into barriers that are relevant to our work in digipres and letting you know what nestor is all about.

Irina Schmid is Digital Collections Archivist for American University in Cairo

https://thesaurus.plus/synonyms/model_of

World Digital Preservation Day is a special day for us to celebrate. Digital preservation is not an easy program to start. Various technologies, a large number of files, not enough financial support, and sometimes just not knowing where to begin. Or it could be a desire for perfection that can halt an idea, without realizing that only imperfections and difficulties can initiate a preservation program. Adding coal to a firebox can start an engine, and at the American University in Cairo (AUC), we are using the same technique. Our small but solid steps act like coal igniting the preservation engine, which leads us to the destination.

Koen Dobbelaere & Quincy Oeyen work at Digital Archives Flanders for the Agency for Facility Operations of the Flemish Government

The expanding digitization of the government brings new challenges regarding the management, the (long term) preservation and the disclosure of digitally created or digitally received information. To tackle these challenges in an efficient way Digital Archives Flanders uses the concept of ‘series’. We define a series as: “An aggregation of files created and maintained by an owner, in the same identifiable sequence, or the result from the same accumulation or filing process, and of similar function, format or informational content”.

Elizabeth Kata is Archives Associate for the International Atomic Energy Agency based in Austria

Let’s face it, there are a lot of barriers to preservation, often due to a lack of resources. An institution needs enough staff and sufficient training opportunities for said staff, technical infrastructure, and an institutional commitment to finance preservation measures. When we began examining our digital holdings in 2020, we encountered a variety of barriers, both anticipated and unexpected.

Barbara Sierman is a Digital Preservation Consultant 

Is digital preservation a profession? And if so, what characterizes it as a profession? If you look at a skilled carpenter, the professionalism is defined by the skills of the carpenter, the tools that are used, the flexibility to apply centuries old knowledge in different situations and materials and above all, to expand this knowledge.

Veli-Antti Leinonen is a Specialist at the Kajaani Data Center Program, CSC IT Center for Science in Finland

In order to secure the digital preservation in long term, the preservation MUST be ecologically on a solid foundation. Otherwise, the data can’t be preserved in the future if it consumes too much of earth’s resources. Non-sustainable preservation will eventually lead into data loss or intentional deletion of data. This is comparable to subject that organizations need to be on a sound foundation to assure the reliability, but from the environmental point of view. In addition to our data center operations, CSC provides national digital preservation services for both cultural heritage sector and research data in Finland, and acts as a national competence center for digital preservation. Having energy efficient data centers provides ecologically sustainable solutions especially when considering bit-level digital preservation.  

Dr Arif Shaon is Senior Digital Curation Specialist at the Qatar National Library.

Efficient long-term digital preservation requires a series of operations to be undertaken throughout the lifecycle of a digital object. The task of preparing content for preservation – i.e., a Submission Information Package (SIP)^[1] is a crucial step in the overall workflow as this is where the semantic and structural quality of both data and metadata is set for accessing and using the content in the future. The lower the quality of a SIP, the lower the longevity of the content being preserved.

For large collections of digital objects acquired from external institutions, the task of preparing SIPs can be very challenging. This is especially true where the policies for data and metadata quality of the acquiring organization cannot be easily aligned with those of the donor or contributing organizations.

Vera Ferreira is Depositing Officer for Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, BBAW in Lisbon, Portugal and Leonore Lukschy is Programme Administrator & Communications Officer for Organisation: Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, BBAW in Berlin, Germany

Homepage of the Archive of Languages and Cultures of Ethnic Groups of Thailand (https://langarchive-th.org)

Lee-Anne Raymond is Manager of MV Images (DAMS) at Museums Victoria, Australia

This year’s theme Breaking Down Barriers invokes imagery of protest marches, placards, actors suddenly bursting into song… Just me? Likely. Too much streaming in long lockdowns. Honestly, I really had to mull on the theme a bit, as I was concerned. How could I determine that barriers are being broken down from within a Museum where we do a lot of digitisation for reasons of physical preservation and access?

Julie McCormack is Senior Manager for Government Recordkeeping at Public Record Office Victoria, Australia

Public Record Office Victoria in Australia (PROV) is pleased to announce the completion of our Digital Archive Program, replacing our entire archival management and digital preservation environment that had been in place since 2005. This program represents a key initiative of our Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) to ensure continuous access to complete, authentic and meaningful digital records now and into the future.

Carey Garvie is Project Officer, Digital Archives Innovation and Research at the National Archives of Australia

After a hectic September of virtual conferences and opportunities to connect and share stories about how the National Archives of Australia does digital preservation with the broader community, I finally got a chance to sit back and start writing our blog for World Digital Preservation Day 2021 (WDPD2021). Reflecting on the theme of ‘Breaking Down Barriers’ and making digital preservation ‘understandable, relatable and accessible to all’, I began to think not about external community activities but internal ones instead.

Nick Thieberger works for the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) and the University of Melbourne

The distance between major population centres in the Pacific makes it difficult for residents of the sea of islands to access records in their languages. Even if records are stored in national museums or cultural centres, that can be some distance from most of the population. As the internet becomes more widely available, connection to these records becomes more feasible, but that requires the records to be described, digitised, and made accessible.

Jaye Weatherburn, Program Manager Digital Preservation and Elise Bradshaw, Digital Curation and Archives Specialist work at the University of Melbourne

Supporting digital connections

The theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, “Breaking Down Barriers” connects with some work we have currently underway to realise the University of Melbourne’s 10-year digital preservation strategy. This year in a big effort to build and support connections between the distributed teams contributing to the success of long-term digital preservation at the university, we have been working on a collaborative planning and implementation process for long-term preservation of university records.

Ros Malone is School Archivist for Bunbury Cathedral Grammar School in Perth, Australia

Image Keys: Easing Barriers to Retrieval in the School Archives

It’s a familiar problem for many Schools and School Archives, and indeed for collections of all kinds – what can be done with our vast collection of untitled, un-tagged digital images?

Rosemary Grace Bruce-Mullins is Committee Member and Member of the Research Team at the Wentworth Historical Society Inc, Australia

As a local History Society member digital preservation of records provides a multitude of benefits.

An experience where the local town hall, that housed the history society collection, was firebombed, and thankfully saved, made us aware of the reality of losing the collection, and all the information it contained.

Karuna Bhoday is Program Manager, Integrated Archival Management System Program at National Archives of Australia.

The National Archives of Australia ensures that Australian Government information of enduring significance is identified, secured, preserved and accessible for future generations.

To continue to meet our vision of being world leading archive in this digital age and to fulfil our functions now and into the future a high priority for the National Archives is to embed an end-to-end archival management capability across the organisation and to accelerate its digital transformation.  The integrated Archival Management System Program (IAMS) is a Digital Transformation Project led by our Chief Information Officer. 

It’s my pleasure to announce the official start of World Digital Preservation Day.

It’s both welcome and surprising to realise that we’re now onto our fifth annual event.  In the first couple of years, the simple purpose of connecting people and raising awareness about our work was sufficient.  Even that seemed ludicrously ambitious in 2017.  This year’s theme – Breaking Down Barriers – represents a new confidence, and perhaps a new urgency too. It’s a call to action. It’s a challenge to do something with those connections and insights that we’ve gained in the last four years.  We’ve connected with colleagues around the world and formed those relationships and in 2021 we move forward together.

There’s no shortage of ambition here, but let’s be honest, there’s a need for ambition. There are enough barriers to be broken down.  We’re used to thinking about digital preservation as the intersection of technology, resources and organization. There are barriers to all three of these, and the scale of the challenge only seems to grow.

The last rays of sun are now setting on the most westerly reaches of the map and we’ve all now had a chance to celebrate and participate World Digital Preservation Day.  I have a brief moment – for me it’s now the morning after the night before – to offer a few immediate reflections and pick a few highlights.

Our theme for the 5^th November, Digits For Good, has a neatly-constructed double meaning implying both purpose and time.  Both are necessary and both were on display.  I encourage you to leave your comments here on your own highlights.

It’s too early to report the full story of World Digital Preservation.  This particular count is far from complete but the success is undisputed.  We counted 85 blogs on the DPC website (yes that’s the most ever) from 22 countries (yes that’s the most ever).  And that’s just one of the many blogging platforms: I know because I wrote for two others besides and we spotted maybe another 25 that we know of.  We have counted well over 5,000 tweets - more than 4,000 on the #wdpd2020 tag and another 750 or so with #dpa2020 from around 1900 different accounts.  There were at least 10 baking ‘incidents’ (I don’t count each individual cupcake or cookie) in the #BitListBakeOff.  Two new initiatives - the digital preservation themed pizza and at least one digital preservation themed cocktail selection, to be enjoyed while marvelling at the musical contributions. The State Library of Queensland has made the parody video into an art form.

Euan Cochrane is the Digital Preservation Manager at Yale University Library in New Haven, CT

• Imagine being able to migrate any data from any legacy format to any compatible modern format automatically.

• Imagine being guided through using legacy software with real-time demonstrations and tutorials that you can interrupt and take over from at any point.

• Imagine being able to add a screen reader to any software, enhancing accessibility.

• Image having access to comprehensive metadata about all software titles.

We are developing Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) software with a long time horizon - we expect the general approach that EaaSI is enabling, i.e. the ability to be able to re-run legacy software at any point in time, to be necessary indefinitely.

Steph Taylor is based in Los Angeles, USA. 

I’ve worked in digital libraries and archives for a long time, and I’ve always wanted to attend the iPRES conference,  but I’ve never made it. Given my many failed attempts, I was not expecting 2020, the year of the apocalypse, to be any different. But these are strange times. I heard about an online event called #WeMissiPRES, hosted by DPC and I rushed to book a place. The event was not iPRES, and the organisers (friends of iPRES), explained up front that there would be no heavy papers. Instead, they were aiming for a fringe festival, coffee shop vibe for the event. This sounded perfect.! My 2020 self needed to connect and learn, but in a gentle way.

The event itself was excellent. In recent years, there has been a shift to put more professional content online within the digital preservation community and the event benefited from this move. And in the age of the pandemic, many of us are now video conferencing experts.  Organisers, speakers and delegates easily picked up the etiquette of online interactions and each session ran smoothly. There was also a social element, which was a lot of fun and helped to provide the networking element often missing with online events.

The biggest and most significant shift for me was not the technology or the well-organised programme, but the range of participants. Although I had missed out on iPRES, I’ve had a number of  jobs where I’ve been privileged enough to attend many conferences. These conferences billed themselves as international, but as #WeMissiPRES unfolded, I realised that I had never attended a truly international conference. Most of my conferences had been based in Europe. There would be a lot of European-based delegates, with a smattering of people from elsewhere. I’d only been able to attend one conference outside Europe and was one of only a handful of European-based people there, with most people being from the local region.  So here I was, in a time of restricted national and international travel, when many people around the world were barely leaving their own homes, participating in an actual global event.

Justin Simpson is the Managing Director of Artefactual Systems.

Digital preservation can be a hard sell. Institutions may recognize the need. Many do not adequately prioritise the work.  The return on investment for digital preservation efforts is difficult to quantify, and not achievable in a short time span.  

We will not convince the world of the importance of this work in financial terms alone.  While the practice of digital preservation can be understood as a business practice, I believe a more profitable framing is to consider the work of preserving and providing access to cultural memory as a practice of care.

Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto describe caring as ‘… a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.’ [1]

This definition describes the work of caring for cultural memory just as well as it describes healthcare, or childcare, or the many other forms of caregiving.  The work of caring, of all kinds, is generally undervalued, and often invisible.  Our conversations about how to provide, for example, healthcare, are often restricted to purely financial concerns. Caring is then turned into a commodity for profit making, at the expense of the real value that caregiving creates.

Isabel Galina Russell is a Researcher and member of GPD based at Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, UNAM. 

For a second year, the Grupo de Preservación Digital (GPD) based in Mexico, is joining in the celebration of World Digital Preservation Day. The GPD, founded in 2017, is a multidisciplinary and interinstitutional group focused on the practice of digital preservation as well as supporting research and training in digital preservation. We also focus on advocacy work for preserving our digital cultural heritage. The GPD originated at the Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico’s National Library which is based at the national university, the UNAM. The group focuses mainly on the digital cultural heritage sector, working with cultural heritage institutions and universities around the country. We now also have an increasing membership of people from other sectors, all concerned about how to address digital preservation issues. 

Christopher Zaste is a Digital Archivist at the University of Manitoba.

