Blog

Hannah Merwood is a Research Assistant in the Digital Archiving department at The National Archives.

Last year Sonia Ranade and Alec Mulinder wrote a blog introducing the work we are doing at The National Archives to create a new method to manage digital preservation risk. In January, our lottery funded research project “Safeguarding the Nation’s Digital Memory'' was launched - a collaborative project with statisticians at the University of Warwick and other UK archive partners to develop a risk management decision-support tool based on data and evidence.  

Adam Harwood is a Research Data & Digital Preservation Technologist at the University of Sussex. 

The University of Sussex Library Special Collections is taking a whole new approach to digital preservation this year and will embrace the do it yourself for no money philosophy. The goal is to use a suite of open source tools and existing infrastructure at the University to create a digital archive.

I’ve been testing out a few different open source tools recently and putting together a workflow to process Special Collections' digital archives. I’ve been meaning to test out Bagger to create AIPs for a while now and last week I spent a morning giving it a test run. I know I find it very helpful reading about how other practitioners have been using digital preservation tools and so I wanted to share my experience of testing Bagger. It was a relatively painless experience…

DPC staff have been involved in very many events and webinars over the years, responding directly to members’ needs and filling the gaps where other advice and support was lacking. The ‘Greatest Hits Collection’ will play that back over the coming months while colleagues and members are working from home and perhaps not able to access other development opportunities. And of course, we’re always open to proposals from members who want to put together their own digital preservation themed mixtape.

The Build-Up

As I’ve already shared on this blog, on Twitter, by email, to anyone willing to listen…. DPC colleagues and I have been super busy the last few months working on a new online training endeavour, funded by The National Archives (UK), Novice to Know-How (N2N). The project officially finished on 31^st March and we went straight into a soft launch to help iron out any wrinkles. But the question then remained, how do we create a fanfare about the official launch in these extraordinary times?

Eleanor Dumbill is the Library Support Officer (Research Repository) at the University of Loughborough.

Shortly after joining the repository team at Loughborough, I was presented with a mysterious cardboard box. My colleagues were only able to tell me that the contents were generally related to past doctoral theses and that the box had been sitting under a desk in the office for at least ten years. I’ve been able to use some of my experiences investigating this box in training as an illustration of preservation formats and data management. 

Emma Hancox, Digital Archivist at the University of Bristol, explains how we went about developing a new preservation policy for her institution, alongside the development of the Digital Preservation Policy Toolkit.

Our three-day digital preservation policy ‘Book Sprint' grew out of the University of Bristol’s need to create a digital preservation policy to support the preservation of digital collections in Special Collections and the Theatre Collection, and the Digital Preservation Coalition’s awareness that its members would benefit from support with writing their own policies. The DPC Team, a group of invited domain specialists from other DPC members and University of Bristol stakeholders assembled in Bristol to draft the policy’. The plan was that by the end of the process Bristol would have its policy and the DPC would have a Toolkit for other organizations to use in developing their preservation policies.

Helen Fisher is the University Archivist at the University of Birmingham.

We were asked to write a blog post this time last year but we postponed it because we didn’t really know what to say about our digital preservation journey at that stage. Our turn has come round again, and we can’t put it off any longer, so here goes!

Since 2017 colleagues from different divisions of Library Services at the University of Birmingham have been working together to try to deal with our digital preservation challenges. I’m the University Archivist and am based in the Cadbury Research Library which manages the University’s rare books and archives. I had been concerned for some time about the growing gaps in the University Archives, with digital copies of committee minutes and other record series not being transferred to us, and about the amount of born-digital material scattered across our collections on USB sticks and floppy disks of various sizes

DPC staff have been involved in very many events and webinars over the years, responding directly to members’ needs and filling the gaps where other advice and support was lacking. The ‘Greatest Hits Collection’ will play that back over the coming months while colleagues and members are working from home and perhaps not able to access other development opportunities. And of course, we’re always open to proposals from members who want to put together their own digital preservation themed mixtape.

Ivan Dimitrovski is a Digital Archives Assistant at UNIRMCT. He attended AV Winter School 2020 with support from the DPC's Career Development Fund which is funded by DPC Supporters.

The 2020 Winter School for Audiovisual Archiving, the fifth edition of this unique annual training where participants are taught to design and implement a preservation plan for their audiovisual collections, took place at the Sound and Vision Institute in Hilversum, The Netherlands. This year, I was fortunate enough to be granted a full scholarship by the Digital Preservation Coalition, enabling me to attend this prestigious training.

A Note from the Editor, Sara Day Thomson

As the coordinator of the DPC’s Web Archiving & Preservation Working Group, it has been my absolute pleasure to work with some of the most enthusiastic, creative, and persevering professionals in the field. The community of archivists, curators, librarians, researchers, and enthusiasts who do the work of capturing and preserving web resources has always displayed a collaborative spirit and a willingness to try new approaches and learn from each other.

The coronavirus pandemic has truly and profoundly put that spirit to the test, and the web archiving community has not disappointed.