DPC

A lot has been going on since August 2017 when we wrote about our planning for a digital preservation ecosystem at the University of Melbourne.

Work continues on our ten-year digital preservation strategy – we are just over two-and-a-half years in now. The strategy continues to be a strong foundation that aids development of project work to eventually deliver all the elements required for ongoing digital preservation capability.

Dave Heelas is the Archivist and Records Manager for Unilever Art, Archives & Records Management.
This post is the second in a series of three.

A second area that has been raising a lot of questions for digital preservation within Unilever’s collections is the Audio-Visual collections. As we have more and more digitised material it became a priority to move these from the external storage they were on into a more managed and protected environment in the form of the digital preservation repository.

In this short blog I will focus on the digitised AV collections within Unilever.

The Digital Preservation Coalition is delighted to announce that Jenny Mitcham will join the DPC staff in November in a new role as Head of Good Practice and Standards.

Jen is well known to the DPC membership and the wider digital preservation and archives community from her current work at the Borthwick Institute at the University of York.  Originally trained as an archaeologist and a graduate of the Universities of Nottingham and Southampton. She administered the Clwyd-Powys Sites and Monuments Record in the late nineties before moving into digital preservation as a Digital Archivist with the Archaeology Data Service for nine years, helping to shape archiving practices and procedures as the discipline evolved.

Sharon Webb is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex Humanities Lab

Now that the dust has settled on our first 'Digital Archives in Communities – Practice and Preservation' workshop held in June this year, I finally have a chance to contemplate and reflect on the highlights, outcomes, tensions, challenges, and next steps of this project. Rather than go through the presentations and speakers in chronological order, I will instead try to summarise some of the themes and areas of coalescence that emerged.

Charlie McCann is Archive Manager for BBC Scotland

Here at the cultural and current affairs coalface of BBC Scotland’s archives we’re getting used to a new position under the corporation’s Scottish commissioning wing and taking the opportunity to shift our gaze a little and do some more work to focus on the fruit of all our data preservation labours: our collections’ content. To be perfectly honest, it feels a little as if we’ve been neglecting “the content” of late, focussing so much as we do on “the data”- cleaning it, giving it a machine-readable makeover, digitising it into new formats and storage, figuring out new ways of sending it zooming around the globe at fantastical speeds and even building it a digital library to live in- generally working terribly hard to take very good care of all those zeros and ones. All of this has doubtlessly created new methods and means of security, stability and accessibility, but it has also raised a great many new questions and challenges for archivists. For example, has the tumultuous environment of the tech-driven approach to archiving caused us to lose something of our metaphysical understanding of our collections and in turn let our users and stakeholders down?

This month sees the addition of two new organisations to the DPC’s Supporter Program. The Coalition welcomes:

• Ex Libris, Cloud-based Solutions provider for the Higher Education sector.
• Formpipe, Developer of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Information Quality Management and Electronic Quality Management System (eQMS) software solutions.

Both organisations have committed to supporting the DPC, and to a constructive collaboration for the benefit of the whole digital preservation community.

“As the membership of the DPC diversifies and expands globally, it is essential that both users and the solution providers who support our community have a meaningful way to communicate and learn from each other” explains Executive Director of the DPC, William Kilbride. “We are delighted therefore to see these organisations, which represent various aspects of digital preservation, choosing to support the DPC in this way.”

Faye Lemay is Digital Preservation Manager at Library and Archives Canada

The team at Library and Archives Canada have written a 4-part series for the blog. This is the first installment...

In the past three years, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has intensified its efforts to improve its capabilities to preserve Canada’s documentary heritage. In a bid to step up its mandate to preserve and protect Canada’s digital holdings, the Digital Preservation (DP) team has forged a new path, converting what was once a series of short-term projects aimed at stabilizing the current infrastructure into building a strong foundation for an enduring and sustainable program. The main driver accelerating the momentum toward program development has been organizational support from the most senior levels of management at LAC, providing the impetus to set new directions for change.

Phil Clegg is Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of MirrorWeb

We were recently invited to join the first episode of the Digital Preservation Futures webinar series by the DPC.

The webinar provided a valuable opportunity for us to learn more about the digital archiving community. We were also able to share what we have learned from projects we’ve worked on across the public and private sectors, as well as what our customers look for in a digital archiving and preservation solution.

