DPC

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?

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. 

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.

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 29^th), 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.

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. 

Ellie Burnage works for Exact Editions based in the UK

“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it!” Halford E. Luccock 🎼

November has crept around again, and with it World Digital Preservation Day 2023 on Thursday 2nd November. Organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition, this annual celebration invites all data creators, archivists and curators to celebrate the benefits and opportunities enabled by the hard work of digital preservation community. 

The theme of this year’s celebration is ‘Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort’ — and a particular project Exact Editions took on during the last year encapsulates the collaborative work that digitising a magazine archive entails. Haymarket documented over 120 years of automotive history when they extended the archive of Autocar, the world’s oldest car publication, back to the first issue ever published in 1895. 

This blogpost has been written by St George’s, University of London (SGUL) Records Manager Kirsten Hylan, Research Data Support Manager Sarah Stewart, and Archivist Juulia Ahvensalmi.

‘Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort’ is the theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, celebrating how, by working with colleagues at our university and beyond, digital preservation allows us to both share and gain knowledge, which in turn supports our efforts at digitally preserving our digital records. 

Jon Tilbury is Chief Innovation Officer at Preservica

In the evolving realm of Digital Preservation, success hinges on collaboration. However, the dynamics of working together, exchanging knowledge and providing mutual support have seen significant transformations over the last few decades.

Since the late 20th century when Digital Preservation emerged as a distinct field, those engaged in it have recognized the importance of tackling its challenges through collaboration within a broader community. However, over that time the nature of those involved and the way information is exchanged around the community have fundamentally changed, and there are multiple communities with different problems and priorities. How do they support each other as Digital Preservation expands and evolves?

This blog post has been written by Francesca Mackenzie, Digital Archivist specialising in file formats for the The National Archives (UK) and Jonathan Isip, Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies (UPSLIS).

From our own experience starting out in the field of Digital Preservation, and conversations with each other on the subject we had found a recurring theme that the technical jargon can be off putting and often create a sense that the job is more complex than it is. Often glossaries can be quite daunting, so the goal of Digital Preservation for 5 Year Olds was to lower some of the language barriers of entry that maybe didn’t need to really be there in the first place.

Dr Miranda Barnes is Research Associate in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Books at Loughborough University

The Open Book Futures project, which began in May 2023 as an acceleration and advancement of the COPIM Project (11/2019-04/2023), continues to focus on the open access monograph, with an emphasis on Scaling Small. This principle “eschews standard approaches to organisational growth that tend to flatten community diversity through economies of scale” (Adema & Moore, 2021). Work Packages in both projects focus more broadly on infrastructure, governance, accessibility, financial models and revenue, metadata and dissemination, and experimental publishing, but also archiving and preservation. It is the combined approach and multifaceted, collaborative interaction of the work packages that leads to our best insights and outputs.