As we gather around the virtual campfire this World Digital Preservation Day, I have a story to share.  I knew a guy, keeping him anonymous, who loved to back up his data to CDs and later DVDs.  Many of these discs, of course, had “archival media” proudly printed on the manufacturer’s label.  His backup collection contained family movies, photographs, documents, software, and much more.  Many of which are some of his most prized possessions.  One day, his computer crashed.  Not a simple crash to desktop, but a fatal error causing the loss of all locally stored files.  Thankfully, he had a vast backup store of discs, so he thought it was not the biggest loss. 

The next day, he went to the store and bought a new laptop.  This machine had a fast processer, lots of RAM, and even a nice 4k display.  No expense was spared.  He brought his machine home and began adding his backup files.  Running his finger along the laptop’s right side, he found no eject button.  He tried the left side and found nothing.  He looked all over the machine, pressing button after button, but to no avail.  His new laptop, the one he just spent a considerable amount of money on, had no disc drive to read his obsolete media.  Frustrated, he had to go to Amazon and buy a disc drive that can connect via a USB cable.

Such digital preservation stories are quite common.  We have all experienced such issues, and not just in our professional careers.  Family photos stored on old CDs, a home video on a VHS tape, I can go on with examples.  In our primarily digital society, the digital copy is often the only copy.  A record can easily be lost if is not stored in an accessible backup format.  These scenarios of loss are what we, as digital preservation professionals, try to prevent.

Sara K Janes is an Archivist at Lakehead University.

Local and regional archival collections are a key part of the worldwide archival network. Living and working in Thunder Bay, ON, which is a four-hour drive from the nearest city of comparable size, has taught me just how important local heritage collections are to the people who create them and the people who use them. If our national and provincial archives are a plane ride away, we can’t reasonably ask those institutions to take responsibility for our local history.

I work as the Archivist for Lakehead University; the archives (https://archives.lakeheadu.ca/) is but one room and 1.5 FTE, so I have responsibility for most things, and digital preservation is only one aspect of my work. We’ve thus benefited enormously from taking part in Scholars Portal, a set of services provided through the Ontario Council of University Libraries. One of those services is Permafrost (https://permafrost.scholarsportal.info/), which provides reliable storage and a hosted Archivematica instance. Accessing these tools as a service hosted elsewhere, and with excellent support provided by Scholars Portal, makes it possible for an archivist without a strong tech background to carry out meaningful digital preservation work.

Greg Bak is the Associate Professor of History (Archival Studies) at the University of Manitoba.

Heritage institutions are accustomed to having more mandate than resources. We are used to supplementing meagre core funding by applying for special project funding, whether internal or external. Open source software offers a way of structuring collaboration that allows us to build upon sporadic and context-dependent project funding.

Products such as Archivematica, BitCurator and Fixity offer institutions of all sizes access to purpose-built digital preservation tools and systems that can be adapted to local needs. Heritage institutions are still working to absorb the different logic and economic demands of using open source systems as opposed to proprietary systems. Costs are not necessarily reduced, but they are differently incurred, distributed and managed. Initial setup costs are drastically reduced, but subsequent work is required to bring the system into line with local institutional and user needs. Development of the code base can be shared among institutions. Smaller institutions can leverage work done by larger institutions and consortia.

Oya Y. Rieger is a Senior Strategist and Rebecca Springer is an Analyst, both working at Ithaka S+R, US

Throughout the pandemic, critical information about COVID-19 has been flowing through a range of channels, including social media, news outlets, journals, and preprint servers. Cultural heritage organizations have been participating in efforts to curate and archive these rich and diverse sources of information–not only for future generations but also for those currently studying various scientific, sociological, political, and cultural aspects of the pandemic. These archiving efforts will not only help to capture a significant moment in our history but may help to prevent or manage future outbreaks. But digital preservation continues to be an expensive and complicated process, especially at an institutional level. According to a recent UNESCO Memory of the World survey, 66 percent of respondents reported that in their country there are no national preservation policies or strategies. The 2020 Open Preservation Foundation survey shows that the average FTE across digital preservation roles is less than two. In almost every country, cultural heritage organizations with a strong sense of mission are trying to do their best with limited resources and expertise.

Stephanie Orphan is the Director of Content Preservation at Portico. 

 Fifteen years ago, when Portico was in its early stages, we answered a call from the community to ensure that the electronic journals libraries were investing in were protected for the long term. At the time, the primary concern was ensuring that licensed content, often from the very large commercial publishers, was properly preserved with mechanisms in place to ensure future long-term access for researchers, as well as near-term post-cancellation access where possible.

During the first five years in which Portico signed publishers (2005-2010), we made great progress, signing 119 journal publishers, including all of the very large commercial publishers as well as many medium-sized publishers, university presses, and a couple large open access (OA) publishers. We also successfully expanded our services to include preservation for e-books and digitized primary source collections (the latter through our d-collections preservation service).

Over the course of the next 10 years, little by little, the trajectory of Portico’s growth began to change. The range of publishers expanded to include more small publishers (those with five or fewer journal titles) and fully OA publishers---including many library publishers and independent scholar-led journals. While we continued to work with publishers who had developed their own sophisticated platforms or who were using commercial hosting platforms, increasingly we began working with publishers self-hosting through an instance of OJS (Open Journal Systems), WordPress, or web sites.

Chelsea Goforth, Senior Data Project Manager at Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has engaged in digital preservation activities to enable rapid data access, wide data sharing, and long-term data re-use of COVID-19 related data collections.  Our preservation work supports social science researchers engaged in asking and answering questions about COVID-19 in order to soften its impact, especially for the most vulnerable populations.

Eng Sengsavang is a Reference Archivist at the UNESCO Archives.

Technologies are needed that produce 'social goods'…[1] 

Since the 1980s, the drive to achieve “sustainable development” has been led by the United Nations through several global frameworks for action, most recently the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our reliance on digital technologies and information is so enmeshed into our lives that it is time we acknowledge the critical role digital preservation plays in such global initiatives. Digital preservation is an indispensable component of sustainable development and will prove to be increasingly critical for the achievement of the SDGs and future initiatives like it. Digital preservation consists of a constellation of acts and strategies that, like sustainable development efforts, fundamentally anticipate the succession of future generations who depend on our actions today for the shape and content of the world they will inherit in decades to come and beyond.

 Photo: Earth seen from Apollo 17, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sherrine M. Thompson, Lead, Access to Information, World Bank Group Archives

Two years ago, my colleagues Jeanne Kramer-Smyth and April Miller introduced the World Bank Group (WBG) Archives’ efforts to preserve digital records, and last year my colleagues Shiri Alon and Daniele Balduzzi wrote about how we’re defining the digital landscape of the WBG in order to shape and refine our long-term digital preservation strategy. This year’s post will focus on the importance of preserving born-digital records for accountability, transparency and the public good.

Preservation of both born-digital records and digital surrogates of analog originals is the responsibility of the WBG Archives as owners of the WBG’s Records Management Policy  and one of the principal  implementors of the Bank’s Policy on Access to Information (AI Policy). The former ensures that records, regardless of format, are properly managed throughout the entire lifecycle and the latter sets forth how the World Bank makes information available to the public.  

Amy Rudersdorf is a Senior Consultant with AVP.

Introduction

2020 hasn’t been the year most of us expected. At the top of all the stuff that this year has thrown our way is the global pandemic. For some organizations it has also meant reductions in resources and staffing. This has left many cash-strapped organizations with tighter budgets than ever before, even as the costs of technology and human resources continue to rise. At the same time, many organizations are struggling to get a handle on the mountains of digitized and born-digital content in their collections to ensure it is safe now, and managed over time to ensure it is accessible and renderable into the future.

So what’s a digital preservationist do when it comes to selecting technology for their program? Is it cheaper, better, and faster to build from scratch or buy an out-of-the-box (OOTB) solution? This post describes the benefits and drawbacks of do-it-yourself (“DIY”) digital preservation that may help decide in which direction to go.

Authors – all from the Library of Congress: Kate Murray (Digital Projects Coordinator), Trevor Owens (Head, Digital Content Management Section), Marcus Nappier (Digital Collections Specialist), Ted Westervelt (Chief, US/Anglo Division) and Abbie Grotke (Assistant Head, Digital Content Management Section & Web Archiving Program)

The Library of Congress relies on a network of policy documents, good practice and specifications that govern the Library's digital collection management program compiled in the publicly available Digital Collections Management Compendium (DCMC). The Compendium brings together the business guidance from across the Library’s many departments related to digital formats, inventory and custody and finally, access. In October of 2019, the Library of Congress launched a public version of the DCMC, which presents digital collection management policies in three main areas: digital formats, inventory and custody, and access. The section for digital formats includes a summary of how the Library’s Recommended Formats Statement can be applied, as well as overarching statements about how we manage various digital preservation issues for digital formats, including the preservation of content “as received” over time, the creation of digital surrogates, and inventorying of format types. As such, the ongoing maintenance and development of the RFS is critical to the Library’s overall digital collection management policy and practice.

R. F. (Chip) German Jr is the Programe Director for the Academic Preservation Trust. 

World Digital Preservation Day is a good day to reflect about our work.  I’m thinking about big things I’ve heard, observed and learned in the six years that I’ve been with the Academic Preservation Trust.  Most are obvious at least in hindsight, but they didn’t start out as principles that served as touchstones for our decisions. They are now.  Thanks to the many folks responsible for them.

First is “Missions differ; don’t forget yours.”  Those of us who play some role in the long-term preservation of digital materials do so in pursuit of diverse missions.  In some cases, we do it to comply with governmental or business requirements.  At APTrust, our library-focused consortium aims to preserve a significant volume of digital materials related to human knowledge and cultural history. 

Early on in dealing with such materials, I learned a principle from the remarkable preservation librarians with whom I work each day that I’ll express in this paraphrase:  Preservation NOW without access THEN is pointless.  I get that.  If what we preserve today is unable to be used in the future, why did we bother?  Not only is that statement an important principle on its own, clarifying its components leads to other principles.

John Richan is a Digital Archivist at Concordia University. 

The following blog is also available in French below: 

For the third time in four years  Concordia University Records Management and Archives (RMA) is participating in World Digital Preservation Day organized by the Digital Preservation Coalition. For those of us involved in digital preservation, continuing to protect and provide access to reliable, trustworthy data has reached new levels of importance during a global pandemic. Concordia, a major North American research University in Montréal, has a rich digital legacy requiring active preservation by RMA while the institution undergoes rapid digital transformation.    

World Digital Preservation Day presents an annual opportunity to recognize advancements made by the global digital preservation community throughout the year. While learning with interest how external colleagues are ‘doing digital preservation’, RMA staff make a point of engaging the Day as a reflection and celebration of our development since 2017 when the Concordia RMA Digital Preservation Program was launched.

Heather Tompkins is a Project Officer at the Library and Archives Canada. 

When the call came out for blog posts for this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, we within the Digital Preservation and Migration Division of Library and Archives Canada (LAC) wondered what we could discuss and what might be of interest for the external community.  Today, we are opting to blog about our Pre-Ingest workflow.  

Our Pre-Ingest review is part of an essential workflow for preserving digital archives.  We’re looking forward to sharing what we are doing and hearing from you re: how your own work may be similar or different.  So far, this work hasn’t been greatly impacted by COVID-19 – we have continued to do Pre-Ingest despite working from home with minor network speed issues.  Our built infrastructure (specifically, a 20TB server to which we can connect via VPN), and our ability to message, share screens, and video chat have all been put to good use!  

As is often the case with digital archival transfers, we don’t always have the opportunity to review the content prior to transfer or gather much information.  As a result, sometimes what is transferred… isn’t always what we intended to acquire or preserve.  LAC’s Pre-Ingest workflow helps to address this challenge. Initiated in 2013 with only two staff members, this function has grown over the past seven years to include five Digital Archivists from the Digital Integration section who bring both archival experience and a digital preservation mindset to the work.

Dr. Daniel Flores, Asociación Latinoamericana de Archivos - ALA, Representante Nacional de Brasil en el GE RIBEAU ALA. 

Profesor e Investigador del Curso de Archivología y de la Maestría y Doctorado en Ciencias de la Información de la Universidad Federal Fluminense - UFF (Brasil) y Líder del Grupo de Investigación en Documentos Digitales: Gestión y Preservación Digital Sistémica en un CCDA.

