DPC

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to announce that Dr. Andrew Jackson will join its staff in January 2024 as Preservation Registry Technical Architect.

Based in the UK, Andy will lead efforts on the new “Building registries of digital preservation good practice” project, which is a collaboration between the Digital Preservation Coalition and Yale University. The project aims to enhance the registry ecosystem and make it easier for practitioners to both share and discover good practice guidance.

William Kilbride is Executive Director at the Digital Preservation Coalition

•  Coda: a passage that brings a piece or a movement to an end.
• Canon: a theme that is repeated and imitated and built upon by other instruments with a time delay, creating a layered effect.

World Digital Preservation Day 2023 adopted a musical turn of phrase with the theme ‘A Concerted Effort’, emphasizing the need for collaboration and partnership to achieve a shared goal.  As the saying goes, ‘No one can whistle a symphony, it takes a whole orchestra to play it’.  It might be phrased less elegantly: if you’re doing digital preservation on your own, you’re doing it wrong.

In musical terms this blog post is the coda which brings our celebrations to a close.  It’s too early for me to take stock of all the different initiatives and outputs which have been shared over the course of the last 36 (ish) hours. I only have space for a few items which caught my eye so a very limited perspective.  But here are a few things that, if you didn’t already know about, are worth holding on to:

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

I talk about digital preservation with IT colleagues regularly and I often feel like I am in a position of perceived weakness - lecturing them on technical matters relating to preserving data. Needing a little confidence boost, I used ChatGPT to see what it had to say about the difference between backup and digital preservation. I posted an interesting outcome of this conversation in the Digital Preservation jiscmail list. Its answers boosted my confidence and I no longer feel those nagging pangs of talking nonsense during technical conversations.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has released its 2023 edition of the Global ‘Bit List’ of Endangered Digital Species today, on World Digital Preservation Day.

An open resource for digital preservation advocacy, the DPC's Global Bit List of Endangered Digital Species (Bit List) is a community-sourced list of at-risk digital materials which is revised every two years. Entries to the list are nominated by the community, who are at the forefront of digital preservation efforts, and entries are reviewed by the Bit List Council – a group of international organizations which represent global expertise in the preservation of the listed digital species.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) welcomes Evolved Binary to its Supporter Program this World Digital Preservation Day!

Established in 2014, Evolved Binary specialises in information storage and retrieval, providing development and consultancy services to help organisations with their complex archival, and access needs.

“Evolved Binary is excited to join the DPC community. We look forward to both sharing our expertise and knowledge in the areas of preservation, archiving, and cataloguing, and also to learning from the DPC members,” explains Adam Retter, Director of Evolved Binary.