Blog

Last week one of our monthly #DPClinic sessions focussed on the topic of preserving WhatsApp, an interesting subject that drew in a good crowd of people from the digital preservation community.

The session was triggered by a question from a DPC Member who was interested to find out how other organizations were tackling the challenge of WhatsApp preservation, in particular where it has been used for business functions and needs to be captured as a record. It was clear that this issue is a shared one and an emerging challenge for those working in digital preservation. There had previously been some discussion on Twitter on this topic with some really helpful replies to the question I posed.

Lauren Curless is the Data Integrity, Analytics & Information Management Manager at National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

As an audio-visual archive, the NFSA has always been interested in storytelling. Australian culture is showcased in every item held in our collection, across a huge number of formats, in the stories of Australians from all walks of life. We’re in a unique position amongst cultural institutions, our collection is primed for digital preservation due to the nature of our content and existing curatorial, digitisation and access programmes. 

Mzodidi Tutuka is Principal Library Assistant at University at Cape Town Library. He recently attended the NEDCC Digital Directions Conference 2022  with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I am Mzodidi Tutuka from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. I work at the Digital Library Services (DLS) department which falls under the Information and Resources division within the UCT Libraries. Our department consists of 9 individuals dedicated to providing the best data/digital support for researchers and students. Through a successful grant application to the DPC, which we have been members of since 2020, I have been fortunate to be granted an opportunity to attend the NEDCC Digital Directions conference this year. Attending the conference has helped me put a perspective on the general scope of the work that my department does.

Ruth Schieferstein is a Digital Archive Officer at Historic Environment Scotland. She recently attended the NEDCC Digital Directions Conference 2022 with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I had the great opportunity to attend the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) Digital Directions conference thanks to the generous DPC Career Development Fund. The conference was held virtually over three days and was packed full with interactive talks and collaborative breakout sessions. My motivation for attending the conference was to meet fellow digital preservation colleagues and to stay up-to-date with current best practices and standards.

Niamh Murphy is a student of the Master of Library and Information Studies programme at University College Dublin.

As prefaced last week, this week’s post concerning Brunnhilde will be about the core requirements for its installation, the most recent update, the additional dependencies, and uses of the software, with specific attention to macOS and Python 3. As previously discussed, there are a multitude of reasons in favour of the installation and use of this software, which can be found here.

Niamh Murphy is a student of the Master of Library and Information Studies programme at University College Dublin.

While learning about file format identification software, namely Siegfried, as part of a module called Digital Curation: Core Concepts on my master’s program at the University College Dublin, it was suggested that Brunnhilde also be installed. This was not a requirement of the module, but rather a recommendation to those interested, as Brunnhilde is complimentary to Siegfried and produces a number of useful outputs. With that, there was also a forewarning that it can be difficult to install and use at first. As I enjoyed experimenting with Siegfried, I decided to go ahead and install Brunnhilde, explore its uses and document the experience.

This blog post is in some ways a follow up to my 2018 post "A valediction for validation?". It was prompted by a tweet from Micky Lindlar that got me thinking about this stuff again...

"Controversial statement of the day: the longer I work in digital presevation, the more pointless i find file format validation." It was a tweet that ellicited a significant number of replies that agreed with Micky's sentiment, suggesting perhaps a growing disenchantment with validation and thus my corresponding and continued interest in an alternative.

...and shortly after that a fascinating and information-dense presentation from Tim Allison and colleagues for an OPF webinar. As well as a brilliant follow up conversation on twitter prompted by questions from Tyler Thorsted to Tim. 

Fabi Barticioti is a Digital Asset Manager at LSE Library. She recently attended the NEDCC Digital Directions Conference 2022 with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I recently received a Career Development Fund grant from the DPC to attend the NEDCC 2022 Digital Directions conference, which was delivered entirely virtually. My initial interest in attending this conference was to expand my professional network, as I believed many of the attendees would likely be from organisations in the US. I was right about that; apart from me (based in London), another (in Edinburgh), and a handful of others scattered around the globe, most were from organizations based in the US.

Paul Wilson is a retired IT consultant who worked for 28 years for the global Systems House Computer Sciences Corporation; and prior to that for the UK National Computing Centre.

In April 2016, I created a set of document templates to support the digital preservation of my personal document collection, and it was published for general use in the DPC website. Since then, the document set has been tested through a complete lifecycle of subsequent maintenance exercises. The learnings from those experiences have been incorporated into a final set of templates which are again provided for free and general use in the DPC web site.  To give you an idea of what sort of collections the templates might apply to, and what sort of digital challenges they might help to address, the background to their development is summarised below.

Paul Stokes is Product Manager for Jisc

Losing your data may well cost you a LOT more that you thought. How much more? That's a difficult question to answer, but one that Jisc and the Digital Preservation Coalition are looking to answer…