Blog

In October 2022 I was privileged to join colleagues virtually for an event organized by UNISA in Pretoria, South Africa. The event marked International Open Access Week 2022 and had the title 'Open for Climate Justice'. This blog is a version of the paper that I presented.  (Added 1/11/2022: The slides are available from UnisaIR at https://hdl.handle.net/10500/29530)

 Thankyou very much for the invitation to join you today to share some thoughts about the relationship between digital preservation and climate justice.  Ansie’s invitation was very timely, not just because it’s International Open Access Week. This time last year I was invited to share some thoughts on this very topic on the fringes of the COP 26 summit here in Glasgow so it’s an opportunity to share how my thinking has progressed since then. Also, environment was a main theme of the iPres conference in September so it’s an opportunity to reflect on some of the emerging thinking presented there. 

I’m going to cover a lot of ground in the next 30 minutes or so but it will all be published later today on the DPC blog so you can listen along or make notes as you please.

I aim to develop eight ideas.

Firstly, I need to define the digital preservation problem then make explicit the link to the main theme of climate justice. 

Then I want to talk a little about openness in climate science.  In my head this links to core themes of authenticity which are central to the mission of most archives; but you won’t fail to notice a wider issue about accountability and the challenges to climate justice that arise from vested interests. A spoiler: openness is going to emerge as a requirement.

I will then turn my attention back to more familiar themes in digital preservation, the relationship between preservation and disposal, and consider the opportunities that digital preservation creates to manage and reduce the amount of data we retain. 

Digital preservation is more than storage.  We can track energy consumption right across digital preservation workflows, and that has implications for how we might structure preservation. 

We also need to recognise that energy consumption is not the only way in which digital technologies impact the environment.  The virtual world is physical.  The manufacture and disposal of computing equipment has a real and unsustainable environmental cost.  I will explore some of these issues.

Towards the end I will take a brief detour into the history of digital preservation.  This might seem indulgent, but it is not irrelevant to the climate crisis and demands for climate justice.  Changes which will disrupt the digital economy will also disrupt our understanding of digital preservation. 

Finally, I want to reflect on the DPC and how we’re beginning to make changes in our own work.

Natalie Anderson is Project Officer, Digital Archives Innovation and Research, at National Archives of Australia. She attended ASA 2022 Here We Are Conference with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I was recently the lucky recipient of a #DigitalPreservationCoalition (DPC) grant to support my registration and attendance to this year’s #AustralianSocietyofArchivists (ASA) national annual conference – #HereWeAre2022 in Canberra.

As a staff member of the National Archives of Australia and working in the Digital Archives Innovation and Research section, I am fully aware of the importance of digital preservation. By safeguarding Australian Government digital records and data, we can ensure that future generations will be able to access and use this rich and important digital collection. The ASA is Australia’s peak professional body for archivists and recordkeepers. They advocate on behalf of archivists, and the archival and recordkeeping profession, and seek to promote the value of archives and records, as well as support best practice standards and services. Key themes for this year’s conference included Practice and Identity, Collaboration and Advocacy, and Developing Practices.

Over two days I posted about conference presentations on LinkedIn which related to digital preservation. In this blog I will be sharing one of the presentations that was of particular interest to me.

I discovered iPres in 2019 when I was looking for articles for my final master's work. I found many good papers that helped me a lot. When I started searching for more about iPres and decided to participate in the next one, which would be in 2020, it didn't happen because of the pandemic. However, I didn't give up; I kept following on social media to keep updated. Participating in iPres meant acquiring more knowledge about digital preservation, to put it into practice in my job, and the result was better than expected. 

I am currently an archivist at the National Library of Brazil, working in records management and I am a member of the permanent commission for digital preservation. Since 2018, the production of digital documents has been growing in my institution, and has required acquiring more knowledge to preserve them. In addition, we have the largest digital library in Latin America, with 2,138,378 million documents. Attending this conference in 2022 helped me outline strategies, exchange experiences and ideas with professionals from four continents, to preserve all these digital documents. 

Matthew Addis is Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum.