The following blog is available in English below

Nuestra sociedad comenzó a producir documentos digitales, los cuales son, en sí mismos, complejos y específicos y, por tanto, requieren un tratamiento especial, desde su génesis, confinados en Sistemas Computarizados contemplando una Cadena de Custodia y Preservación, orientados a normas, estándares, modelos y requisitos. Sin embargo, era necesaria, y sigue siendo, la solución previa de los problemas y dilemas conceptuales que la propia Archivología necesita para superar eficazmente la Ruptura Paradigmática y establecer un escenario firme de Transición Paradigmática, como forma de garantizar a la sociedad y a la ciudadanía, que pueden ejercer su ciudadanía plena sobre la base de documentos auténticos, fiables y conservables.

Ahora, con Registros digitales - Documentos digitales, mucho ha cambiado, hemos detectado y presenciado una ruptura paradigmática, donde la complejidad y especificidad de los registros digitales ha cambiado, la forma en que entendemos la "prueba", o "evidencia", para la Cadena de Custodia, ahora resignificada para la Cadena de Custodia de Archivos Digitales - CCDA. Enfoque mucho más interdisciplinario de la ciencia y el derecho forenses digitales. Ahora la atención se centra en la política de archivo y el entorno digital, basados ​​en estas políticas, así como en las normas, estándares, modelos y requisitos.

Miguel Ángel Márdero Arellano, Coordenador da Rede Cariniana, Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia – IBICT

The following blog is available in English below

O tratamento dos registros sobre a pandemia do COVID-19, por profissionais da informação, deverá incluir a aplicação de estratégias de preservação para garantir a confiabilidade das fontes e o conhecimento da realidade atual.

O volume de informação sobre a pandemia em formato digital cresce a cada minuto. Todos os esforços para organizar esses registros poderão ser reconhecidos no futuro por aqueles que enfrentarão novos problemas de saúde pública. Da mesma forma, as estratégias de preservação que forem aplicadas a esses registros proporcionarão a garantia de termos fontes de informação confiáveis para conhecer a realidade atual.

Isso será o resultado de um trabalho árduo de profissionais da informação empenhados em descrever todos os detalhes de registros dos eventos em diferentes formatos. Após um período de isolamento, a necessidade de abrir bibliotecas e arquivos para atendimento das comunidades, mesmo antes de estarmos em um ambiente livre da doença, é produto do compromisso social dos responsáveis pelos serviços de informação para que todos tenham acesso a informações precisas sobre as ações necessárias para conter os efeitos do vírus.

Nancy McGovern is the Director of Digital Preservation at MIT.

This year’s theme - Digits: For Good – is great! It’s always fun to work on a WDPD blog post. There are so many examples of collaboration within and beyond the digital preservation community. Working together is part of what we do, yet it often seems to be more intentional and valued in 2020.

The 2020 WDPD topic got me thinking about preserving digital content in a way I haven’t in a while. I have worked as a digital archivist and then as a digital preservation manager. As a digital archivist in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I found appraisal to be a very engaging activity and yet by the time I felt I knew enough to make a decision about keeping the digital content or not, I found it hard to not take the content – I inevitably got fond of it as I came to understand it. Working on digital preservation is more agnostic about content for me – if digital content needs to be preserved, I’m in! The examples I’m sharing are not about preserving specific material, they are more about sustaining community and building capacity to be able to preserve whatever needs to be preserved “for good – or at least for as long as required” – love that part of the Blog theme for WDPD.  Here are some of the recent activities that I’m highlighting.

Jonathan Tilbury is CTO and Founder of Preservica based in the UK

From corporate to academic, charity to government, archives around the world are working harder than ever making sure that the events of the past year are documented for generations to come. With lessons to be learnt from this global health pandemic, and the end not quite in sight, having easy, automated, and affordable digital preservation software accessible to every archive, especially those with limited resources, has never been so important. The more people using digital preservation, the greater the benefit for all, but with this comes an increase in the number of non-expert users.

Luckily, there are a number of initiatives that will bring all these threads together to create an ecosystem that re-uses community expertise to deliver best practice digital preservation in an automated manner.

Tom Storrar is the Web Archiving Service Owner at The National Archives.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented challenge for The National Archives’ Web Archiving Team. In the six months since our last blog post, we have continued our efforts to build a definitive record of the government response to the first pandemic of the digital age. Our three-pronged approach, consisting of regular in-depth archiving of core websites, complimented by broad crawls across the government web estate, working closely with our suppliers, MirrorWeb, and daily captures of interactive content with the excellent Webrecorder/Conifer tools have now matured and become routine.

This has not been without its technical challenges. With each of these “prongs” we have had to change the way we work, and rapidly: not only to working remotely, but also to new technology and to the speed with which content has been updated or published. This has prompted us to create new approaches to archiving content and to accelerate innovations that we had already started to develop before the pandemic. For example, we need to ensure that every member of the team has available to them their own version of Webrecorder/Conifer in this remote scenario. So far we have achieved this using virtual machines, which is quite a change from just a year ago, when we were taking turns capturing content from a single machine in the office!

Helen Dafter is an Archivist (Digital Preservation) at The Postal Museum

Before any archive can start to preserve digital records it first needs to get them into the archive. This is something I have been working on at the Postal Museum this year. It has been an exercise in advocacy and trust building as much as technical skills.

To set the scene, the Postal Museum cares for the archive of Post Office Limited (POL) and Royal Mail. It is an independent charity which has created its own challenges for this work. This blog focusses particularly on my work with POL but I hope that the processes developed will be applicable to Royal Mail in due course.

In 2018 POL developed retention schedules across the business. The Postal Museum commented on these during the project, identifying materials which needed to be offered to the archive. These provided the starting point for my approaches to POL departments to discuss the transfer of records to the archive.

Aleksander Gelfand is the Information Management Officer at the United Nations Archives and Records Management Section, Department of Operational Support, United Nations Secretariat in New York.

Digital preservation and media obsolescence have been issues on the minds of archivists at the United Nations since at least the 1970s. Then, information found on punch cards had to be preserved knowing that the cards themselves were not a suitable medium for preserving machine-readable information. A temporary solution was to transfer the information to computer tape, though the process was expensive and time consuming. With the increasingly introduction of new information technologies, preservation seemed a constantly moving target.

The 1980s was a decade of automation at the UN as computers running word processing and database software became ubiquitous. The UN Archives began advocating for action at the very beginning of the lifecycle of electronic records, and as a result Archives staff took a more active role in managing records rather than being a passive recipient. This, however, was easier said than done – at least initially.

The first large wave of digital records came in the form of floppy disks, which were increasingly common in collections accessioned throughout the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Frequently inside folders with paper records, unless properly described, these pieces of soon-to-be obsolete media could easily get lost. Nevertheless, by early 2000s, the contents of many of these disks had been migrated to external hard drives and many finding aids included descriptions indicating the presence of this digital media.

Becky McGuinness is the Community Manager for the Open Preservation Foundation

In October, the Open Preservation Foundation attended the ‘All Things Open’ conference. Two of the themes it focused on this year were community leadership and diversity and inclusion, which are central to much of our recent and ongoing work. In this post, I’ll share some key takeaways from the event in the context of Digits: For Good, including celebrating the growth of open source, ensuring tech access for the underrepresented, the importance (and pitfalls) of community leadership, and best practices for creating a diverse and inclusive community. 

In one of the keynotes, Erica Brescia, COO of GitHub, spoke about how open source has become a key driver of innovation in technology. Open source software is used in every sector and the amount of software is expected to grow exponentially in the next 10 years. As well as its increasing popularity across sectors from medicine and healthcare to memory institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums, the use of open source is expanding geographically. Five years ago, the majority of contributions came from the western world, but today, the epicentre of open source development has moved to developing nations with a huge increase in participation from India, Africa, China and Latin America. To support this growth, there will need to be more contributors, maintainers and commerce to meet demand. More importantly, there is a need for inclusive communities that support wide participation and access to essential knowledge and resources for those who are often underrepresented.

Tim Schofield is a Senior Developer for Max Communications.

Max are working with Imperial College London Archives and Corporate Records Unit (ICL ACRU) digitally preserving their documentation. We use Archivematica for digital preservation in tandem with AtoM as an access system.

The project set out to improve Archivematica’s reporting ability by developing an in-house QueryBuilder utility. The QueryBuilder enables the user to create compound queries and interrogate Archivematica’s database. For instance, searches can be run returning all packages created within a particular date-range, or packages over a certain size, or created by a particular user.

Matthew Addis is Co-Founder and CTO of Arkivum based in the UK.

What do we mean when we talk about data integrity?  What is data integrity and why is it an important part of digital preservation?  Data integrity means different things to different people.  If you ask the question to an IT professional, compliance officer, corporate archivist, research librarian, or curator of a special collection then you will typically get very different answers.  What we mean by data integrity depends on what we mean by data, how and why that data exists, and most importantly who’s using it and for what purpose.  There is no single answer.  But in all cases, digital preservation has a role to play in achieving data integrity, and that makes life in the digital preservation world both challenging and interesting!

Authors: Lynn Bruce, Web Archivist; Laura Gould, Government Records Archivist; Barbara Fuentes, Web Continuity Assistant; Joanne Watson, Digital Capacity Planning Lead & Garth Stewart, Head of Digital Records Unit from the National Records of Scotland.

Introduction

In a year like no other, so many aspects of our society have changed in the wake of Covid-19; how we work, how we play, how we govern, how we live.

At the pandemic’s onset, National Records of Scotland - as keeper of Scotland’s national archive, set out to ensure that we captured a record of the unprecedented changes facing Scotland’s government and public health administrations. This required bundles of energy, focus, and engagement by colleagues, which at times significantly tested our resilience. We’ve adapted admirably to this challenge: read on to explore our key successes and thoughts on the future.

Sally McInnes is Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales. 

When Sarah Middleton announced that the theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day was Digits: for Good, I could not resist the chance to talk about the Library’s approach to preserving one of Wales’s most iconic manuscripts, namely the Boston Manuscript of the Laws of Hywel Dda (the Good). The Library has combined innovative approaches in traditional conservation, digitisation and digital preservation to ensure that these Welsh Laws are accessible now and in the future.

The Boston Manuscript was purchased in 2012 by the Library with assistance from the Lottery Heritage Fund, the Friends of the National Libraries and the Welsh Government.  The manuscript, written in Welsh, dates from around 1350 and records the native Welsh laws, which were thought to have been codified by Hywel Dda. It is a key text in the history of Welsh law and provides insights into Welsh identify and cultural life. It was used as a working text, being annotated by a Judge in South Wales, who carried it around in his pocket. By the 19^th century, the manuscript had reached America and was in the custody of the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, having probably been taken across the Atlantic by an emigrant.

Lee Hibberd is the Digital Preservation Manager at the National Library of Scotland.

For more than a decade the National Library of Scotland has been on a journey to achieve one of the digital preservation fundamentals – safe storage. In October 2020, and for the very first time, we achieved our goal of keeping 3 copies of our preservation data. To mark the coincidence of this result with World Digital Preservation Day I’d like to share the ups and downs of the climb with you - from the foothills to the clouds.

Between 2000 and 2010 the National Library of Scotland had an established Digital Preservation Programme, was purchasing digital content and collecting Scottish websites and personal archives with digital bits attached. Growth was manageable and routine – one copy lived on networked disk storage, and another on back-up LTO tape. We were early and full members of the Digital Preservation Coalition and had attended our fair share of training but data losses remained as words on a PowerPoint slide. It wasn’t long before the theory became personal.

Peter Judge is an Archivist at Group Archives & Museum (Lloyds), Group Corporate Affairs

Lloyds Banking Group Archives hold very few records about race and ethnicity. During previous Black History Months, we have been asked for stories about black colleagues that could be shared as part of the celebrations, but by going through material in the archive we quickly realised that conversations around race and ethnicity didn’t start in the Group until the 21^st century. So this year we took the opportunity to join the Group’s Black History Month working party and create a bank of stories that will illustrate for future researchers one small part of the black experience in the U.K., in a year when capturing these stories feels more important than ever. It is through our use of the digital preservation platform Preservica that we aim to keep these stories accessible for future generations.

Bláithín Ní Chatháin is a Historical researcher and oral historian, Atlantic Philanthropies Archival Project at the Digital Repository of Ireland.