In our experience, there are four key capabilities our customers seek from a digital archiving solution. In collaboration with our partners at TNA, we developed a set of procedures we call C.A.P.S:

The Legal Possibilities for Software Preservation Miniseries builds on the Software Preservation Webinar Series that ran from April 23 - May 30, 2018. This miniseries explores the legal challenges associated with preservation, sharing and reuse of software. Guests discuss their current advocacy work and next steps for legal strategy around software preservation.

The Miniseries and the Software Preservation Webinar Series are both jointly hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition and the Software Preservation Network.

Episode 7: Licensing and Other Legal Approaches

Facilitators:  Jess Whyte (University of Toronto), Paula Jabloner (Computer History Museum), Jessica Meyerson (Educopia Institute)

Guests:

• Andrew Charlesworth (University of Bristol)
• Brandon Butler (University of Virginia)
• Burkhard Schafer (University of Edinburgh)

Discussion Questions:

1. Describe the relevant legal considerations when discussing software preservation and reuse in a research context.
2. Describe your work in this area – who you are working with and your methods for understanding the current state of the field.
3. What can digital preservation practitioners do in order to ensure that software dependency concerns are heard and taken in toconsideration by law/policy makers?

Watch the Recording

(Runtime 53 mins)

Supplementary Resources

Websites & Blogs

United States Legal Context:

• Albert, Kendra. (2016). The Angry Birds in the Coal Mine . RIT MAGIC Invited Speaker Series, March 3rd, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB0hPZUMc1o&feature=youtu.be
• Intellectual Property Rights Issues for Software Emulation: An Interview with Euan Cochrane, Zach Vowell, and Jessica Meyerson, by Morgan McKeehan, The Signal, January 22, 2016
• The United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) 1201 Rulemaking  (exemption to break technological protection measures in the service of software preservation)
  • Copyright.gov/1201 – the U.S. Copyright Office homepage for the 1201 process for 2018
  • Software Preservation Network/Library Copyright Alliance Petition, Comments, and Reply Comments (see Class 9) in support of an exemption for software preservation
  • Software Preservation Network 1201 Additional Comments in support of Society of American Archivists “all lawful uses” proposal.
• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Software Preservation: Association for Research Libraries project landing page
• The Copyright Permissions Culture in Software Preservation and Its Implications for the Cultural Record—Best Practices Phase 1 Report
• How Is an App Like a Player Piano? And Does That Help the Fair Use Case for Software Preservation?—Brandon Butler, The Taper blog
• What’s Eating Software—Brandon Butler, The Taper blog
• Digital Preservation and Copyright, by Peter Hirtle

Canadian Legal Context

• Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (INDU) Statutory Review of the Copyright Act: http://www.ourcommons.ca/Committees/en/INDU/StudyActivity?studyActivityId=9897131,
• Link to submitted brief requesting an exception for circumventing technical protection measures (currently being translated to French): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PHQrINvwSeEao_rOEVmWjdCxsBid4UVxlIk5eI5jn7w/edit?usp=sharing

Articles & Reports

United Kingdom Legal Context

• Charlesworth, Andrew. (2012) Intellectual Property Rights for Digital Preservation: DPC Technology Watch Report 12-02 2012, https://www.dpconline.org/docs/technology-watch-reports/796-dpctw12-02/file
• Kemper, Jakko; Kolkman, Daan. (2018) Transparent to whom? No algorithmic accountability without a critical audience, Information, Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1477967
• Rowland, D., Kohl, U. & Charlesworth, A. (2016) Information Technology Law. 1 Aug 2016 5th ed. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Schafer, Burkhard; Edwards, Lilian. (2017). ‘“I spy, with my little sensor”: Fair data handling practices for robots between privacy, copyright and security’, Connection science, Vol 29, pp 200-209
• Schafer, Burkhard; Komuves, David; Zatarain, Jesus Niebla. Diver, Laurence. (2015).  ‘A fourth law of robotics?: Copyright and the law and ethics of machine co-production’, Artificial Intelligence and Law, Vol 23, pp 217-240
• Schafer, Burkhard. (2015). ‘D-waste: Data disposal as challenge for waste management in the Internet of Things’, International Review for Information Ethics, Vol 22, pp 100-106

United States Legal Context

• Whitt, Richard S. (2017).  ‘Through a Glass, Darkly’ — Technical, Policy, and Financial Actions to Avert the Coming Digital Dark Ages. Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2016. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2742388

Ongoing Discussion

Add your thoughts and comments below...