One area that stood out for me at iPRES this year was the thread of climate change and environmental sustainability that weaved its way through several parts of the conference.

In the panel session called ‘”IT'S ALL IMPORTANT OF COURSE, BUT…”, which hotly debated the question of what is the most important challenge in digital preservation (costs, advocacy, and people all came high up the list, and rightly so), I think it was Keith Pendergrass, one of the authors of a seminal report on the environmental sustainability of digital preservation, who made the observation from the audience that “how to ensure content is sustained through climate collapse is perhaps the biggest challenge for preservation”.    This struck me as particularly relevant given other sessions at iPRES had talked about grass-roots collecting and archives, including in local communities and in developing countries.  It won’t be content in the national libraries that will be lost, but content in small archives like these that are hit with increasingly extreme climate events that literally destroy their very existence.  

Adrian Clark is Academic Librarian for the Wolfson School of Engineering at Loughborough University. He attended DCDC 2022 with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I am the Academic Librarian for the Wolfson School of Engineering at Loughborough University. My interests are in research support and how data archiving and preservation underpins the scholarly record and can create new research opportunities. Having worked in the cultural and heritage sector previously as well as my current role I was excited to listen to so many different perspectives at the 2022 Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC 2022) conference this past July.

One of my first thoughts on looking at the conference programme was that: “I wish our archivist was here with me!” Loughborough is currently recruiting to replace our Archivist; the university archive records the organization's inception as The Loughborough Technical Institute in 1909 to its present structure as a world class university. Additionally, the library is currently revisioning its strategy. Two strands of that process Opening Up Research and Contributing Towards Knowledge Exchange, supplied a key reason for attending DCDC 2022. I was hoping to identify potential partners to help us tell the story of our institution better and to figure out if we could do things differently when it comes to collection curation. I wasn’t disappointed! Below I have brought together the themes of several of the talks that I attended and the learning they prompted.

After (non-Covid) illness and a holiday, today, 10^th October, is my first proper day back “in the office” after iPres 2022. It seems fitting that the day is also World Mental Health Day 2022, marking a day of action and reflection on a topic that is very important to me. I’ve blogged before on my own mental health struggles and the impact that the start of the pandemic had on me, and this seems like the ideal time to revisit the topic of mental health.

Ever since returning from Glasgow last month I have been meaning to get my thoughts down on my own iPres experiences. Writing this post has been a good way for me to organise my own thoughts and learnings from the conference and also a good excuse to dip into some of the written proposals and presentation recordings, but I think the time spent has been worth it. This is an account of how iPres was for me!

Robin Wright is Head of Australasia and Asia-Pacific for the DPC

In August earlier this year Australasia Preserves, a Community of Practice that supports the discussion of digital preservation in Australasia, collaborated with National and State Libraries Australasia to hold an online meetup session exploring Digital preservation frameworks, strategies, and policies.

Rachel MacGregor is Digital Preservation Officer at the University of Warwick

I’m writing this with the stardust of iPres 2022 still glinting on me and reflecting back on everything I did and everything I learnt at the conference. Everyone has a different conference – this one was no exception - and the packed programme meant that there was always going to be lots of stuff I will never catch up (although a great deal was recorded). You can read William’s blog about the organisation (which was amazing) – all I am aiming to do is to share some of my highlights and what I plan to do next with what I have learnt.

Robin Wright is Head of Australasia and Asia-Pacific for the DPC

During iPres this year, online delegates from Australasia and the Asia-Pacific had an additional way to engage with the iPres program and other attendees from their region by tuning in to iPres radio. This was a series of five half hour open zoom sessions run by the DPC’s Head Australasia and Asia-Pacific each day at 14:00 AEST (12:00 SGT, 16:00 NZST) that was designed for online delegates from the Australasia and Asia-Pacific region.

It provided an informal forum for delegates from the region allowing them to interact and find out more information about events at iPres at a convenient local time. The sessions also provided an introduction to the iPres Sunrise sessions being held later that day at 7.30am Glasgow time (16:30 – 18:00 AEST, 14:30 – 16:00 SGT, 18:30 – 20:00 NZST).