Amanda Oliver, Wilfrid Laurier University & Julie Shi, Scholars Portal
Introduction
Laurier Archives and Special Collections, located in Waterloo, Canada, is on the shared traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples. The archives collects material with an emphasis is on Wilfrid Laurier University, the environmental conservation movement in Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and its Eastern Synod, music in Kitchener-Waterloo, and the history of Waterloo Region in analogue and digital formats.
Scholars Portal is a service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries, hosted through the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL), to provide shared technological infrastructure to university libraries in Ontario and across Canada. The University of Toronto is on the traditional land of the Wendat Nation, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit.
Permafrost, our hosted digital preservation service, provisions member institutions with technical infrastructure and support to process their digital collections for preservation. This includes a dedicated Archivematica instance running on a virtual machine on servers at the UTL data centre and storage provisioned through our Ontario Library Research Cloud (OLRC) storage network. The OLRC is built on the open-source OpenStack Swift software, integrated with the bit preservation management application DuraCloud, and has five storage nodes at partner university libraries across Canada.
Laurier Archives and Special Collections has been a member of Permafrost since 2016.
Why we got involved in testing the DPC’s Carbon Footprint Toolkit
Since 2022, Laurier Archives and Special Collections has collaborated with Facilities and Asset Management and the Sustainability Office to measure emissions of archival storage spaces. This was accomplished by calculating m3 of natural gas and kWh of electricity used during a selected period, calculating greenhouse gas emissions using co-efficient factors, and converting to kg CO2e using Global Warming Potential. The current kg CO2e values for archival storage spaces on campus is comparable to driving an average gas vehicle for 14,000 km annually. These values are 0.13% of total campus scope 1 emissions and 0.10% of total campus scope 2 emissions. This work only captures emissions for archival storage spaces.
Laurier Archives and Special Collections wanted to help test the DPC’s Carbon Footprint Toolkit to develop a more fulsome understanding of the department's total carbon emissions. Scholars Portal wanted to help test the Carbon Footprint toolkit to understand how the tool may be used to support Permafrost members interested in the environmental impacts of digital preservation and to determine the impacts of shared technological services more broadly.
What we chose to focus on
Laurier Archives and Special Collections focused on gathering internal data to the institution to populate the on premise and website use tabs of the toolkit. From a service provider standpoint, Scholars Portal focused on gathering information about running Archivematica and the OLRC on virtual machines hosted on local servers. These two systems support institutions with addressing many activities within the Bitstream Preservation, Content Preservation, and Metadata Management functions.
Information about network traffic between Scholars Portal machines and between Laurier and Scholars Portal requires discussions with additional partners and will be explored in a later phase.
What we achieved
The systems team at Scholars Portal has created various dashboards and inventories that provide information about the virtual machines and physical hosts that Laurier’s Archivematica instance and the OLRC run on, and graciously shared access and time to allow us to gather data. This data does not account for all the moving parts involved in Permafrost, but provides a window into the hardware used, the resources assigned to and consumed by each VM and host server, and data about compute and storage use that forms the basis of initial emissions estimates for the service.
Figuring out how to map the data collected and the virtualized environment to the Carbon Footprint Calculation tool proved more challenging and required reading up on the exact meaning and purpose of various metrics and the differences between virtual and physical computing environments. On advice from the systems team, we also switched from focusing on physical hosts, which will invariably change as hardware is refreshed, to the VMs themselves, where the main activity and resource consumption is happening. When data is only available for the host server or service (in the case of the OLRC, which is used for other storage needs as well) as a whole, resource usage was also assumed to be proportionate to the vCPU assigned to the specific VM or storage used by the service or Laurier respectively.
Above all, this exercise has provided us with a better understanding of the components involved in processing and providing access to digital materials with Permafrost and the factors we should be considering when calculating emissions for digital systems and processes.
Lessons learned
Gathering the data required to measure the carbon footprint of digital preservation activities takes time. You need to explain the purpose and importance of this work to information technology partners and service providers, who may not immediately understand the what and why of this ask. We spent a significant amount of time explaining the project and what information we needed to test the Toolkit, with varying levels of success. Though we do not have all the answers yet, we now know what questions to ask and have a sense of the time and effort needed to gather this information.
Next steps
Our next step is to refine this process so it can be replicated by other Permafrost members. This will allow peer institutions to include carbon emissions estimates from digital preservation activities in their own carbon calculations. We also hope to bring this conversation to the Permafrost community to foster ongoing discussions on the environmental impacts of digital preservation more broadly.