‘Amplifying change: A history of the Atlantic Philanthropies on the island of Ireland’ is a collaborative project between the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) based in Dublin and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) at Cornell University Library, New York. The ‘Amplifying Change’ team based at DRI was granted access to the Atlantic Philanthropies Archive housed at RMC, enabling DRI to play a role in providing persistent access to grant documents and in contextualising the stories that surround significant social and cultural change with newly collected oral histories. The collaboration aims to build and disseminate a vibrant, sustainable, and openly accessible digital archive and online exhibition of the impact of the Atlantic Philanthropies grantees on the island of Ireland, consisting of select business records and new oral histories, that reflect Atlantic’s grant making philosophy, approach and impact in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Jacob Bickford, Erin Liu, Ellie Peng, Ash Ullah are Bridging the Digital Gap trainees with The National Archives.

We are four Bridging the Digital Gap trainees employed by The National Archives (funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund) and seconded across four host institutions: University of the Arts London, London Metropolitan Archives, Transport for London Corporate Archives and University of Westminster.  The traineeship scheme is designed to bring our digital capabilities to the archives sector whilst developing our skills in various aspects of archival practice.

Whilst forming our proposal for a collaborative cross-institutional project, we were cognisant of our position as trainees working in archives that sit within comparatively larger organisations, bodies with resources to support the hosting and operation of purpose-built digital preservation systems.  We wondered where newcomers (like ourselves), ‘non-specialist’ practitioners and/or those without a massive budget sat in relation to this digital preservation landscape, which could appear resource-intensive and technically complex.  We were keen to explore how digital preservation tools can be approached as readily as any other everyday DIY tool, since the practices of creating, storing, keeping and sharing material are intuitive and necessary to all.

Rachel MacGregor is a Digital Preservation Officer at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

26^th March 2020 – I was just finishing my first full week of working from home (I’m still here) and it felt very far from normal, particularly because I should have been in Dublin speaking to colleagues from the Archives and Records Association Ireland about digital preservation. I had been really looking forward to my trip there not least because it’s a city I’d like to see more of having only been once before. That will have to wait for the time being (although Dublin – you have been warned!).

Micky Lindlar is Digital Preservation Team Leader at Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) in Germany and recipient of the Digital Preservation Awards 2020 DPC Fellowship.

Dear Judges,
Dear DPC,
Dear digital preservationists world wide,
Dear colleagues and friends,

Digital preservation is mostly done in the dark. Like a lifeguard in a sea of bits and bytes we ensure that all stay afloat, we take precautions, we rescue when needed, we raise a warning finger at unsuitable gear. Our job is to create and maintain safe environments where data lives – lives to be used by others. The digital preservation awards is one of the rare occasions where the work in the dark is put into the spotlight to be seen and recognized. Praise by your peers is the highest form there is and I feel very honored to receive the DPC Fellowship. 

By Brian Dietz (Digital Program Librarian for Special Collection, NC State University Libraries), Shira Peltzman (Digital Archivist, UCLA Library) and Jessica Venlet (Assistant University Archivist for Digital Records and Records Management, UNC at Chapel Hill University Libraries)

The decisions facing those who work with born-digital archival materials are myriad. While it has become increasingly easier to find technical processing workflows and lists of handy tools, documentation and guidance on exactly how to provide access to our born-digital collections has lagged behind in our collective conversations. 

Over the last several years, a few like-minded efforts in the U.S. to tackle this common challenge coalesced into the DLF Born-Digital Access Working Group (BDAWG) in 2017. Among other things, the group set out to explore the questions: What if the Levels of Digital Preservation included access?  Does access have to be an all or nothing choice? What are some of the key considerations - technical or policy - that make access to born-digital materials possible?

Bradley Daigle is the  Strategic and Content Expert / Chair for the Academic Preservation Trust  / NDSA 

As most of this audience knows, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) celebrates the expression of digital preservation in all its forms through its awards process. This year, the NDSA was honored with having been shortlisted in the new Innovation and Collaboration section of the awards for the work that its members and colleagues have done to reboot the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation. Given the talent and effort by so many who were nominated, this nomination is itself a testament to the role the Levels play within the overall practice of digital preservation.

Marcel Ras is the Digital Preservation Program Manager at the Dutch Digital Heritage Network

The mission of the Dutch Digital Heritage Network is to develop a system of facilities and services for improving the visibility, usability and sustainability of digital heritage. And thus lend more social added value to our digital heritage. An ambitious mission that demands a lot of collaboration and connection with the individual heritage organisations. This can only happen with the right set of instruments providing help.

Imagine you are the project manager of the Album Cover Museum, just recently digitised 10.000 LP covers from your collection. The results, 10 TB of data, are stored on a hard disk. You have Ambitious plans to digitise even more in the near future with an estimated yearly growth of 20 TB. The collection needs to be preserved and linked with other digital collections in an online exhibition about music. This brings a truck load of questions to be answered now. Too many for a little museum to answer by itself.

Edith Halvarsson is a Digital Preservation Officer at the Bodleian Libraries. 

It seems like it was only a couple of months ago that Bodleian Libraries’ last yearly roundup was posted on the DPC blog. While it has at times felt like time has stood still this year, looking back on the huge amount of work which colleagues have completed over the past months is a tell-tale sign that we are nearing the end of 2020.

So, what is new at the Libraries? After much research, requirements gathering and testing in previous years we are now seeing many of our proof-of-concept and pilot projects moving into their final delivery phases. It has also been a year when digital services, research, and teaching has been discussed and highlighted across the University of Oxford. In response, the Libraries has ramped up its web archiving activities to capture how the University is adapting to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Below is a summary of our year so far.

Author: Walker Sampson, University of Colorado, Boulder; in collaboration with Keith Pendergrass, Harvard Business School,  Boston; Tessa Walsh, Artefactual Systems,  BC, Canada; Laura Alagna, Northwestern University Library, IL;

For the past several years, Keith Pendergrass, Tessa Walsh, Laura Alagna, and I have been exploring how to make digital preservation more environmentally sustainable. Recently, we have focused on building a global community of practice, striving to add environmental sustainability as a third, co-equal pillar of digital preservation practice along with digital object management and successful use. We began our work with a research article, then created a workshop protocol, and have been engaging in outreach and education efforts. We are honored to be a Digital Preservation Awards finalist for the Dutch Digital Heritage Network Award for Teaching and Communications.

We have written a couple of blogs posts on our work previously, first discussing our workshop protocol and then providing details on implementing policy and workflow changes at Baker Library Special Collections. Here I would like to describe efforts at the University of Colorado Boulder to generate guidelines on the use of three storage tiers. In our article we recommend storage tiers as a way to accommodate retention needs for a range of content – some of which may not merit or immediately need top-tier storage. I suspect many institutions may have multiple storage options available to them, with varying qualities to each – though here, we have just begun the process of organizing these options into a unified strategy.

Perla Olivia Rodríguez Reséndiz - Coordinadora de la Red Iberoamericana de Preservación Digital Sonora y Audiovisual (RIPDASA) / Investigadora de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

La nominación del Programa de Webinars en español de la Red Iberoamericana de Preservación Digital Sonora y Audiovisual (RIPDASA) a los Premios que cada año otorga la Coalición de Preservación Digital (DPC) es un estímulo al trabajo que desde 2019 llevan a cabo los investigadores y profesionales de esta red de investigación.

El Programa de Webinars fue creado por la RIPDASA con el propósito de difundir información práctica y experiencias profesionales sobre la gestión y el cuidado de los archivos digitales para minimizar el riesgo de pérdida de las colecciones sonoras y audiovisuales en la región.

La RIPDASA se creó para compartir saberes y experiencias de Universidades, instituciones de la memoria, empresas y organismos internacionales de la región a fin de favorecer la investigación científica en torno a la situación y perspectivas de futuro de la herencia sonora y audiovisual y con ello, proponer soluciones ante su riesgo de pérdida.

Andrew Davidson is a student at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.

Fraserburgh is a small coastal town that sits on the North East corner of Scotland. It was the birthplace of abolitionist James Ramsay in 1733; one of the founding fathers of modern Japan, Thomas Blake Glover in 1838; world renowned fashion designer, Bill Gibb in 1943; and me, in 1985.

I am in no way suggesting that my name be added alongside theirs in the annals of the town’s history, the only thing we hold in common is that we all at one point in time lived in the same place. However, to convolute this idea and confuse our commonality further, it might be more appropriate to say we all lived in the same geographical region but arguably all lived in different places.

Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, Fraserburgh was still very much a summer holiday destination with two caravan parks that ran alongside what was once the railway line, full of families who came for the beach and, believe it or not, the mild summer weather. The harbour full of boats landing fish from the North Sea and the town centre, a thriving hub of small local businesses.

Maria José Lloret Alcañiz is the Digital Preservation and Access Managera at the United Nations Library & Archives in Geneva.

The United Nations Library & Archives in Geneva are responsible for the preservation of the archives of the League of Nations (LON) and have the mission to make them accessible for researches and historians around the world. The access is public, but the paper archives must be consulted on site; that’s probably the main reason why most users are coming from Europe and the US.

That was the situation before the 5-years ‘Total Digital Access to the LON Archives Project’, known as LONTAD, was born. The project will provide for the digitization, physical and digital preservation and online access of the LON Archives.

I remember the day, in mid-2017, when I first heard about the donation that our Director General had received from a Geneva foundation, to support the digitization of the entire LON Archives. I had been working in the Library & Archives for many years, managing a team in charge of the computing infrastructure and IT systems, including the Archives Management system. But, to be honest, I knew very little about the contents that my colleagues were cataloging into the system. The project sounded really interesting for the archivists, of course, but it was also challenging for an IT professional, so I didn’t hesitate to join the management team and take over the responsibility for technology, including digital preservation. From the beginning, it was clear that the latter was an essential component of the project which represents an enormous undertaking, requiring a substantial investment: we could not take the risk that one day the digitized material might be lost or become unusable.

Anja Mahler is a Digital Archivist, Atlantic Philanthropies Archive Project, Digital Repository of Ireland.

Before I took up the position of digital archivist for the Atlantic Philanthropies archive project in early 2018, I did not know much about Chuck Feeney and the extent of his philanthropic investment on the island of Ireland. Conor O’Clery’s book The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune provided me with great insight into the work of the Atlantic Philanthropies.  Soon after I took up my position, I travelled to New York to visit Cornell University. I got to see the physical archive held at the Division for Rare and Manuscripts Collections and I also gained exclusive access to The Atlantic Philanthropies grant management system for Ireland and Northern Ireland.  It was then that I grasped the great extent of this archive. It was not, however, until I got to look closely at the grant files, which contain records that document the entire life cycle of grants-from proposals to final reports and rich ephemera, that I experienced a sense of awe because I realised the vast impact of the Atlantic Philanthropies. I recall cataloguing the document Action Plan on Bullying and how that acted as a catalyst for me to realise the sheer amount of combined energy needed to bring about societal change.  My dear colleague Phoebe Lynn Kowalewski, the Atlantic Philanthropies Archivist at Cornell University Library, put it this way to me very recently:

Fiona Bourne is the Archives Manager at the Library and Archive Service for the Royal College of Nursing in Edinburgh.

It’s a strange feeling to be quietly working at home with a laptop and a cup of tea one day, to suddenly be addressing the world at large about digital preservation the next. Many archivists around the world have been doing just that this year, at home keeping pets off the keyboard and family off-screen or battling against appalling internet connections. They have been struggling to keep their archive open, the collections safe and to progress their projects. But the benefits to digital record-keeping and preservation have evidently been immense as I found out at the iPRES 2020 conference. As DPC award finalists we were asked to do a lightning talk about our nominated project, A new way of sharing nursing history – Royal College of Nursing member and public digital archives

My organisation is the Royal College of Nursing (RCN): a professional association and trade union for nurses and healthcare workers with over 470,000 members. We provide guidance on clinical and professional practice, legal representation in employment relations, pay negotiations and political lobbying. The organisation is over 100 years old and is known as the ‘voice of nursing’ for the UK. Sharing that history is a critical part of my role, but the ease of digital accessibility has blurred the lines I work within. Historical record series’ now run right up to the present bringing new audiences and new problems. A public digital archive website provides access to selected records, such as publications and annual reports, but many of our records cannot be shared publicly.

Lotte Wijsman is a Student at the University of Amsterdam (MA Archival and Information Studies) & Intern at the National Archives of the Netherlands

After several months at home, it has become time to take stock regarding productivity. At the start of the lockdown, people spoke about all the things they could do now that they would be stuck at home. Whether this was to DIY or to learn another language, it was all ambitious. For me, none of these ambitions have come to fruition. However, several others did. I completed my paper on the significant properties of spreadsheets, which was part of my internship at the National Archives of the Netherlands. Moreover, I am now working on my Masters thesis on reference rot, while in lockdown and without physical access to the university library. This would all be impossible without digital preservation.

