Jack O’Grady, Collections and Digital Access Specialist at Hamilton Public Library
Introduction
As the Collections and Digital Access Specialist, I was brought on to support the Hamilton Public Library (HPL) Local History & Archives (LHA) department with introducing a new digital preservation system for their extensive collection of digitized and born-digital records. Prior to 2024, LHA had maintained a growing collection of mostly digitized photographic material in the Canto Cumulus digital asset management system, as well as local network drive storage allotted by the HPL Digital Technology (DT) department. The loss of vendor support for Canto Cumulus and a cyberattack in 2024 led to the local network drive and Microsoft SharePoint becoming the main storage locations for LHA’s digitized material. The local network drive is backed up to offline tape storage at regular intervals, and the Microsoft SharePoint material is enmeshed in the wider Azure cloud ecosystem. This was the infrastructure set-up I began working with when starting this project, and it was understood to be temporary, put together in the wake of a cyberattack and intended to be replaced by the new digital preservation system I would be configuring alongside our chosen vendor, Preservica. Some material is also available through Flickr, the Internet Archive Canada, and other specialized databases.
Why we got involved in testing the DPC’s Carbon Footprint Toolkit
On a personal level, I had previous experience attempting to implement carbon footprint calculation practices while a student intern with the University of Toronto Libraries IT Services department. That project saw some success but was limited in scope and my own ability to commit time as a part-time student worker. With LHA, there was mutual interest among staff in deepening our understanding of the archive’s digital carbon footprint. Environmental sustainability is a stated commitment of the HPL system, ingrained in library policy, and was included in the LHA department’s Digital Preservation Strategy, which is working through the process of becoming library policy.
Working with the Carbon Footprint Toolkit was also a unique opportunity for LHA because of our position as a team implementing digital preservation for the first time. We understood how this positioned us to provide a helpful perspective for other institutions. The Toolkit would also encourage us to consider the technical infrastructure more carefully, which we believed would benefit the entire project and help the team make more sustainable decisions and be better stewards of all our resources (financial, computational, and environmental).
What we chose to focus on
The initial plan for testing the carbon footprint toolkit was to calculate LHA’s current footprint and compare it to the projected footprint for the new digital preservation system. We moved away from this focus as it proved more difficult than anticipated to secure data for the current system while in the middle of radically transforming it. As our infrastructure was in flux, the focus instead turned to how we could use this as an opportunity to build in interoperability with the carbon calculation footprint toolkit into our system. The goal became to think of, and proactively build tools, for capturing carbon footprint calculation data from the system, so that future teams would be able to use the carbon footprint spreadsheet tool more regularly and with more ease.
What we achieved
While initial efforts to map our current infrastructure were stalled by the system changing under our feet, as well as the people I needed to contact simply being too busy handling other projects, the pivot to the future system was much more effective. This work began by mapping the upstream and downstream activities which would impact the new digital preservation system’s carbon footprint, taking advantage of the already ongoing work to define those future workflows. From here, I identified points in those workflows where carbon footprint data which aligned with the toolkit could be extracted, before designing tools which would facilitate capturing it without over-burdening the team. What this has led to is a growing suite of data collection tools that, with some additional context, can feed data directly into the toolkit for easier calculation with the new system. These include:
- Modifications to the standard DPC Digital Asset Register template (https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/implement-digipres/dar-toolkit) to describe what machine data is stored on and log computational actions taken against it (i.e. checksums, etc.).
- Logs to record critical networking actions, specifically the digitization and uploading of new material, the movement of material from one storage location to another, and the creation of access copies/downloading of material for use by researchers.
The goal of these tools is to make collecting carbon footprint calculation data a part of the team’s workflows with the new system. Learning from the struggle to find data for the system being phased out, we were inspired to make this work easier for future teams. As a part of the manual for the new system, instructions for filling out, maintaining, and using these tools as a part of regular system governance are being drafted.
Lessons learned
This exercise showed for LHA how important creating open lines of communication and transparent systems are for this work. Without those in place, understanding the carbon footprint was too big of a task, there were too many moving parts and no birds-eye view. We were able to take advantage of being at the beginning of the process, so we moved to build in that birds-eye view and include carbon footprint governance into the system. Doing that work helped us have other helpful conversations because it required us to think critically about our infrastructure, so it’s useful for any team new to digital preservation.
Next steps
- Continue working with Preservica and internal IT team to acquire data centre information needed to contextualize carbon footprint data and make calculations.
- Work with internal web team to gain access to visitor and usage data for LHA’s web-based access points.
- Finish manual for the new digital preservation system, finalizing procedures for regularly capturing carbon footprint data in the archive’s day-to-day workflows.
- Include carbon footprint calculation in next annual benchmarking and digital preservation maturity review.