Blog

Laura Isabel Sastoque Pabon is Digital Preservation Training Officer at the University of Southampton

In celebration of World Digital Preservation Day 2024, Digital Preservation Southampton presents an interactive lesson on file integrity checking, designed for educators and trainers to implement in their own classroom or workshop settings. This engaging activity invites participants to take on the role of digital detectives, where they will identify and restore corrupted files.

Gali Halevi is Collection Development Director at CLOCKSS

In the field of archiving and preservation, the concept of "biblio-equity" is essential for ensuring that collections reflect the rich diversity of global scholarship and communities. Biblio-equity embodies principles of fairness, justice, and equal access to preserved resources, while preservation efforts focus on safeguarding materials that represent a wide range of languages, cultures, and backgrounds.

To develop archiving strategies that elevate historically marginalized voices and scholarship, it is crucial to recognize the long-standing inequities within archival collections. Communities such as Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), LGBTQIA+, disabled, and neurologically diverse individuals have often been systematically excluded, resulting in their contributions being underrepresented in archival records. Moreover, there has traditionally been a focus on preserving materials from developed nations, often overlooking significant contributions from diverse and developing non-English-speaking regions.

Ellie Burnage works for publisher Exact Editions based in the UK

“Membership is a relationship. People give their money, but also their time, ideas, expertise and connections to support a cause that they believe in […] It’s a two-way relationship.”
Ariel Zirulnick, Fund Director of Membership Puzzle Project (Press Gazette, 2021)

In recent years, many specialist interest magazine publishers (and media organisations as a whole) have transitioned into membership models as a way to create engaged communities of readers with shared passions, hobbies and interests. This means that in addition to regular subscriptions, publishers are also offering their communities access to myriad other benefits under a membership umbrella, such as discounts, events, discussion forums and digital access to archives.

Tom Wilson is Digital Preservation Archivist at the British Film Institute National Archive

So, let’s address the first elephant in the room. I’m aware that a SIP is a Submission Information Package, i.e., an input into a system. I’m also aware that “sipping from” implies taking something out, but the pun was too good to pass on!  

The second elephant in the room (at least, in the rooms I frequent at work), is the one regarding the “new” digital preservation practices that we are implementing for Our Screen Heritage, the new, major, national lottery-funded project at the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive. The digital preservation team at the Archive have heard our colleagues talking about us implementing new and groundbreaking ideas and practices for digital preservation of born-digital documents. Whilst this may well be true within the context of BFI, we cannot make any such claim outside of the BFI. Happily, the community theme of World Digital Preservation Day gives us an ideal opportunity to acknowledge and thank the digital preservation community for their generously shared knowledge and experience.  

Fran Horner is an Archivist at the University of Sheffield.

This World Digital Preservation Day, I would like to highlight and celebrate the digital preservation communities I am part of and find extremely valuable.

I am an Archivist at the University of Sheffield Library Special Collections, Heritage and Archives and digital preservation falls under my remit. The university is part of the White Rose Libraries (WRL) partnership which was established in 2004 and brings together the university libraries of Sheffield, Leeds and York in the UK to collaborate in various different ways.

Isobel Reed is SCRAN Digital Archive Officer for HES (Historic Environment Scotland) 

What is SCRAN?

The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network, or SCRAN, first went online on 25^th July 1997. It contains over 460,000 digital resources including images, audio-visual material, text documents, and even 3D scans. These resources are drawn together from collections held by museums, galleries, archives, the media, community projects, and individuals who represent Scotland’s shared culture and heritage.

During its first five years, SCRAN provided multiple grants that allowed cultural organisations to digitise parts of their collections to be made available for educational purposes, and it was one of the largest educational online services in the UK. It was used by thousands of schools, libraries, colleges, and universities as an educational resource, and allowed educators to create and share material such as lesson plans and presentations (here’s one fun example – ‘Nursery Rhymes Collection’).

Paul Stokes is Jisc - Subject Matter Expert (Digital Preservation), Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition; Chair of the DPC Advocacy and community engagement committee; Director of the Open Preservation Foundation; Director of OPF NL.

Keep reading .....

Gareth Cole is Open Research Development and Discovery Lead at Loughborough University

Last year, my colleague, Dr Miranda Barnes, wrote about the work we’ve been conducting as part of the Open Book Futures Project. This blog post aims to update on that work and highlight where we’ve made advances and to reinforce how it could not have been achieved without a community effort within, and outside, the team. As Miranda highlighted, Community is key to the project and, in fact, is the heartbeat of the project.

Our work package is looking at the archiving and preservation of open access books. As with all projects we have regular meetings! The broad community the project has brought together with experts and specialists across a number of organisations and disciplines means that we are able to consider a variety of perspectives when conducting our work. Work Package participants include colleagues from Jisc, the British Library, the DPC itself, metadata specialists, publishers, IT developers, researchers, and university open research librarians. This community reflects the wider project which actually has two PIs, one an academic and one a University Librarian.

Hervé L’Hours, Repository & Preservation, UK Data Service, UK Data Archive, University of Essex, in collaboration with the CoreTrustSeal Standards & Certification Board.

 This post is a collaboration between the UK Data Service^[1] and the CoreTrustSeal^[2] for World Digital Preservation Day^[3].

In 2024, a CoreTrustSeal board position paper defined a set of curation and preservation levels^[4] that organisations can use to document how they care for digital objects. The levels range from simple storage of objects that are distributed as they were deposited, to the long-term responsibility for reuse of the data and metadata, including making changes based on the needs of the repository’s user community. The levels help define whether a repository provides active long term preservation, necessary to be in scope for CoreTrustSeal certification. However, the levels have wider relevance to defining a range of data and metadata services and responsibilities.

Amy Baker is Digital Preservation Assistant at Historic England

This year World Digital Preservation Day coincides with another major project for Historic England: the release of the Heritage at Risk Register for 2024, coming late November. As a result, it has been a busy time for the digital preservation team here at Historic England, and so felt like a perfect time to not only celebrate #WDPD2024 but also bring attention to the importance of digital preservation within projects like Heritage at Risk.

Each year Historic England releases a Heritage at Risk Register. This is where vulnerable listed heritage sites are assembled into one register to draw attention to the most at need for safeguarding for the future. By communicating the condition of built heritage, it aims to connect communities to their local heritage to encourage positive development. The 2023 figures state that while there were 159 additions to the At Risk Register, there were also 203 removal for positive reasons. For more information on the Register please visit here.