Authors: Tom Wilson, Charlie Barbe and Patricia Sleeman for the UNHCR.

UNHCR is at the forefront of one of the most critical crises facing the world in the 21^st century – that of displacement. 79.5 million people - 1 percent of the world’s population - have fled their homes due to conflict or persecution. Preserving ‘the history of now’, for present and future generations, has never been more complex or essential. UNHCR Records and Archives Section (RAS) preserves not just the legacy of UNHCR’s work but also of humanity. Though small in size, it supports a global staff of over 17,000 and has an ambitious vision.

Since 1996 UNHCR has preserved critical digital information about situations that have shaped our world and it continues to do so. Faced with the largest refugee crisis the world has ever seen, UNHCR has a mandate to protect some of the most vulnerable in our global society – refugees, the internally displaced and stateless. This includes the preservation of its records and archives. Preserving the digital legacy of UNHCR is the protection of the legacy of humanity. The digital content selected for preservation is testament to the work of UNHCR and a record of the victims of emergencies, for now and for generations to come.

Capture can be challenging due to the complexity and the speed at which UNHCR operates in some of the most dangerous places in the world.  UNHCR’s digital content is highly valued but often for its primary value due to the rapidity of response needed for emergencies and operations in the field and UNHCR is often an early adopter of new technologies, often challenging to preserve. Also, a continual staff rotation policy is challenging for information management.

This World Digital Preservation Day is a bit different to those we have experienced before, but certainly no less important and relevant. Coinciding, as it does every two years, with the Digital Preservation Awards, we had grand plans for a spectacular contribution to the days’ proceedings … an awards ceremony to be held at the newly opened Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg!

via GIPHY

However, as the events of the year unfolded, it was clear that those plans would not be possible, and we even (very briefly) considered whether we would run the Digital Preservation Awards at all… after all, surely everyone everywhere had bigger fish to fry?!

But then it struck us, that the Digital Preservation Awards was exactly what we needed in a year like this. In fact, even more so! Hard work, excellent, clever, innovative work was still going on in spite of – and because of – the global crisis… albeit generally from spare rooms and dining tables rather than offices and labs.

Annie Stille is a Metadata Specialist at Sydarkivera in Sweden

Illustrations from Magnus Heimonen, Web editor and media producer, Sydarkivera

The challenges of web archiving in a rapidly changing world at Kommunalförbundet Sydarkivera described with focus on the digits. Sydarkivera is a municipality organisation founded in the south of Sweden in 2015. Preserving information as an archival authority organisation in times of change is a great challenge. Some of these challenges will be presented in this blog post, written by Annie Stille, metadata specialist and responsible for web archiving at Kommunalförbundet Sydarkivera.

Sydarkivera is a provider of long-term digital preservation services. It acts as the archival authority for several municipalities in southern and central Sweden who are members of Sydarkivera. The purpose of the organisation is to preserve the member’s information flows for future generations.

In today’s society, information flows are rapidly changing and increasing in volume. This puts the onus on actors dealing with digital preservation to be prepared and outward-looking. This is, however, challenging because it is not always possible to predict how the information will be used in the long term. This places considerable technical demands on organisations working with digital preservation in terms of potential formats, technical solutions, metadata, storage and data management. Alongside these technical demands are changes to attitudes towards new situations that require quick action from a digital preservation perspective. Doing nothing or acting too slowly risks information loss.

Toni Sant is the Digital Curation Lab Director for the University of Salford at MediaCityUK.

Training is an essential component of good digital preservation. There are several ways that people involved in digital preservation receive their training. In some cases, digital preservationists come from a library and information science background. Other times a computer science degree leads to a specialism in tool development for preservation or technical infrastructure management. However, it’s also true to say that a large number of people who engage with digital preservation projects, without prior experience, could benefit greatly from even the most basic digital preservation training.

Digital preservation training is a broad church. The Digital Preservation Coalition and other organisations with members from across a wide range of institutions, such as the Open Preservation Foundation, offer systematic training in the form of short courses or workshops. An ever-growing number of higher education institutions offer degree courses at all levels providing varying quantities of digital preservation training.

Laura Peaurt is a Digital Preservation Officer at the University of Nottingham. 

This year I’m reflecting on the progress that Manuscripts & Special Collections at the University of Nottingham Libraries have been able to make during this challenging and unprecedented year to preserve our digital collections for future generations of researchers.

We have spent this year putting our new digital preservation system into action. This represents a great leap forward for us in terms of our ability to actively manage and continue to develop our growing digital collections. We have also successfully integrated the system with our Collection Management software meaning that in the future our end users should be able to access our digital records directly from the catalogue.

Our first steps have been to transfer our existing digital collections into the system for safekeeping including both digitised images and born digital collections, but we have also been able to spend some time actively collecting new digital content to document the university’s role in responding to the pandemic.

Emma Hancox is a Digital Archivist at University of Bristol Special Collections and Theatre Collection

At the University of Bristol we have recently been working on improving our capabilities for digital preservation. Some of the activities we have been carrying out include developing a digital preservation policy, assessing ourselves against the DPC’s rapid assessment model and implementing Preservica as our digital preservation system.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic our efforts had mainly been focussed on dealing with legacy digital material in our archive collections and digital images created through past digitisation efforts. As for organisations across the country, the pandemic brought major changes to the teaching, management, and operation of the University of Bristol. As a response to this, we decided that it was important to collect records documenting these changes in our Special Collections archive so that future researchers could understand the University’s response. We also wanted our Coronavirus records to act as a complement to those being collected by other repositories nationally and internationally. We see this and the work being done by these other archives to collect Covid-19 related material as encapsulating the World Digital Preservation Day 2020 theme of Digits: For Good.

Elisabeth Thurlow is the Digital Preservation & Access Manager at the University of the Arts London.

As we challenge the long-held myth of neutrality within libraries, museums and archives, and diversify our collections, how do we avoid making decisions in support of digital preservation, which risk reinforcing historic biases? How do we select and prioritise our preservation actions whilst ensuring we are not duplicating existing biases? As well as the potential social impact of digital preservation, how green are our often IT-intensive digital preservation actions? How do we assess and minimise the environmental impact of our digital preservation programme?

These are not new discussions for my library and curatorial colleagues, who have been engaging in similar conversations in relation to their collections management practices over a number of years. But the inclusion of digital preservation in these recent discussions over the last two or three years is a strong indicator that digital preservation is becoming more embedded in our institutional culture. Collaboration is at the centre of many of these conversations - which is also central to the success of any digital preservation programme and our work at University of the Arts London (UAL).

Dr Emily Bell is a Research Associate in Archiving and Preserving Open Access Books, at Loughborough University and Dr Gareth Cole is the Research Data Manager at Loughborough University. Both are members of the COPIM Project.

COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers. It is building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish.

As part of COPIM Work Package 7 (Archiving and Digital Preservation), we are researching the challenges and options for archiving and preserving open access books. As part of this we are running a series of workshops in 2020 and 2021 aimed at gaining a better understanding of existing best practice in the preservation of OA monographs, and developing possible solutions for the technical issues of archiving books, including embedded content and links. Our first workshop took place on 16 September 2020, jointly run with the Digital Preservation Coalition and was focussed on third party material. This workshop brought together representatives from the Archaeology Data Service, Cambridge University Library, Educopia, Internet Archive, Library of Congress, Los Alamos National Lab and Portico, as well as COPIM team members from Loughborough University, Open Book Publishers, the British Library, the DPC and Jisc.

Thomas Shaw is the Assistant Director of Digital Innovation and Research Services at Lancaster University. 

It is undoubtedly both a truism and an understatement that these are unprecedented times.  Universities, along with other types of knowledge-intensive organisation, have experienced seismic shock and uncertainty due to the current pandemic, ranging from uncertain student recruitment to detrimental impact on research projects.  Add to this the consequent financial effects, and the resulting circumstances do not appear to be conducive to making the argument for the importance of digital preservation and the need to invest in it.

In universities, there are currently two key barriers to making the case for digital preservation:

• Financial constraints and uncertainty – the need for institutions to manage very challenging financial circumstances creates barriers to investment in either staffing or infrastructure for digital preservation. In most institutions, now will not be a good time to request new investment.

• Organisational focus is elsewhere – universities have had to respond rapidly and adapt to the challenges of the pandemic. Institutions have had to transition to digital and blended modes of teaching, whilst managing key activity in other areas, such as preparation for the Research Excellence Framework. Consequently, senior leaders are unlikely to be receptive to calls for action on digital preservation at the current time, especially with so many other competing challenges.

Michael Day is the Digital Preservation Research Lead at The British Library

In the not-so-distant past, if the digital preservation community in the west ever paused to think about the effects of viruses on digital collections and operations, I suspect that most would have been mainly thinking about computer malware or similar nasties. In fact, a couple of years ago, the digital preservation team at the British Library hosted Evanthia Samaras, from the Public Record Office Victoria and the University of Technology Sydney, to undertake a PhD placement to look at this very issue. Our research at that time didn’t find that much evidence of malware-risk in the Library’s collections, although we did find that we held a copy of a late-1990s computer magazine cover disk that had been published with a computer virus named “Marburg,” itself named after a human virus outbreak in Germany during the 1960s..

The British Library’s vulnerability to human viruses was not within scope of that particular study, but the implications of a global health pandemic became apparent very quickly during March this year. The Library’s physical sites were closed on the 26th March, part of a UK nationwide lockdown.

Samantha Case is an Assistant Archivist for the Whisky and Gin Archives at Bacardi based in Glasgow.

In its 158-year history, family-owned Bacardi has seen (and documented) many moments that have tested its resilience. From natural disasters to Prohibition to forced exile from its original homeland in Cuba – these stories from the past have shaped our culture and legacy. 2020 will mark another one of these challenging moments captured in our archives. Making sure the stories of today are preserved for generations to come is a tremendous responsibility made even more challenging during COVID-19 as situations shifted daily and countries found themselves in different stages of the recovery or closure.

Due to the sudden onset of the pandemic and the global scale of our company, it was vital that the archive team at Bacardi captured communications and changes in ways of working as rapidly as they happened. Our brand and company archives are spread out across four locations in the UK, France, Italy, and the USA, so we were well-placed to gather a range of records. Early on we mapped out the business records that we would need to capture to reflect any changes in working practices and the state of our business. It was important to consider how to best capture unique changes brought on by the pandemic, such as social distancing and temperature checks.

This situation emphasized how crucial digital records are to our company’s history. All the records relating to the pandemic were digital, which was ultimately useful because it allowed us to gather records from people even while unable to physically be in the office.

Teagan Zoldoske is a Digital Archives Assistant at the Archaeology Data Service 

Metadata is the data about data which is both as simple and complex as it sounds. Without proper metadata, data is useless. It can’t be used for verification, reuse, or anything else. But what really is metadata?

Metadata.

Something extremely important to the long-term health and reuse of data and yet the mere mention of it can cause people to shut off and run away. So, what is it, how is it different from data, and how could it be for good?

Metadata is the data about data. I think that sums it up quite nicely, don't you? Ok, let's phrase it a different way. It's essentially the documentation needed to make the data findable, understandable, and useable. It allows for verification of claims, reuse for future projects, and more.

Dr Jane Maxwell is Manuscripts Curator at the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library, The Library of Trinity College Dublin. Dr Brendan Power is Digital Preservation Librarian at The Library of Trinity College Dublin.

When the enormity of what the COVID-19 pandemic threatened fully dawned eight months ago, every research-active institute, lab, and repository began to ask ‘how can we respond to this in a manner which has long-term value?’. The archives profession was no different, concerned, as always, with ensuring that future researchers would have material upon which to base their enquiries. The Library of Trinity College Dublin, in collaboration with the Long Room Hub, the University’s arts and humanities institute, initiated a COVID-19 archives-collecting initiative. Focused very much on capturing individuals’ experiences of living in Ireland in 2020, the ambition of the initiative was three-fold; in the first instance we recognised that the private voice is a resource that is traditionally difficult to capture during major social upheavals. Secondly, we recognised that the recorded experience of a university community would represent a distinct snapshot of Irish life. Finally, in the early days at least, the Library saw this initiative as a valuable outreach activity, offering our community a concrete and valuable way to respond to the times we were going through.

