Blog

Mandy Swingle and Kellie Ashley are Curators at the University of Queensland

In 2017, The University of Queensland Library unveiled an online exhibition about Professor Dorothy Hill (1907-1997), Australia’s first female professor. This exhibition is the result of an 18 month project that showcases the extensive collection of papers she donated to the Library and celebrates the scientific contribution of one of Australia’s leading academics. The exhibition features digitised content curated from the ninety boxes of her collection. Today, on World Digital Preservation Day, we are excited to share our story of how we aim to digitally preserve this wonderful collection.

Back in February of this year I wrote a post for this blog describing work the DPC was embarking on to formalise our commitment to supporting inclusion and diversity in the digital preservation community. Then followed a lot of reading and research, discussions with people across the community, and numerous drafts and reviews of the document.

But, I am happy to report our Inclusion and Diversity Policy was published in June and launched at our yearly member’s unconference ‘Connecting the Bits’. There are a number of reasons why this is a topic that is important to me and I was honoured to have a chance to work on the policy. I must admit that it is perhaps the piece of work I am most proud of in my career to date.

Joanna Fleming is Digital Curation Specialist for State Library of New South Wales

The State Library of New South Wales (the Library) is the oldest library in Australia, with a history dating back to 1826 and a collection of historical, cultural and informational significance documenting the heritage of Australia, New South Wales and Oceania.

The Library has a long history of collecting born-digital material and collection digitisation. However, systems, delivery, infrastructure, policy and practise required improvement to keep up with the demands of digital collecting and the expectations of readers. The Library also needed to be able to ensure the ongoing sustainability of digital collections. 

José Borbinha is Professor of Information Systems at IST / INESC-ID in Lisbon, Portugal

I am an engineer… as that, I’m “cursed” with the fundamental (lack of?) knowledge to understand the root causes of the digital preservation challenge… But let us not talk about that today! The crime was committed a long time ago, and the criminals have escaped for good… We have no option than to address it the best we can…

OK, so let us do all the necessary engineering for that! Let us move on!!! Let us analyse the problem, conceive the corresponding technological solutions, and… just do it! Correct? NO! WRONG!

It is wrong because even if it is true we need “engineering” to address the problem (good for me and my friends… we still have work… ;-), we also know it is not enough… Let us then restart…

My preferred definition for digital preservation is “communication with the future”. This was the slogan of the SHAMAN project (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/85468_en.html), but I’m sure we took it from someone else… unfortunately I could not trace it to its due source… my apologies!

Rachel Tropea is Senior Reseach Archivist and Jaye Weatherburn is Digital Preservation Officer at the University of Melbourne

Australasia Preserves is an active digital preservation community of practice for the Australasian region, established in February 2018 (http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/digital-preservation-project/2018/03/06/australasia-preserves-establishing-a-digital-preservation-community-of-practice/). This community aims to nurture a community of learners, teachers, researchers, managers, and practitioners from a variety of professional and personal backgrounds and skill levels.  

A team from the University of Melbourne has committed time and resources during 2018 for organising online monthly meetups, featuring a variety of speakers and topics. The Twitter hashtag #AusPreserves is used to share information with the broader international digital preservation community.  

Ashley Blewer is AV Preservation Specialist for Artefactual Systems

NTTW3 Group picture - Photo credit E. Verbruggen CC-BY

Glynn Edwards, Josh Schneider and Peter Chan are part of the team at Stanford University Libraries

Email offers singular insight into and evidence of a person's self-expression, as well as records of collaboration, networks, and transactions. Email communications of prominent individuals, including politicians, writers, scholars, and the like, reveal not only their professional and personal actions, decisions, and creative output, but also relationships within society and communities. Thus, the appeal of email collections extends beyond historians to all manner of researchers, journalists, and the general public seeking to obtain insight into individuals and their lives.

Jessica Meyerson is Research Program Officer for Educopia Institute and coordinating member of the Software Preservation Network

Introduction

As the Software Preservation Network (SPN) makes its first attempt to transition from a grant-funded effort to a member and sponsor-supported community, we do so with an awareness that initiating a new collaborative effort looks very different, in terms of required skills and resources, from sustaining an existing collaborative effort. We are lucky to be informed by Educopia Institute’s Community Cultivation - A Field Guide (CCFG), which provides a comprehensive description of community growth both in terms of lifecycle stages (Formation, Validation, Acceleration, Transformation) and growth areas (Vision, Engagement, Infrastructure, Governance, and Finances & Human Resources).

I want to take this opportunity to map a subset of SPN’s activities using the CCFG with the goal of demonstrating SPN’s commitment to responsible development and to provide an example of how other digital preservation communities can use the field guide as a tool for assessment and development.

Carl Grant is Dean (Interim) for the University of Oklahoma Libraries

In July 2018, astronomers announced that they had located a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, our home galaxy. (Black holes are gravitational fields that have such intensity that when things enter, they disappear without a trace.)  Which reminded me of a concern I’ve been voicing about digital preservation for the last several years, i.e., the fact that we have no apparent organized strategy for preserving cloud-based services.

David Fricker is the Director-General National Archives of Australia and President of the International Council on Archives

For some time, UNESCO has recognised the transformative power of digital media as a creative engine of cultural heritage, and as a carrier through which culture is transmitted across populations and through time to future generations. Of particular concern, however, is the fragile nature of digital heritage and the risk that, as technology advances, so much of our digital heritage is lost through neglect or technological obsolescence. Back in 2003, in article 12 of its visionary Charter for the Preservation of the Digital Heritage, UNESCO defined its task ‘to serve as a reference point and a forum where Member States, intergovernmental and international non-governmental organizations, civil society and the private sector may join together in elaborating objectives, policies and projects in favour of the preservation of the digital heritage’.  More recently, in 2015, UNESCO adopted its Recommendation Concerning the Preservation and Access to Documentary Heritage, including in Digital Form, which calls upon member states to establish cooperation and dialogue between governments, social organisations, and the ICT industry, and to create practical solutions in the area of sustainable digital preservation.