Environmental Sustainability
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Environmental Impact and Digital Preservation: New Technology Watch Guidance Note now available on member preview
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to give members a preview of the next in its series of Technology Watch Guidance Notes, Environmental Impact and Digital Preservation by Eira Tansey of Memory Rising, today. The new Guidance Note gives readers a brief but wide-ranging introduction to how digital preservation activities can both affect, and be affected by, environmental change. The report examines the implicit assumptions of digital preservation, and identifies how changes...
What is the carbon footprint of large-scale global digital preservation?
Matthew Addis is the Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum. It was great to be at iPRES 2023 in person again this year. I was privileged to be invited onto a panel called ‘Tipping Point’ that was run by Paul Stokes and Karen Colbron from Jisc. The panel questioned the premise that there is so much data being generated each year that we are at the point where we no longer have the ability to process it in any meaningful way, let alone curate and preserve it. Panellists...
Does net zero emissions from energy usage in the cloud mean carbon free digital preservation is on the horizon?
Matthew Addis is the Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum. If cloud infrastructure providers such as Google, AWS and Azure have net zero emissions from their use of energy, then does this mean we no longer need to worry about the carbon footprint of digital preservation in the cloud? The answer is no. Carbon emissions from energy consumption is just one part of the story. The embodied footprint [7] of all the ICT servers that run in the cloud also needs to be taken into...
The Anthropocene Remembered: Digital Memory After the Climate Crisis
I was honoured to give a keynote lecture at the start of the FIAT/ IFTA’s Media Management Seminar in May 2023. The text below is a slightly adapted version of the talk which was also recorded and will be made available in due course. It’s wonderful to be with you here in Dublin today and to meet as many friends and colleagues again after so long: this event hasn’t happened in person since 2019 and so it’s a privilege to be invited to be the opening keynote in a face to face meeting. My...
Memories from the Anthropocene: digital preservation in a time of climate crisis
In October 2022 I was privileged to join colleagues virtually for an event organized by UNISA in Pretoria, South Africa. The event marked International Open Access Week 2022 and had the title 'Open for Climate Justice'. This blog is a version of the paper that I presented. (Added 1/11/2022: The slides are available from UnisaIR at https://hdl.handle.net/10500/29530) Thankyou very much for the invitation to join you today to share some thoughts about the relationship between...
iPRES 2022: Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability
Matthew Addis is Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum. One area that stood out for me at iPRES this year was the thread of climate change and environmental sustainability that weaved its way through several parts of the conference. In the panel session called ‘”IT'S ALL IMPORTANT OF COURSE, BUT…”, which hotly debated the question of what is the most important challenge in digital preservation (costs, advocacy, and people all came high up the list, and rightly so), I think it was Keith...
Quantified Carbon Footprint of Long-Term Digital Preservation in the Cloud
Matthew Addis is Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum. Introduction Have you ever wondered what the actual carbon footprint is of doing digital preservation? For example, what are the CO2 equivalent carbon emissions associated with archiving and preserving a TB of data for 10 years? There’s been some brilliant discussion and ideas in the digital preservation community around environmental sustainability of long-term digital preservation. The DPC have a page that...
Digital Preservation and Environmental Sustainability: Five Themes for the Future
[sigue la versión en español] In November I was invited to speak to the members of RIPDASA in Latin America on the theme of environmental sustainability and digital preservation. This presentation gave me scope to expand a short provocation given on the same theme on the fringes of COP26 which we have also published. It is not exactly a deep dive, but more than a toe in the water. You can also watch the video of the presentation which includes Spanish subtitles. Thank you...
Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation
Digital preservation good practice is not solely about how successfully we preserve the bits and enable access to them, it must also take into account the broader context in which our work sits, and the wider responsibilities we have to society and the environment. Simply put, there is no point in preserving the bits if there is no one left to read and understand them. As a community we must therefore balance risks to the digital content that we hold not only against the financial cost but...
Environmentally sustainable digital preservation - moving from theory to practice
In April 2020 we held a webinar on ‘Enacting Environmentally Sustainable Preservation’ (DPC Members login to access the recording). In a follow up blog post, we mentioned we’d be keen to see how ideas raised in this webinar were incorporated into future digital preservation projects and initiatives going forward. Revisiting this topic we intend to explore how a range of digital preservation practitioners are addressing the issue, in particular how considerations around environmental...
