DPC
Working in Concert: The Digital Preservation Community Symphony
Nance McGovern is Associate for Digital Preservation Practice and Instruction at Global Archivist LLC and a DPC Fellow
Digital preservation at its best is a collaborative sport. As always, the theme for World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is timely and important.
Collaboration has been an important part of digital practice for me since I started preserving digital content in 1986 at the Center for Electronic Records at the U.S. National Archives. We regularly welcomed visitors from all over who were interested in hearing about our program and in sharing what they were working on with us. An open source approach – sharing, using, and contributing back – contributes to the sustainability of good practice for digital preservation. Welcoming visitors – virtually and in-person – is a relatively easy opportunity for organizations engaged in digital preservation to contribute and to be informed.
It Takes A Team: Planning for Web Archiving at the U.S. National Archives
This blog post has been written by Laurence Brewer, Elizabeth England, Lisa Haralampus, Leslie Johnston, and Markus Most at National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
Background
The U.S. federal government has signaled how important web content is to the public documentation and experience of government. According to U.S. government website tracking data, every 90 days there are over 5 billion visits to government websites. Enabling long-term preservation of government website content is critical to public understanding of the government and its history.
The Recommend Formats Statement: the File Format Community Collab
Marcus Nappier is Senior Digital Collections Specialist at the Library of Congress
This year’s DPC World Digital Preservation Day theme, “Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort” highlights the necessity of collaborative work to achieve digital preservation goals and ensure that our collective digital heritage stands the test of time. I’ve been thrilled to work alongside amazing colleagues at the Library of Congress to annually update and publish the Recommended Formats Statement, a digital preservation guidance tool and culmination of file format nerdiness.
What should our digital preservation policies be? Taking the time to think things through
Heather Tompkins is Senior Project Officer at Library and Archives Canada
As World Digital Preservation Day approached this year, I started to think about what might be worthwhile to share with our digital preservation colleagues across the world. One of the topics that came to mind is the work we are undertaking at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) to develop our digital preservation policies. In 2022, our digital preservation area underwent an audit which resulted in several findings. One finding was to develop a digital preservation policy suite that defines our preservation priorities. Another finding was to have criteria for the acquisition and preservation of digital material that takes into account LAC’s ability to preserve and make them accessible. While we had an overarching policy on preservation, we didn’t yet have clear documentation of these priorities or criteria as it relates to the unique aspects of digital preservation. We internally recognized we could improve how we work, in part, by clarifying these priorities and criteria.
Well-Being of Future Generation Records in Wales
Sally McInnes is Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales.
As a small, smart country, we in Wales are well accustomed to undertaking concerted efforts for the common good, notably reflected by our Well-being of Future Generations Act. This Act is unique to Wales and requires public bodies to think about the long-term impact of their decisions and to work collaboratively. We have certainly delivered the Act in the context of digital preservation, influencing decision making through the creation of a national policy, advocating for investment, skills development and through many collaborative initiatives.
A Guide to the Installation of IsoBuster, IROMLAB and IROMSGL
Niamh Murphy is a Digital Archivist with the Royal Dublin Society.
In our community, optical media imaging is an essential yet challenging task to undertake. Despite the plentiful documentation available in support of this topic, establishing a workflow can leave you questioning: Where do I begin?
Digital Preservation Soup
Ailie O’Hagan is the Digital Preservation Officer at Queen’s University Belfast. She attended the iPRES 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.
Starting with Digital Preservation is like making stone soup – the more we come together and pool our resources, the better we can sustain our staff and collections needs.
Digital preservation in interesting times
Mark Schroeder is a solution architect in Iron Mountain's Digital Business Unit
We are living in most interesting times…
(Joseph Chamberlain, 1898)
When the collapse of the Soviet Bloc precipitated the breakdown of the German Democratic republic in 1989, the East German Secret Service (Ministerium für Staatsicherheit - Stasi), found themselves holding extensive archives of records. In the forty years of its existence, 91,000 employees of the Stasi and up to 180,000 informants had amassed thousands of linear metres of archive material.
Graveyards and ghosts in web archiving
Alice Austin is the Web Archivist for the University of Edinburgh.
October 1969 was a busy month. Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired for the first time; Steve McQueen, Trey Parker and PJ Harvey were born; and on a dark, dark night (or about 10.30pm on the 29th), a 21-year-old UCLA student called Charley Kline started to transmit a message to the Stanford Research Institute using the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. He meant to send the word ‘LOGIN’ – but the receiving system crashed at ‘LO’. And thus, the internet was born.
“So I’ve finally procured a digital preservation system, now what?”: Takeaways from DPC Supporter panel
Jenny Mitcham is Head of Good Practice and Standards at the Digital Preservation Coalition
Last month the DPC hosted a series of ‘Digital Preservation Futures’ events designed to showcase the work of our Supporter organizations. The event that kicked off this series was a panel discussion entitled “So I’ve finally procured a digital preservation system, now what?”. The session began with a representative from each Supporter organization giving a short lightning talk in answer to the question posed in the title, and this was followed by a lively discussion and Q&A with the audience. It worked well to benefit from the expertise of all of our Supporters together and in many cases to hear them effectively ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ and repeating and developing on the points that others had made. With representatives from Arkivum, Artefactual, AVP, boxxe, Libnova, Preservica, and consultant Simon Wilson, this really did feel like ‘a concerted effort’. Pulling together the key learnings from the session into a blog post for World Digital Preservation Day seemed an obvious next step.