Ailie O’Hagan is the Digital Preservation Librarian at Queen’s University Belfast.
Last year, in the Library at Queen's University Belfast, we began to address preservation of our born-digital materials. The catalyst for this came from a story – or rather, our inability to completely access a story! Earlier in the year, we had received a donation of materials belonging to the late Professor Lord David Trimble, former First Minister of Northern Ireland, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and Nobel Peace Prize Winner (1998). Alongside shelves of draft papers, photographs, briefing papers, reports, and correspondence in binders and boxes, was an array of digital objects: Zip disks and floppy disks, Psion portable PCs, a Compaq pocket PC, multiple encyclopedia-sized Toshiba laptops, CD ROMs, a SUMO disk drive, USB flash drives - 247 obsolete carriers in total, recording iterations of Trimble's political documents and ephemera.
These contain digital letters and press releases, web files, drafted statements and speeches from Trimble's tenure as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, including the speech he delivered on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize following negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Yet despite having the collection in our care, we could not immediately access the digital content. Attempting to open files without appropriate safeguards could inadvertently alter metadata, overwrite information, introduce malware, or compromise the authenticity of the records. Given the symbolism of this collection as a significant chapter in the journey towards peace in Northern Ireland, we were particularly aware of the need for a robust and confident workflow that would allow us to demonstrate the authenticity, provenance, and integrity of digital records entrusted to our care.
This experience prompted us to assess our pre-existing processes in Special Collections, to better understand which aspects the team were already comfortable with, and where there were gaps in knowledge or equipment set-up. This revealed inconsistencies across several stages: from the process involved in accepting digital files, to whether and how files were renamed. Checksums were often optional, and once placed in the "born-digital" folder on the shared drive, the files would remain untouched, existing in the back of our minds as something to return to later.
The first priority was ensuring that we could safely receive and inspect new digital materials. To achieve this, we invested in a write-blocker so that we could lift the lid on contents held in hard-drives, USB pens or other media connected via USB reader without risking accidentally changing metadata or risking the integrity of the files. We also benefited from expertise provided by Nico Albrecht at Data Forensics Ltd, who delivered a digital forensics workshop for library staff. This workshop introduced us to techniques for securely handling digital materials received through email, SharePoint, and external carriers, while preserving valuable metadata that might otherwise be lost during routine transfers.
For email attachments, we learned to save via the desktop app, to avoid the loss of metadata that can occur from downloading from the cloud. Files downloaded from SharePoint in the browser could also be susceptible to the erasure of metadata such as author and date information, so sites needed to be mounted to a local network from which to take a reliable disk image. As a further measure, our Digital Services team formatted an isolated air-gapped computer for processing new digital donations. This allows us a safe environment for assessing and processing new digital donations, before they enter wider library systems.
While the technical training supported staff skills development, our assessment of the pre-existing process revealed that successful and consistent adoption of the new workflow would also depend on ensuring the process could be as clear and simple as possible. To this end, we automated the creation of consistent processing folders and integrity checking by integrating Nico Albrecht's DF Sentinel tool. This tool enabled us to generate a visual "traffic light" health report on files and automate the creation of 5 processing folders for Source files, Preserved copies, Working copies, Verification reports, and Processing Outputs. This would provide the set up for our imaged copies and reports, making it clear which files were to be transferred to the preservation system, and which could safely be processed for the access terminal. By reducing manual steps and providing a clear visual interface for file validity checking, the workflow made preservation practices more accessible across teams with different levels of technical expertise.
With the set-up prepared to receive materials, we were finally ready to image and document these, for which we utilised FTK Imager. Metadata, provenance information, and collection references were also recorded at this stage, so future researchers could understand not only the files themselves but also their origins and context.
The experience of encountering inaccessible born-digital materials in the Trimble collection demonstrated that preserving digital heritage is more than just a technical challenge, but we are successful when adapting to our own systems and institutional practices, to create accessible and practical workflows. By including the whole team in the training and workflow design, we set up the foundation for a lasting and relevant workflow and built collective staff expertise and confidence to continue preserving and ensuring our digital heritage can remain accessible.