Blog

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.

Brendan Power is Born-Digital Archive Preservation Librarian at Trinity College Library Dublin.

iPres 2022 was my first in-person attendance at the conference. My first role in digital preservation began a couple of months before the outbreak of COVID-19 so it was great to meet and interact with colleagues at an in-person event. The first thing that struck me when reflecting on iPres 2022 was that being an in-person event really helped to make manifest that community is really at the heart of what iPres and the Digital Preservation Coalition does.

The atmosphere at iPres was welcoming, friendly, supportive. The delegates I interacted with were generous with their time and knowledge and so willing to share their experiences with others. It was clear that as a community there was an acknowledgement that everyone is at different stages of their digital preservation journey. Those further along the journey were open to sharing their experiences, honest about the challenges they faced, and generous with offering their learnings. The attendees I met also highlighted to me that digital preservation is a global concern that impacts upon any industry or sector you can think of. I met delegates from national libraries and archives, universities, businesses, banks, charities, government departments and agencies, and many more. We all face the same challenges, and it was heartening to be surrounded by so many like-minded people working towards a common aim.

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.