Villy A. Magero is a Records Officer at Nairobi City County Government, Kenya and is a Member of Kenya Association of Records Managers (KARMA) and an Individual member of the International Council on Archives.

Introduction

The Kenyan political scene and system of Governance has been through a tumultuous time which birthed development and eventual promulgation of a new Constitution of Kenya 2010 (CoK 2010). The Constitution brought in changes in Governance right from the Central Government and more power was given to the people through devolution which birthed 47 Counties out which Nairobi City County is the 47^th County in the Country. The County was operationalised by the County Government Act No. 17 of 2012 of the CoK 2010.

Currently the County of Nairobi has a total of 123 Members of the County Assembly 85 elected and 38 Nominated. They are charged with a responsibility of representing the local Nairobi resident at ward level. The County Assembly is established through Article 176 of the CoK 2010. The members of the Assembly sit on various committees that discuss issues touching on motions, petitions and any other matter that is presented to them as far the legislative process is concerned, they also offer an oversight role to the Executive arm of Nairobi City County. The Committees are the rooms where the actual dismantling of issues are broken down before they can be tabled on the floor of the Assembly to be passed as motions or bills for enactment in the County.

Dirk Duellmann is the Head of Scientific Computing Collaborations group, CERN IT department

CERN and the High Energy Physics (HEP) community in general have a long tradition of applying Open Science concepts already well before today's term "Open Science" had been invented. Due to the size and complexity of large-scale particle accelerator and detectors projects, our community was forced from early on to consolidate effort and share key infrastructures such as accelerators, computing resources (both at CERN and world-wide partner labs) and also its crucial software investments. This culture has, in comparison to other sciences, created an early coherence across the HEP community that facilitated the collaborative development of open software over the decades, and enabled an open exchange of data analysis methods and science results.

Authors: Angela Dappert, Karin Bredenberg, Micky Lindlar, Tracy Meehleib, PREMIS Editorial Committee

 When asking a room full of digital preservationists whether they know PREMIS, most will raise their hand.  Most understand key concepts including Objects, Rights, Events and Agents. But open questions remain for them and we need to support new practitioners. The PREMIS Editorial Committee wants to make PREMIS approachable and make it easier for people to understand and use preservation metadata. What kind of materials are people looking for? Short webinars on specific issues? Longer tutorials? Implementation stories? A short live survey gave us insight into the community’s needs.

PREMIS is the de facto standard for digital preservation metadata. It captures technical, provenance, rights, and platform information that is needed to ‘ensure the viability, renderability, understandability, authenticity, and identity of digital objects in a digital preservation context’[1].

PREMIS is widely adopted in open-source, commercial and in-house developments. It has reached a high level of maturity. Version 3.0 was released in 2015. It has proven to be stable and to be doing what it is supposed to: Defining digital preservation metadata that ‘most preservation repositories need to know to preserve digital materials over the long term‘.

Bonface Odhiambo is a University Archivist, United States International University- Africa. He is representing the Kenya Association of Records Managers and Archivists (KARMA) and International Council of Archives (ICA). 

The year 2020, will be one of the memorable years that will never fade away from people’s minds. Everyone will tell you how COVID-19 disrupted their lives, how the pandemic led to several deaths, how lockdowns brought about travel restrictions, how they lost their jobs and many more. Despite the myriad of shortcomings, the pandemic has instead reinforced the participatory or post custodial perspective towards digital preservation. Building on the UNESCO communication on turning the threat of COVID-19 into an opportunity for greater support to documentary heritage and ICA’s declaration that the duty to document does not cease in a crisis, it has become more essential and necessary to advance the digital participatory micro history. As a digital preservation enthusiast, I believe that this year, the current situation, has set the pace for a new paradigm in preserving heritage and culture. Let’s embrace “Digits for Good” as a rallying call, and let’s use the pandemic as an opportunity to advance the digital preservation landscape.

Alicia Pastrana García and José Carlos Cerdán are part of the Non-Print Legal Deposit department at the National Library of Spain

I know, you are living it, you know how your day-to-day life is changing but, what about your grandchildren? Will they understand how this is changing our lives? The best view of our society is on Internet, especially on social networks. How will a researcher of the future understand this change if he does not have access to all the information that is flowing on the Web? Is anyone preserving all that information?

Yes, someone does!

At the National Library of Spain, we are doing just that, like many other national libraries around the world. We began nominating websites about the emergence and spread of the coronavirus in mid-February, responding to a call from International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). But when the situation got worse in Spain, we decided to create our own collection, making a much more exhaustive selection. Thus, the first Spanish crawl was launched on March 10th. Since that date, both we and our collaborators from the regional libraries, within the framework of the Library Cooperation Council, began an intense work of searching and nominating the information published on the Internet related to this topic.

We have already collected one of the most important web collections in our history. The number of pages that appeared and are still appearing to the situation caused by the expansion of the coronavirus is immense and most of them will disappear once this great crisis is over.  Web collections will become one of the largest sources of information about the situation caused by COVID-19.

Angeline Takawira-Magaya is a Digital Archivist at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals ("IRMCT" or "Mechanism")

During the pandemic, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals ("IRMCT" or "Mechanism") has been hard at work preserving the records of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Mechanism. If you're wondering what we've been up to, take a few minutes to read all about what we've been doing and why we are doing it!"

Q: What is digital preservation and why is it important?

A: Digital preservation is the active management and maintenance of digital objects to ensure that they continue to be accessible and useable for as long as required.

A key feature of effective digital preservation is that it is a process which is active and on-going and not a one-off event after which we fold our arms and sit back.

So, for example putting our digital data on robust and secure storage systems would allow us to keep the data but would provide no assurance that the data would continue to be accessible or useable over time, even if we took good care of the storage systems and upgraded them routinely.

With a mandate to preserve, we recognized that we needed to do more than just ‘keep the data’. We needed more than just secure and robust storage.

Ingrid Dillo is Deputy Director at DANS and is co-chair of the RDA COVID-19 Working Group. Marjan Grootveld is Coordinator Projects and Policy at DANS and involved in FAIRsFAIR.

Under the umbrella of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and on request of the European Commission more than six hundred data professionals and domain experts developed guidelines for sharing research data to address the COVID-19 pandemic. The guidelines for researchers, published in July 2020, help four domains to find a balance between timeliness and accuracy: clinical science, omics, epidemiology, and social sciences. Instruments and practices mentioned in the guidelines include data management plans, metadata, and ethical and privacy considerations, along with the technology needed for this. Furthermore, the RDA COVID-19 Working Group’s report contains recommendations for governments and research funders, for instance to promote open science through policy and investment, across international jurisdictions. Documentation is seen as crucial for all stakeholders. While researchers should document their methodology, data cleaning, and data provenance, decision makers should document their decisions. And of course, documentation should be preserved for the future.

Roxana Maurer is the Digital Preservation Co-ordinator at the National Library of Luxembourg (BnL).

Yesterday evening the National Library (BnL) was supposed to host the ceremony for the Digital Preservation Awards 2020 here, in Luxembourg City. Like so many other in-person events however, the Awards were moved online because of the pandemic. As I had the pleasure and privilege to be one of this year’s judges, I can only recommend that you read more about the finalists on the DPC’s website, because extraordinary work is happening in the field of Digital Preservation. Moreover, definitely do not forget to check the winners at 12:00 GMT today!

Although it might be easier to focus on the negative aspects with everything that has been happening this year, I would like to use this blogpost to focus on this year’s theme for World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD20): “Digits: for Good”. There are still two months left in this year, but I’m going to take this opportunity to look at and celebrate all the things we did manage to do this year (or the things we learned from what didn’t work out), instead of looking at what we had planned or hoped to do.

Anthea Seles is the Secretary General of the International Council on Archives (ICA). 

The digital preservation discussion needs to be broadened to include colleagues from different parts of the world that face vastly different realities than those confronted by practitioners in developed countries. That is not to say there aren’t transversal issues around cost, access to trained personnel, but many of us working in the ‘West’ have not had to deal rolling blackouts or inability to find sufficient basic infrastructure to support our programmes.

Özhan Saglik is a Lecturer at Bursa Uludag University Library.

I graduated from a bachelor degree in 2012 and master degree in 2015 from Istanbul University Information Science Department. I have been working in the library and archives since 2013. Now, working at Bursa Uludag University and PhD student at Istanbul University Information Science Department with the topic of trustworthiness of e-signed records.

"The things we loved change with us, so they are part of our richness"

Turkish famous writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar wrote this quote in his great book called Five Cities which was writing his memories in Ankara, Erzurum, Konya, Bursa and Istanbul. He lived in these cities and many things changed with him.

Rawia Awadallah is Manager of the ROMOR Project in Palestine

With the rapidly increasing reliance on digital material, digital preservation (DP) becomes critical to ensure long-term availability and understandability of information resources for further re-use and the development of new knowledge.  DP is a crucial activity of information management in various organizational settings. However, the priorities in many areas on this planet go far away from preserving digital content and focus only on preserving the basic survival requirements of people.

Heikki Helin is Senior Technology Coordinator for Digital Preservation Services at CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd in Espoo, Finland

Two years ago, on WDPD2018, we wrote a kind of a status report about national digital preservation service in Finland. A lot has happened since then. As today is the 5th anniversary of our digital preservation service in production (yes, exactly today), it’s perhaps a time to give a short overview of what has happened since.

Back in 2018, we provided the preservation service only for the national cultural heritage sector, but during 2019 this was extended to also include research data (national universities, research institutes, etc.). All this within the remit of the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland. This, obviously, increased the number of our potential partner organisations significantly, and especially the potential amount of data to be preserved. At the end of 2018, we had preserved about 200 terabytes of data, but today the number is roughly one petabyte. The amount of data is growing on an average of 1.2 terabytes per day, with data flowing in constantly 24/7.

National Archives of Korea(NAK) is a central archive affiliated to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety that systematically collects and preserves major records, provides archival information to the public and carries out various activities so as to promote an archival culture. NAK opened its doors in 1969 and it has since been growing and developing steadily at the central records and archives management organization in charge of national records management. At the present, it has several branch offices in various regions, including the Government Complex in Daejeon, National Archives, Seoul, National Archives, Daejeon, National Archives, Busan and Presidential Archives.

There had been growing interests on the digital preservation among collecting institutions in Korea for some time. Each institution had only dealt with it’s own challenges so far, however, rather than creating a collaboration mechanism. It was noteworthy that three collecting institutions met for the first time, on February 12 to pave a road to cooperate: National Archives of Korea(NAK), National Library of Korea(NLK), and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information(KISTI). They agreed on the need of a Korean version of Digital Preservation Coalition then.

In a couple of subsequent meetings, each participating institutions had chances to briefly share their past and current activities related to digital preservation: NLK performed various digital material preservation and digital service of online materials, KISTI conducted various research on digital preservation and NAK developed a digital format registry. They also discussed for cooperation agenda and agreed to organize joint seminars and regular meetings.

Etsuko Watanabe is the Chief of International Liasion Team at the National Archives of Japan.

National Archives of Japan (NAJ) is a government organisation which serves to ensure the proper preservation of, and provision of access to, public records with historical/evidential value. Over two decades have passed since archivists all over the world started to tackle issues brought about by ever-evolving digital technologies; however, the governments’ records in Japan have been preserved in physical (mainly paper-based) formats as original records, even though they were digitally generated. As of March 2020, the digital records account for only 0.1 % of our entire holdings (1.54 million volumes). In addition, the transfer of digital records created by governmental bodies started in 2011, and their total amount still remains at 1,759 volumes.

Along with the governments’ policies, digital records acquired by the NAJ are, in principle, converted to long-term preservation formats in order to ensure their readability. They were then preserved in the system for transfer, preservation and use, which is called the “Electronic Records Archives of Japan (ERAJ).” To ensure the preservation of digital records, we undertake the following processes: (a) creating metadata, (b) ensuring security, (c) integrity checks of digital files, and (d) carrying out proper backups. Long-term preservation formats for acquired records to be converted are regulated as PDF/A-1 (ISO19005-1) and JPEG 2000 (ISO/IEC15444) depending on their file format. In addition, it is specified that acquired records should be preserved in their original formats when they are unable to be converted, or need to be preserved in their original form. So far, the file formats of Microsoft Word and PDF are often seen among these acquired records.

Zhenxin Wu is Professor of the Information System Department, and Deputy Director of the Digital Preservation Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences at the National Science Library in Beijing, China. She is also responsible for the technical system and data archive for NDPP (National Digital Preservation Program). 

