Blog

Jenny Mitcham is Head of Good Practice and Standards at the Digital Preservation Coalition

Last month the DPC hosted a series of ‘Digital Preservation Futures’ events designed to showcase the work of our Supporter organizations. The event that kicked off this series was a panel discussion entitled “So I’ve finally procured a digital preservation system, now what?”. The session began with a representative from each Supporter organization giving a short lightning talk in answer to the question posed in the title, and this was followed by a lively discussion and Q&A with the audience. It worked well to benefit from the expertise of all of our Supporters together and in many cases to hear them effectively ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ and repeating and developing on the points that others had made. With representatives from Arkivum, Artefactual, AVP, boxxe, Libnova, Preservica, and consultant Simon Wilson, this really did feel like ‘a concerted effort’. Pulling together the key learnings from the session into a blog post for World Digital Preservation Day seemed an obvious next step. 

William Kilbride is Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition

Digits are born vulnerable.

Every single byte of data depends on a global infrastructure of technology, process and people for its meaning and purpose to be realized. Much data serves the moment: it is quickly forgotten in a continuous flow of process and interaction. Other data serve lengthier purposes, as evidence and outputs of transactions that have significant impacts and long duration, longer than the infrastructure and the institutions through which the data was created. Everything in the latter category falls into the scope of digital preservation—the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary, beyond the limits of media degradation, technical obsolescence, and organizational change.

The Bit List is not a paper exercise. It was originally conceived as a call to action based on the insight and authentic voice of the global digital preservation community, and it remains so.

Ellie Burnage works for Exact Editions based in the UK

“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it!” Halford E. Luccock 🎼

November has crept around again, and with it World Digital Preservation Day 2023 on Thursday 2nd November. Organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition, this annual celebration invites all data creators, archivists and curators to celebrate the benefits and opportunities enabled by the hard work of digital preservation community. 

The theme of this year’s celebration is ‘Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort’ — and a particular project Exact Editions took on during the last year encapsulates the collaborative work that digitising a magazine archive entails. Haymarket documented over 120 years of automotive history when they extended the archive of Autocar, the world’s oldest car publication, back to the first issue ever published in 1895. 

This blogpost has been written by St George’s, University of London (SGUL) Records Manager Kirsten Hylan, Research Data Support Manager Sarah Stewart, and Archivist Juulia Ahvensalmi.

‘Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort’ is the theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, celebrating how, by working with colleagues at our university and beyond, digital preservation allows us to both share and gain knowledge, which in turn supports our efforts at digitally preserving our digital records. 

Jon Tilbury is Chief Innovation Officer at Preservica

In the evolving realm of Digital Preservation, success hinges on collaboration. However, the dynamics of working together, exchanging knowledge and providing mutual support have seen significant transformations over the last few decades.

Since the late 20th century when Digital Preservation emerged as a distinct field, those engaged in it have recognized the importance of tackling its challenges through collaboration within a broader community. However, over that time the nature of those involved and the way information is exchanged around the community have fundamentally changed, and there are multiple communities with different problems and priorities. How do they support each other as Digital Preservation expands and evolves?

This blog post has been written by Francesca Mackenzie, Digital Archivist specialising in file formats for the The National Archives (UK) and Jonathan Isip, Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies (UPSLIS).

From our own experience starting out in the field of Digital Preservation, and conversations with each other on the subject we had found a recurring theme that the technical jargon can be off putting and often create a sense that the job is more complex than it is. Often glossaries can be quite daunting, so the goal of Digital Preservation for 5 Year Olds was to lower some of the language barriers of entry that maybe didn’t need to really be there in the first place.

Dr Miranda Barnes is Research Associate in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Books at Loughborough University

The Open Book Futures project, which began in May 2023 as an acceleration and advancement of the COPIM Project (11/2019-04/2023), continues to focus on the open access monograph, with an emphasis on Scaling Small. This principle “eschews standard approaches to organisational growth that tend to flatten community diversity through economies of scale” (Adema & Moore, 2021). Work Packages in both projects focus more broadly on infrastructure, governance, accessibility, financial models and revenue, metadata and dissemination, and experimental publishing, but also archiving and preservation. It is the combined approach and multifaceted, collaborative interaction of the work packages that leads to our best insights and outputs.

Somaya Langley is Digital Preservation Manager at the Science Museum Group

If you’d asked me two decades ago what managing and preserving the memory sector’s digital and audiovisual collections would look like today, the picture I’d have painted would’ve been one where the metaphorical sky contained far more radiant shades.

Katherine Mitchell is an AHRC-funded PhD Researcher, Design and Digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

For the last couple of years, I’ve been an embedded PhD researcher in the Design and Digital curatorial section at the V&A Museum, London. During my time there, I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside colleagues across different departments, both when conducting my PhD research and working on additional projects. So in response to this year’s WDPD theme of concerted efforts, I want to celebrate the value of researcher-institution collaborations, and the power of working at intersections. Because as an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Researcher, collaboration is quite literally in the name. And as someone working on digital collections care, I continually operate at intersections: between the museum and academia; between curatorial and preservation concerns; and between theory and practice.

Jake Bickford is a Web Archivist at The National Archives (UK)

Several members of the UK Government Web Archive team were fortunate to attend iPres 2022 in Glasgow, and we were all struck by the emphasis on the climate crisis and our community’s urgent need to address it. A particular highlight for me was James Baker, Rachel MacGregor and Anna McNally's workshop The Climate Crisis and New Paradigms for Digital Access, which challenged participants to identify concrete changes we could make to reduce the environmental harm caused by our work. This theme ran throughout the conference and several of the other interventions are summarised in Matthew Addis’s excellent blog post. We returned home determined not to leave these ideas behind as we resumed our normal routine.