Blog

Emily Chen is Digital Archivist at the Parliamentary Archives. 

I actually started in the middle of the pandemic so I can’t tell you what business as usual looks like at the Parliamentary Archives (I’ve been told that biscuits figure hugely in it though). I am part of the Digital Preservation Team here, and so whilst some of my colleagues have begun returning to the office, I have only managed to be on site a grand total of two times since I started. To me working from home IS the norm. The joy and curse of being a digital archivist!

Whilst many things had to be put on hold in the middle of the pandemic, much of our work continued and was indeed able to expand. Primarily, in the areas of ingesting born-digital records into our digital repository and our archiving of the Parliamentary web estate.

A major focus of our ingest was on the roughly quarter of a million records pulled from our decommissioned ERMS (SPIRE), which reached end of life in 2019. Since then we had established a mature workflow that streamlined and automated a great deal of the cataloguing of these records. This meant that even with no prior digital preservation experience, it only took a bit of training for our cross-office colleagues to get to ingesting on their own. They were able to give us their invaluable help and support in steaming ahead with the ingest and over the period of April 2020 to March 2021 we ingested nearly 2/3rds of all the folders exported to date. This was around 13,000 individual folders (each corresponding roughly to one child workflow).

Beth Astridge (Project Archivist, UKPA) and Clair Waller (Digital Archivist), University of Kent Special Collections and Archives.

This is the first in a series of three blog posts from the University of Kent Special Collections & Archives team. In this series, we will be describing some of our ongoing work to implement robust workflow and processes for the acquisition and management of born digital records, driven by our work to establish the UK Philanthropy Archive at Kent. 

In this blog we introduce the UK Philanthropy Archive collection and our thinking relating to the processes involved with the acquisition and transfer of digital records.  

What is the UK Philanthropy Archive? 

The UK Philanthropy Archive is a growing archive collection within the University of Kent Special Collections & Archives department. The archive was established in 2019 with a vision to develop an eminent research resource reflecting the breadth of UK philanthropy.  

The UK Philanthropy Archive identifies, collects and preserves the archives and papers of UK philanthropists, philanthropic trusts and foundations, philanthropic networks, and other material related to philanthropy, grant making and fundraising. These archives and papers form a research collection that represents the history, experiences and perspectives of philanthropists, trusts and foundations and the impact of grant giving and philanthropy on UK society.  

The material in the UK Philanthropy Archive reflects the standard range of formats found across many modern archive collections – including paper records, photographic and audio-visual material, objects, and digital records. The collections that we are processing are usually hybrid collections containing a mix of paper and born digital records, and sometimes entirely born digital collections. Many of the archives reflect the operational aspects of grant giving organisations or projects – similar to a business archive collection. Some also include additional personal or contextual material relating to the individual founder, philanthropist or group that established the trust/foundation.   

Tom Ruane is a Preservation Audio Engineer at The British Library. He recently completed the DSM6010 Digital Preservation course at Aberystwyth University with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters

The British Library is home to the UK’s Sound Archive, which holds over 6.5 million at-risk sound recordings, held on formats from the dawn of sound recording technology, all the way through to contemporary digital carriers.  In my role as a Preservation Audio Engineer, I’m part of a dedicated team working to preserve these recordings and ensure ongoing access for the nation.

During the first lockdown in 2020, I applied for the DPC Career Development Fund and was kindly awarded a scholarship to study DSM6010: Digital Preservation, a six-month, postgraduate course at Aberystwyth University.  I completed the course at the end of February 2021 and found its content to be hugely beneficial, giving me a solid grounding in the principles of digital preservation and a much broader, holistic view of data curation.

One point that struck me during my studies, was that the development of digital preservation as an organised discipline, parallels that of audio preservation in many ways, a field that I have spent the majority of my career in.  In retrospect, this isn’t really that surprising as digital preservation is principally format agnostic, and that any information preservation dependent on technology, faces the same risks - losing the ability to access the information and interpret it correctly.  

So in this post, I thought it might be of interest to DPC members to provide an overview of how we, in the Technical Department of The British Library Sound Archive, currently manage the data we create and prepare it for ingest into the Library’s centrally managed digital repository for long-term preservation; a process that has taken several years to develop and continues to be iterated upon.  

Laura Giles is Digital Archivist at the University of Hull.

It’s been a long time since we at the University of Hull have contributed to the DPC blog so we are just checking in to say “Hi” to the community and that we’re still here! We are still working on processing the digital archives that form the Hull UK 2017 City of Culture collection and developing a set of workflows to try and ensure that records are processed efficiently, preserved and eventually accessed in as straightforward a manner as possible for researchers.

Clare Paterson is Senior Archivist (Business & Digital) at the University of Glasgow. 

The digital preservation challenges we face at Glasgow will be familiar across the DPC community: increasing volumes of digital data which do not fit the well-honed record-keeping procedures of our long-familiar paper-based systems; expectations of quick, if not immediate, availability of digital information to support our work, research, and learning; and the ever-shifting landscape of technology to name just a few.  