The following blog is also available in Chinese below:

This year, the sudden epidemic has had a huge impact on the world. Out of necessity, the global situation has greatly promoted the speed of digital transformation in various organizations as well as the increase of online communication, for example, #WeMissiPRES in September was successfully held online. The National Science Library of CAS has provided several information services to support research on COVID-19, such as VPN-based online access, fast thematic information services and tracking of the latest global research progress. With the changing states of COVID-19, these changes have gradually become the norm.

It also makes us more clearly aware of the impact of this ‘black swan event.’ We realize that an approach of "unbounded symbiosis"(that is to say, living and working together without geographic boundaries) is more suitable for the global fight against the epidemic, as well as for various industries in the digital age, and of course it is especially suitable for the future development of the digital preservation community.

Serena Coates is the Lead of Preservation Services at the State Library of Queensland.

 To say that 2020 has been a challenging year is somewhat of an understatement.  In Australia, the year started with horrendous bushfires over much of the nation, and then of course, COVID-19 affected the world on a scale hitherto unknown to current inhabitants of planet Earth.

These history-making events were captured on our phones, shown on our televisions, discussed on social media, and will have a lasting effect on our psyches.  As a collecting institution, State Library of Queensland has responded to these global events at the local level, by capturing the stories of 2020 and preserving them for future generations.

To date, State Library of Queensland has collected and archived over 2000 images, videos, digital stories, oral histories, ephemera, realia, and emails relating to Queensland’s experience of and response to COVID-19.  Through a mixture of donations from the public, commissioned works from documentary photographers and storytellers, and web archiving, we have captured a broad cross-section of experiences of Queenslanders during this challenging year. 

Lee-Anne Raymond is the Senior Coordinator (DAMS) at Museums Victoria. 

The recovery rescue of valuable digital images from relative oblivion sometimes takes a pandemic lockdown to achieve. Whilst a viral outbreak of global proportion has delivered us anxious and uncertain times, it has also presented us with unique opportunity.

In late March 2020 as the Covid-19 Pandemic hit Australia’s public institutions, including Museums Victoria (MV), were transformed overnight. Only those with essential worker status were permitted access, ensuring precious collections and infrastructure were safe. MV’s essential workers variously relayed how strange it was to see the place so bereft of staff, volunteers and visitors “...the Museum is so quiet”.

Toni Burton, Collection Curation & Engagement Manager & Bridie Flynn, Senior Librarian Victorian & Australian Collections, State Library Victoria. 

As the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic started to unfold, it was clear that State Library Victoria needed a rapid collecting response to ensure that this event was documented and recorded.

Memory Bank: Collective Isolation Project developed as a cross department initiative to engage audiences in the act of citizen collecting. Using a series of weekly prompts, highlighted by existing collection material, people were invited to contribute their own documentary material to record their individual experiences. The prompts allowed collection and curatorial staff to guide the type of material we would like to receive and consider what might be important for future generations of researchers. A wide range of responses were received but due to the nature of the way people were living most submissions came in the form of digital content.

Ros Malone is a Counsellor for The Australian Society of Archivists. 

It is important for schools in Australia not to misunderstand the central findings and recommendations of the Commonwealth of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, handed down in December 2017.

For school archivists and recordkeepers, the key to understanding is in the title of the enquiry.

Because for many schools across Australia, it was revealed that it was their response to allegations of, and enquiries about, child sexual abuse that was their greatest failing.

Karuna Bhoday is the Assistant Director of the Integrated Archival Management System Project at National Archives of Australia. 

The National Archives of Australia provides leadership in best-practice management of the official record of the Australian Government and ensures that Australian Government information of enduring significance is secured, preserved and available to government agencies, researchers and the community

The National Archives has two key roles under our Act:

• to provide access to the Commonwealth government records which document the memory of our nation (connect Australians with their identity, history and place in the world); and

• to advise government agencies on the creation, management, including authorised disposal, and access of information and data to ensure:

  • government is transparent and accountable;

  • evidence of the actions and decisions of the Australian Government is created; and

  • that information is kept and is accessible for as long as needed.

Andrea Goethals is the Manager of Digital Preservation at the National Library of New Zealand 

This post is about the adjustments our digital preservation team at the National Library of New Zealand made during and after our Covid-19 lockdown.

Before Covid-19, with a couple exceptions, most of the Preservation Research & Consultancy (PRC) team came into the Library building in Wellington to work five days a week. One of us already worked remotely full-time from Auckland, and occasionally a few people worked from home, on the order of a day every other week.

Back in early March 2020, our team had been working on our BCP (business continuity plan) as part of our routine tasks. The BCP had different scenarios to plan for, for example, losing access to our building, which called for working from home as our strategy. We decided to test out our team’s ability to work from home one day - Friday March 20. As it got closer to our test day, the news about Covid-19 started increasing around us. On March 18 the entire Library was told to work from home on March 20 as a test. We started to realize that our test day might intersect with a real call for us to start working from home. A few days beforehand we did two things that turned out to be important in hindsight.

The theme for World Digital Preservation Day (5th November if you hadn’t noticed) is Digits: For Good.

I have improvised the punctuation in my title to look like the old DOS prompt, suggesting crudely that ‘Digits’ are the configured infrastructure which makes everything (anything) possible and ‘For Good’ is the routine we execute: ‘Digits’ as the universal virtual machine: ‘For Good’ our programmatic but achievable goal.

I like the theme this year, not just because it tells me that World Digital Preservation Day is mature and ambitious enough to carry a theme greater than the simple ‘connect and communicate’ of previous years. I like it because there’s a double meaning and both of them seem fitting: digits for ‘ever’ and digits for ‘better’.

It’s no surprise that the digital preservation community is interested in the ‘forever’ bit, even if we usually pivot to something shorter than forever. Mostly we don’t mean to keep digits for ever, and mostly we wouldn’t promise it either. It is perhaps less obvious that digital preservation is also for the common good and perhaps it’s time to put that right. This year’s theme reminds me that we don’t do digital preservation for the sake of the bits and bytes: it’s not ‘good for the digits’. We do it because of real world impacts we can have with the digits that we work for. That means we dive deep into file formats and fixity and storage and such, but you’d be wrong if you thought that was also our purpose. Here we are geeking out about representation information and all the while digital preservation helps deliver healthier, wealthier, safer, smarter, greener, more creative and more transparent agencies, communities and individuals: goals which we wouldn’t be able to achieve, or perhaps even imagine, without access to a trusted and secure digital legacy. This year’s theme encourages a reflection on human aspects of digital preservation: the labour that makes it possible and the aspiration that makes it desirable.

Remember remember the 5th November...

For us here in the UK this date usually means fireworks, toffee apples and huddling round a bonfire as we mark Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night. It’s usually freezing, often raining, but a tradition many* observe anyway as it offers the chance to come together as friends and family, and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at an impressive spectacle whilst eating sweets and treats. 

*I know that fireworks are not favoured everyone, most espeically by our dogs of digital preservation. Please enjoy thoughtfully.

I’m not sure there will be many community bonfire-side gatherings this year given the pandemic and various lockdowns still in force, but I’m not at all worried because we have:

via GIPHY

The Sun has now set on another World Digital Preservation Day: it’s been down for a while already and this post is really a late echo. But universal laws of motion tell me that the Sun doesn’t rise or set. It’s the Earth that rises.

2019 is, of course, the 50^th anniversary of Apollo 11 (and the less celebrated but altogether more joyous Apollo 12), travelling ‘in peace for all mankind’. For a moment people in every continent cheered as a man called Armstrong walked upon the moon. At one point in lunar orbit, Michael Collins could look back towards the Earth (as Dick Gordon could do a few months later) and hold in a single view the entire human family. It’s the ringside seat of all time: to spectate as our tiny planet spins through the blackness of space, sustaining the entire freight of human history.

Sarah Mason is Systems Archivist for Artefactual Systems Inc. and is based in the UK

World Digital Preservation Day is a great chance for the digital preservation community to celebrate achievements, to reach out to those outside and bring them into the community; it is also a chance to discuss what challenges we face and what opportunities are out there to help us move forward. So in the face of challenges that involve funding, staffing, and managerial or IT buy-in, how do we preserve the ever increasing volume and complexity of digital materials?

One way that we can face these kinds of challenges is by collaborating as part of a multidisciplinary team. Bringing together a diverse range of expertise, the team at Artefactual Systems is comprised of analysts (who represent domain specialists from archivists to librarians), developers, and systems administrators. Together, we can use of different viewpoints and specialisations to collaborate on digital preservation solutions--in different geographic locations! We understand that in this field no one person can know it all; sometimes it takes many voices to address issues in a balanced way.

Alexander Barquero es director del Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica y Coordinador del Grupo de trabajo sobre Gestión y Preservación de Documentos Electrónicos de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Archivos

[English version follows]

En un mundo globalizado, transformado por las sociedades del conocimiento e inmerso en la cuarta revolución industrial, los países de la región latinoamericana tienen un gran reto (y una gran oportunidad) para potenciar la capacidad productiva de sus habitantes y obtener el máximo provecho a la constante e imparable producción intelectual, técnica y tecnológica del mundo. Los recursos con los que cuenta cualquier administración para trabajar siempre serán limitados, y en el caso de los países latinoamericanos esto es una constante que pareciera no fenecer pronto. Ante esta realidad, los gobiernos, instituciones, empresas y ciudadanos se ven obligados a la búsqueda continua de opciones que logren aprovechar eficientemente los recursos económicos y talento humano, así como la infraestructura física y tecnológica.

Helen Hockx-Yu is Enterprise Data Architect at the University of Notre Dame in the USA

The University of Notre Dame (UND) is a private research university located in the United States. I joined UND in 2016 as a programme manager for digital asset management. Since 2009, various initiatives have taken place to address the challenge but they have largely been specific in their scope and not broadly adopted across the University as a whole. I was expected to build on the previous work, to refocus and come up with a new plan. My web archiving and digital preservation background were thought to be relevant and helpful - the executives who entrusted me with this important work were the University Librarian and the then Chief Information Officer.

My first challenge was to understand the definition and scope of digital asset management, as the term often relates to rich media such as digital videos, animation, graphics, photographs, audio files, logos and marketing collateral. Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems emerged in the 1990s in the private sector to support digital media creation, marketing, publishing and brand management, and their customer-base mainly consists of commercial organisations.

Alberto Castro Thompson, Ana Yuri Ramírez Molina and Lisandro Pablo Olivares work in the Innovation and Digital Strategy Coordination (CIED) team at Biblioteca Nacional de México

The National Library of Mexico (BNM) is legally empowered by a Decree of Legal Deposit of national scope since 1812[i] and last modified in 1991, being in this reform where publications in electronic formats are included for the first time.

Amy Rudersdorf is a Senior Consultant with AVP in the USA

As a consultant with AVP, I work with many different types of organizations to help them assess and optimize their digital preservation programs. I have the opportunity to really dig into the inner workings of these digital preservation environments. I've found that it is very common for institutions to have very little documentation relating to their digital preservation programs. Sure, you know what you're doing, but there are so many other reasons to create documentation!

Brian Lavoie is Research Scientist for OCLC in the USA

An important class of at-risk digital materials is the myriad forms of output generated over the research lifecycle – think of data sets, computer code, online discussions, e-lab notebooks, and so on. Growing recognition of the value of these materials to the scholarly record has led to many efforts to collect and preserve them over the long term. But mitigating risks associated with preserving digital research outputs means setting up stewardship arrangements that are well-adapted to the evolving nature of today’s scholarly record. For that, we need stewardship with a network logic, or conscious coordination.

Euan Cochrane is Digital Preservation Manager at Yale University Library

Online web services are used by billions of people every day. They impact our lives and society in a myriad of ways. The way they present data to us and the ways they manipulate and transform the data we store in them have the potential to change behaviour and our understanding of the world. And this is all being done at a scale unimaginable in previous history.  These services have changed greatly over time. Many of those changes are not publicly documented or even known to the general public. I’ve outlined a few of those we do know of below:

Ethan Gates is Software Preservation Analyst, Digital Preservation Services at Yale University Library in the USA

The efforts of the EaaSI (Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure) project and the Software Preservation Network to preserve the software and computing environments around digital objects have revealed that a parallel effort needs to be made to preserve the expertise and knowledge necessary to use and interact with such environments. Scanning software manuals and printed guidebooks, photographing boxes and physical media, archiving the web sites of developers, enthusiasts and community forums - all of these are necessary activities, largely happening on an ad hoc basis in the digital preservation community if at all. Dedicated, collaborative initiatives on this front are essential to make sure future users are able to interact with authentic digital objects in context.