Digital Preservation and Climate Change: Provocation to and from COP26
I was privileged to contribute to a panel on the fringes of the COP26 conference in Glasgow this morning convened by the UK National Archives with the title 'Archives Supporting Environmental Sustainability' This short post is the text of my presentation which was the five minute provocation at the start of the session. Ladies and gentlemen it’s a pleasure to be invited to speak to you this morning. I want to thank the organizers at the National Archives for their efforts...
BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS with CSC Climate negative / zero Carbon data center
Veli-Antti Leinonen is a Specialist at the Kajaani Data Center Program, CSC IT Center for Science in Finland In order to secure the digital preservation in long term, the preservation MUST be ecologically on a solid foundation. Otherwise, the data can’t be preserved in the future if it consumes too much of earth’s resources. Non-sustainable preservation will eventually lead into data loss or intentional deletion of data. This is comparable to subject that organizations need to be on a...
Adapting to abrdn – Towards a Sustainable, Open Source response to Digital Preservation
Karyn Williamson is Company Archivist for abrdn. The only thing certain about working for a ftse 100 company is that change is inevitable, and this is certainly true of abrdn. Since Standard Life Aberdeen was formed, the company has transformed from a historic pensions and life insurance business to a rebranded futuristic fully-fledged investment company. As the company worked its way through this transformation, the digital futurist objectives of the company meant that the...
DPC RAM (version 2) - what has changed and why?
This week, version 2 of DPC RAM, our Rapid Assessment Model was launched (including a new DPC RAM logo courtesy of Sharon McMeekin). This blog post describes what has changed and why. When DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model was first launched in September 2019 we were aware that future revisions would be required to keep it up-to-date. In an evolving field like digital preservation, good practice develops over time and the models by which we measure ourselves should also change...
It’s not easy being green: Evaluating the impact of digital preservation
Elisabeth Thurlow is the Digital Preservation & Access Manager at the University of the Arts London. As we challenge the long-held myth of neutrality within libraries, museums and archives, and diversify our collections, how do we avoid making decisions in support of digital preservation, which risk reinforcing historic biases? How do we select and prioritise our preservation actions whilst ensuring we are not duplicating existing biases? As well as the potential social impact of...
Is digital preservation bad for the environment? Reflections on environmentally sustainable digital preservation in the cloud
Matthew Addis is the Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum. Concerns are frequently raised that the way that humanity generates and uses data is simply not environmentally sustainable and is a significant contributor to greenhouse emissions and climate change. Archives and other organisations who hold and provide access to digital content are justifiably concerned about the part they play and how they can be more environmentally sustainable.
Enacting Environmentally Sustainable Preservation: some thoughts
On Friday last week the DPC hosted a webinar on ‘Enacting Environmentally Sustainable Preservation’. We were delighted to be able to get all four authors of a recent article in American Archivist in the (virtual) room together with our Members to discuss this important topic. The article is available here and I’d urge digital preservation people everywhere to read it if you haven’t already. I joked within the webinar last week that I wished I’d written it myself...but I should also note that...
Enacting Environmentally Sustainable Preservation - Webinar
The cultural heritage community has engaged with environmental sustainability in many areas, but is only beginning to explore the sustainability concerns of digital preservation activities. Building off of a recent American Archivist article (“Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation”), in which the authors argue that truly sustainable practice will come only from critical examination of the underlying motivations and assumptions of current digital preservation practices, the...
A Greener Film Archive
Janice Chen is Archive Officer at the Asian Film Archive in Singapore Much has been written about the escalating carbon footprint arising from digital consumption and its resulting environmental impact. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that the world needs sweeping changes to energy, transportation and other systems to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.[i] The bleak future facing our world and the devastating natural disasters in 2018 that have hit...
A foot in the door is worth two on the desk
Shibboleth I am asked, from time to time, how to persuade management that digital preservation matters. It’s a puzzling question in context and content. For a start, I am not sure I have ever persuaded anyone of anything. I have been on hand when people persuaded themselves but that’s not the same thing. It’s like finding the fire brigade at the scene of every major fire and assuming they are to blame. Moreover, I am not sure it’s possible to offer a global shibboleth for digital preservation...