Blog

Helen Dafter is Archivist at The Postal Museum in the UK

Readers of this blog will be well aware of the three legged stool of digital preservation. One key element of this stool is staff skills. For some time I have been concerned that digital preservation skills at The Postal Museum are concentrated in one member of staff (myself). This is undesirable in terms of both organisational and individual resilience.

I was honoured to give a keynote lecture at the start of the International Digital Curation Conference in June 2022.  The text below is a slightly adapted version of the talk which was also recorded and will be made available in due course.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak today and for Kevin’s words of welcome and introduction.  I’ve been tied up lately with an awful lot of detail.  I am fine with that, but I won’t pretend it’s where I am happiest.  So, I am grateful for the opportunity to step out away from the day to day and try to search a wider horizon. 

The theme of iDCC this year is Re-Use.  Time and effort and expertise are spent on digital curation and preservation because we anticipate and seek to enable the re-use of digital materials in the future.  We recognise that re-use cannot be taken for granted – we have too many stories of how and why it can be hard to re-use resources – and we want to protect and transmit the significant efforts and benefits and opportunities with which our digital objects are imbued. 

There is no re-use without preservation.

Analysing PDFs with the PyMuPDF library 

Like many heritage institutions Bodleian Libraries holds a vast collection of PDFs, created in various flavours and software over the past 20 years. These documents have come to the libraries from diverse sources – such as digitization suppliers, academic depositors, and born-digital personal archives. 

We wanted a quick and dirty way of scanning our PDF collections for particular features, tailoring these to the needs of the Libraries’ vast and diverse collections. Using the PyMuPDF library we created a small tool which helps us gather more information about the current state of our PDFs, especially but not exclusively, regarding their accessibility. While our PDF analysis tool is less detailed than validation tools (like veraPDF), using the PyMuPDF library can be a good first step for analysing PDFs and flagging potential high-level digital preservation risks.

Christopher Viney is Archive Digitisation Officer at Historic Environment Scotland

Over the past decade issues in access to archival collections have been thrown sharply into focus demonstrating the value of digitising analogue archival material. This provides a greater level of access and mitigates potential barriers that can often shut people out of our institutions. Indeed, digitisation and digital preservation provides a key tool in the work of Historic Environment Scotland to deliver on its vision ‘to make sure Scotland’s heritage is cherished, understood, shared and enjoyed with pride by everyone’. After the fantastic work of the Archive Digital Project, showcased in the online exhibition “Beyond the Physical”, Historic Environment Scotland has continued to improve access to and preservation of our collections. One such recent project has been the digitisation of The Scotsman Collection.

Alicia Wise is Executive Director of CLOCKSS

Time is a thief of memory, even for formal publications, unless long-term digital preservation arrangements are in place. It takes a community to safeguard the scholarly record. It is too big a job for any single organisation, and too horrific for our species if done badly.

Michael Popham is Digital Preservation Analyst at the DPC and Jenny Mitcham is Head of Good Practice and Standards at the DPC.

Perhaps you’ve been given the go-ahead to procure a “digital preservation system”, or you’re trying to work out what differentiates such a system from the applications and infrastructure that you already have in place? How do you decide what you really need, especially in light of the rapidly evolving marketplace of commercial and open source preservation solutions? The DPC has recently launched a set of resources designed to help.

Leontien is a collaborative PhD student at The National Archives, UK and University College London, her research is about access to born-digital material. 

Within the digital preservation community, the term computational access is popping up more and more frequently. It is often linked to other terms such as artificial intelligence, data mining and deep neural networks. However, there is often little understanding of what these terms actually mean and how they relate to each other. 

On Friday last week, our latest #DPClinic chat delved into the topic of persistent identifiers (PIDs). As I remarked at the start of the session, persistent identifiers are something that pop up as an example of accepted good practice in DPC RAM, our Rapid Assessment Model. They are mentioned at the managed level of the metadata section with the example “Persistent unique identifiers are assigned and maintained for digital content.”

Holly Ranger is Research Data Management Officer in the Research & Knowledge Exchange Office at the University of Westminster

Practice Research Voices (PR Voices) is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project led by the University of Westminster. The project is scoping the development of an Open Library of Practice Research for the dissemination and preservation of practice research, building on existing software and standards and guided by open research principles.

‘Practice research’ is ‘an umbrella term that describes all manners of research where practice is the significant method of research conveyed in a research output’ (Bulley and Sahin, 2021). Practice research outputs are typically multi-component portfolios or collections of non-text file formats which are disseminated and hosted in separate places such as personal websites, institutional repositories, archives, and commercial video-sharing platforms. These factors pose a significant challenge to the preservation and reuse of practice research and practice research data.

Melanie Peart is Archives Specialist at BT Heritage & Archives.

BT Archives was set up over 35 years ago to preserve the history of the then recently privatised company, British Telecom.  Now a global telecommunications company, BT has its origins in mid-19^th century telephone and telegraph businesses.  Its history includes, amongst many other things, the iconic red telephone box (or more accurately telephone kiosk), undersea cable-laying and memorable advertising campaigns.  So there is a wide and important history which we in the archives team are very keen to preserve and make available.  This includes digital archives as well as physical records and we have been collecting digital material since the 1990s and digitising physical archives for almost as long.