One of the student workers we employ in the EaaSI program once came to me with a troubleshooting problem. This is not unusual - our diligent student team is tasked with cataloging and attempting to install a vast range of legacy software applications, and between quirks in the applications, quirks in the necessary operating systems, quirks in the emulators running them and quirks in Yale’s beta installation of the EaaSI platform, any number of questions can come up. The student was having trouble with an application running in MacOS 7.5: the menu bar at the top of the screen seemed to be glitching, constantly closing before they could access the settings and preference menus that are often our best source of information about a given piece of software (language configuration, file format capabilities, etc.)

Sally McInnes is Chair of the ARCW Digital Preservation Group and Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales

It has been two years since the Archives and Records Council launched its National Digital Preservation Policy on International Digital Preservation Day, 2017.  Since then, ARCW has made considerable progress in supporting the policy, the aims of which are to:

• To ensure digital resources of enduring value are selected for preservation and remain authentic and accessible in the future.
• To provide a framework for the development of digital preservation strategies that can be adapted for use by organisations throughout Wales, irrespective of their size and capacity.
• To raise awareness of the importance of effective Digital Preservation among archive institutions and practitioners, managers, information technology staff and stakeholders / decision makers.

Sheila Morrissey is Senior Researcher at Portico, based in New York

We hear again and again that, first, one of the biggest threats to ensuring long-term access to our digital heritage is the cost of preservation, and, second, that one of the critical cost drivers is the set of activities associated with selection, acquisition, and other pre-ingest processing (such as quality assurance of acquired artifacts). 

As the amount of content in preservation archives grows at geometric rates, and as the artifacts in ever-increasing input streams continues to evolve, sometimes unpredictably, into varying new complex forms, how do we scale what might be called “pre-ingest” activities without scaling up our costs at the same rate?

Daniele Balduzzi is IT Officer/Archivist and Shiri Alon is Archivist at World Bank Group Archives

A year ago, our colleagues Jeanne Kramer-Smyth and April Miller published a post about the people and process investments required for the Archives of the World Bank Group (WBG) to fully handle both analog and born-digital records. In this post we will discuss how we are defining the digital landscape of the WBG in order to shape and refine our long-term digital preservation strategy.

Planning for long-term preservation of digital content is a challenging task, often resulting in more unanswered questions than definitive decisions. It’s a complex effort, but also an iterative process with a staggered implementation: setting a course for a distant future in a dynamic present requires a solid sturdy boat, a clear map to refer to, and the agility to navigate in uncharted waters.

Eng Sengsavang is Reference Archivist for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, France

Credit: George Chernilevsky: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg#/media/File:Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg

My experience of technology is inevitably historical: as a child of the 80s, an adolescent of the 90s, and an adult into the 2000s, I experienced first-hand the paradigm shift from analogue to digital technologies, alongside the continual accrual of different eras of technology co-existing simultaneously. Of course, not only mine, but every person’s experience of technology is necessarily historical: throughout our lives, we experience on a deeply personal and at the same time macro level the mutations of technologies that seem to gather speed over time, new technologies continually appearing and old ones disappearing or threatening to disappear, and being replaced or persisting in ways both predictable and unexpected.

Leslie Johnston is Director of Digital Preservation at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington DC, USA

The Strategic Plan for the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration outlines a vision to ensure ongoing access to government information. Digital preservation is crucial for this work, as evidenced by the June 2019 direction (M-19-21, Transition to Electronic Records) to Federal agencies to transition to a fully electronic government and to end the National Archives’ acceptance of analog records after December 31, 2022.

The Strategic Plan also embraces an Open NARA, one that is both transparent about its operations and participates in an open community where it can learn from the insights of other organizations. As part of achieving that goal, NARA has released its Digital Preservation Framework for public comment. The release of this framework will allow NARA staff, federal agencies, the public, and our colleagues in the archival and preservation communities to weigh in and assist us in creating the standard for digital preservation in the U.S. Federal government. We want to ensure that both our process for identifying and mitigating risk in the electronic records that we preserve and make accessible and the decisions that we have made are as transparent as possible.

Sara Day Thomson is Research Officer at the DPC |  Graham Purnell is Digital Preservation Assistant at the National Library of Scotland

1: Getting Our Feet Wet in Emulation

World Digital Preservation Day celebrates all the inspiring work being done in digital preservation around the world. It celebrates innovative tools and techniques, effective advocacy and awareness-raising, and collaboration among fellow practitioners. This summer, I got to experience all of those things at the National Library of Scotland (NLS) as part of a digital preservation skills upgrade.

It all started when Lee and Graham - the digital preservation team at NLS - agreed to let me help them with some speculative research into emulation for digital preservation and access. I learned a lot about emulation as a technology but also about the real-life, facepalming frustrations of trying to coax 20-odd year old software to work properly on a legacy OS built in VirtualBox.

While the research was limited to a few test cases just to get our feet wet, I came away with a much deeper understanding of the opportunities and limitations introduced by emulation as a digital preservation strategy for heritage institutions. With patience and good humour, Graham taught this young dog some old tricks.

But before I get to the juicy bits, I thought I’d paint the scene a little with a few basics about emulation for those readers who, like I did, need a refresher.

If you’re all up to date on emulation as a digital preservation strategy, feel free to skip to section 3: It works! Wait, is it working?.

Hernán Cabrera Pichuante es Jefe de Proyectos Técnicos del Proyecto de Modernización de Archivos Nacionales de Chile (National Archives of Chile)

[English version follows]

Estamos llenos de información almacenada y muchos de mis conocidos en el área de TI insisten en que la copia no solo es segura, sino que, prácticamente eterna.

Es frecuente ver como las políticas de respaldo de los activos tecnológicos llenan bodegas con cintas magnéticas creadas en modernos sistemas automáticos de respaldo.

Es frecuente ver como una y otra vez, al querer recuperar algo la respuesta es: ¿te acuerdas de más o menos de que fecha es lo que me pides?

Es más frecuente aún, que luego de un par de días de búsqueda, la cinta se encuentre y lo que sigue es que estas, por lo general, contienen más de una versión del mismo documento y nos preguntamos …y ¿cuál de todos estos documentos es el que busco?

Perla Olivia Rodríguez Reséndiz es Coordinadora de Red Iberoamericana de Preservación Digital de Archivos Sonoros y Audiovisuales (RIPDASA) e investigadora de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

[English version follows]

En el Día Mundial de la Preservación Digital es necesario recordar  que subiste el riesgo de pérdida, tanto de las grabaciones sonoras y audiovisuales registradas en soportes analógicos como de las que fueron creadas de origen digital. Este es un peligro latente y un problema social contemporáneo que afecta a todos los archivos. No obstante, son especialmente sensibles a esta pérdida los países que hasta ahora no han puesto en marcha políticas y estrategias de preservación digital sustentable.

Gabriela Andaur Gómez es Profesora Asistente, Facultad de Economía y Negocios, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Consejera, Comité Memoria del Mundo – Chile (UNESCO) y Archivera, Proyecto de Modernización, Archivo Nacional de Chile

[English version follows]

Desde hace algunos años hemos visto como dentro de la comunidad profesional latinoamericana ha comenzado a instalarse la preocupación sobre la preservación digital. Este discurso ha comenzado a permear, aunque lentamente, en las instituciones archivísticas locales y las comunidades vinculadas al patrimonio documental. No obstante, falta mucho para generar conciencia sobre la fragilidad de los documentos en el entorno digital, de tal manera de pasar desde la comprensión del problema al avance en su solución.

Uno de los mayores problemas que enfrentamos es la parálisis. Estamos aprendiendo que la preservación digital es una tarea gigantesca y sin fin, que requiere recursos constantes (y superiores a los que solemos tener), la aplicación de estándares técnicos diversos a los que no siempre tenemos acceso, además de competencias distintas a las que hemos estado adquiriendo en nuestros programas de formación archivística.  ¿Cómo preservaremos nuestros documentos electrónicos si no tenemos claro cómo ni dónde empezar? ¿dónde obtendremos los recursos necesarios? ¿cómo nos capacitaremos? La problemática es tan compleja que el miedo y la parálisis son las primeras reacciones, y acabamos por no hacer nada al respecto.

Millard Schisler is Adjunct Faculty for the Online Master’s in Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He lives and works with Digital Preservation in Brazil

I have always liked the image of the three-dimensional sculpture figures created by artist Stephen Hansen as a way to illustrate the “trickle-down economics” of the Reagan era – it is pretty much self-explanatory as to the “distribution” of wealth.  This image also comes to my mind when I think of the international and national organizations that brand the need for digital preservation in their meetings and conferences and create manifestos and guidelines to steer us all. I am grateful for this work, and am not against these efforts and strategies, but many times these ideas seem to take a long time to trickle down to the bottom where everyday life is, much like this image.

Alistair Goodall is Head of IT for Crossrail Ltd in the UK

Last year we were the proud winners of a Digital Preservation Award for our Crossrail archive and I was lucky enough to experience the passion and enthusiasm for digital preservation at the awards ceremony.

Since then we have successfully closed down some of the applications associated with the early stages of our 10 year project (such as land acquisition and property access requests) and these are now available through our Crossrail archive.  The Crossrail project itself has, however, been delayed beyond December 2018 and we are in our most information intensive stage with testing, commissioning and certification underway.

Jon Tilbury is CTO of Preservica, and is based in the UK

World Digital Preservation Day is all about the global community coming together to share ideas and collaborate. So how can we all work more closely on sharing format preservation information and what is the value of doing this?

Antonio G. Martinez is CEO & Founder of LIBNOVA and is based in Madrid, Spain

Last year in our guest blog post for the DPC we wrote about “Do you D.P.?” and we commented that there is no “DP yes or no, but, up to what level of DP can you go?”. This year the theme for World Digital Preservation Day is ‘At-Risk Digital Materials´.

As we mentioned last year, it was the less D.P. intense communities that were picking up the tune of the more energetic entities, at many levels. Over the last few years we have been sensing that the ‘At-Risk Digital Materials’ menace is being taken very seriously indeed by big and small cultural heritage institutions across the globe and that those international entities are picking up speed by their own accord. Many of these international entities are turning to other older and established associations to contrast their fears concerning digital preservation. They realise they are not alone on many issues; it is quite an international concern. And this takes me to another point.

Sean Barker is an Information Management Specialist 

I have an embarrassing admission to make. For years, part of me worked on the LOTAR project (1) developing preservation standards for Product Data Management (PDM), while another part was making those standards obsolete by creating an Integrated Design Environment. And I didn't connect the two parts together.

The first thing I should do is not explain PDM - it's too complex for a short blog and people shouldn't worry about it unless their project gets bigger than a team-of-teams (about eighty people). Think of PDM as provenance on steroids, where even a simple sign-off is backed up by a ten-volume procedures manual and where the people who sign the approvals must be approved to do so by an approved organization.

Anna McNally is Senior Archivist at University of Westminster in the UK

The University of Westminster’s Records and Archives team manage the institutional records of the University (founded in 1838), alongside the deposited records of several architects and town planners, and a garment collection (the Westminster Menswear Archive). We started actively managing digital records in 2016 but, in a relatively fast-paced area (compared with paper records!), it’s hard not to always think of yourself as a beginner. In 2017 we recorded a webinar titled ‘Work In Progress’, which - despite having been in production for nearly 3 years now - is still how I would describe our digital preservation activities. While our software solution gives us confidence that we are meeting our targets with the NDSA levels, we’re aware that there is a lot more we could be doing.

Dr David Tarrant is the senior learning advisor at the Open Data Institute (ODI). 

I would first like to thank the work of the BBC for the research behind this article that was broadcast in “Ian Hislop’s Fake News: A True History”. I have added to the story with details not included in the programme and checked these using a combination of sources. 

So what can our memory institutions teach us about fake news?

Brecht Declercq is Digitisation and Acquisition Manager for VIAA in Belgium

At first glance, there is a strict distinction between carriers of analogue and digital audiovisual information. But in practice, this distinction is not always clear. There are even carriers of audiovisual information that can hardly be catalogued under one of those two names. The word ‘digitisation’ is therefore not always used correctly. Moreover, there is an important difference between digital information, file-based information, and information stored on mass storage systems. By taking a closer look at the history of digi