Since 2015, teams across the University have been collaborating through our Digital Preservation Working Group (DPWG) and building the case for capacity, resource, and expertise.  This collaborative approach benefits us greatly.  Through our DPWG we bring together colleagues from the Digital Library Team, IT Services, Research Information Management (RIM), Data Protection and Freedom of Information Office (DP&FoI), Archives & Special Collections (ASC) and the Digital Curation Centre to share expertise, discuss challenges, and work together on our shared priorities.  Beyond the University, we are always eager to engage with the digital preservation, archival, and open research communities to learn from others experiences and expertise.  

Whilst aware of the scale of the digital preservation challenges we face; we are making progress, both as a working group and as individual teams working in our own areas.  These are some of our highlights:

Following on from our excellent Digital Preservation Futures Webinar Series with DPC Supporters Arkivum, Artefactual, AVP, LIBNOVA and Preservica… there were some questions we just didn’t have time to ask! In this blog post, our Supporters provide answers to those questions:

Thandokazi Maceba is the Data Curator at Digital Library Services, University of Cape Town. She attended IDCC 2021 and the RDA 17^th Virtual Plenary with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

In August 2020 I joined the University of Cape Town (UCT) as a Data Curator at the Digital Library Services department in the Libraries. In this role, my responsibilities center around supporting and enhancing digital scholarship and digital preservation activities at UCT. I collaborate across departments in the Libraries, and with the eResearch Centre to develop and maintain workflows and tools that facilitate faculty and staff use of various digital data publishing and preservation platforms.

UCT Libraries joined the DPC in October 2020, and our affiliation has already afforded me the opportunity to participate in a number of online courses and events, including the IDCC 21, RDA VP17 and the IDCC/RDA Unconference (19-22 April 2021), enabled through the DPC Career Development Fund. Without this Fund, I would not have been able to attend these conference proceedings and I would like to express my gratitude to the DPC for providing me with this valuable learning opportunity. In this blog, I will share some of the things I have learned from the conferences.

The theme for IDCC21 was: ‘Data quality and data limitations: working towards equality through data curation.’ The theme for the RDA VP17 was ‘Opening Data for Global Changes.’ Attending these conferences was of paramount importance for me, as I have not yet had many opportunities for skills development in the data curation and digital preservation field. I wanted to develop my knowledge about data curation, open science and digital preservation.

Sally McInnes is Chair of the ARCW Digital Preservation Group and Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales.

The ability to remotely connect and network with colleagues has been one of the positives that have arisen from these challenging times. From my home in Aberystwyth, which is not always the most accessible of places by non-digital highways, I am able to engage with experts, learn from their experiences and contribute to discussions on a global basis. Although we have been building digital preservation capacity in Wales for many years, these encounters have inspired us to extend the reach of the work being undertaken to promote digital sustainability. Working with the sector, developing the use of digital technologies and sharing skills are key elements of the National Library of Wales’s (NLW) new strategic plan ‘A Library for Wales and the World, 2021-26’, which will be launched shortly.

Iram Safdar is the Digital Archivist at Historic Environment Scotland. She attended IDCC 2021 and the RDA 17^th Virtual Plenary with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters

Thank you to the Digital Preservation Coalition Career Development Fund, without which I would not have been able to attend the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC21). This year, the IDCC took place virtually, over one day and was a co-located event with the RDA 17^th Virtual Plenary, as part of an Edinburgh week of data management. This is the first time I have been able to attend the IDCC, and coming from a background in the archives profession, specialising in digital archives, I was looking forward to learning more about the ways we can manage and curate our digital data, and make it accessible.

The opening keynote, titled ‘Indigenous Sovereignty of Language Data – the Māori example’, was delivered by Te Taka Keegan, Associate Professor in Computing, and Associate Dean Mãori for the Division of Health, Engineering, Computing & Science at the University of Waikato. A Māori language activist, Te Taka started the keynote with a greeting in his language, roughly translating to ‘Honor and glory above, peace on Earth, goodwill to everyone’.

Te Taka noted that there is a significant community undertaking research based on open data and utilising big data to generate resources and initiatives, however, Te Taka identified a few issues with this in terms of Indigenous data. Te Taka observed the increase in collections using Indigenous data, that Indigenous communities themselves are not aware of. Furthermore, collections are generally not own by Indigenous Peoples, and they don’t have a say on how they are run, what information is stored – the crux of the issue being, Indigenous information is being made available that Indigenous Peoples have no control over.

Natasha Kitcher, Doctoral Researcher in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. She is Research Assistant for the AURA Project, working with Dr Lise Jaillant at Loughborough.

Last September, Dr Annalina Caputo, Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Dublin City University, shared with the DPC community news of the AURA Network (https://www.dpconline.org/blog/aura-unlocking-cultural-assets). This AHRC-IRC research networking project brings together an interdisciplinary group of stakeholders from Digital Humanists to Computer Scientists to consider the past, present, and future of born-digital archives.

Now, almost eight months later, we are able to share some of the findings of the network with you.

Much like the born-digital archives it considers, this network was born-digitally thanks to coronavirus, which has facilitated discussions between a far-flung group of researchers and professionals in Libraries, Archives and Museums. While the group formed to consider access and usability of born-digital archives, the virtual nature of workshop attendance over the last few months has enabled scholars, archivists, librarians and other stakeholders from across the globe and at varying stages of their careers to engage in AURA’s debates.