DPC

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) completed a digital preservation project in March 2015. At that point, we had implemented a solution which included:

• A standalone quarantine / virus checking solution;
• The use of existing software, e.g. DROID, Bagger, TreeSize Pro;
• A MS Excel tool to assist with the generation and manipulation of metadata;
• Software to validate checksums and create archival information packages;
• A digital repository to store and validate the digital records;
• Software to apply the digital records to our existing catalogue systems, staff and public facing.

A lot has happened since the end of the project, some good, some not so good. The challenge now is to learn from the experience and start planning for the next version of the system.

By Kate Murray and Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress

If you are a fan of digital file formats and we know there are lots of you out there, get your thinking cap on and editing pen ready because we want to hear from you!  It’s that time of year when The Library of Congress is seeking input on its yearly review and revision of the Recommended Formats Statement.

The following is a guest post by the iPRES2018 Social Media Team. The interview was lead by Michelle Lindlar.

iPRES - the International Conference on Digital Preservation - is without a doubt the biggest and most important conference of the year for everyone involved in digital preservation, curation and long-term data stewardship. The conference series has been bringing together researchers and practitioners from around the world for the past 15 years, with the conference locations alternating between Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America. This September, iPRES will be returning to the US and will be co-hosted by MIT and Harvard. Let’s hear directly from the co-organizers Nance McGovern and Ann Whiteside what we can expect from the iPRES2018.

National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web, New York, 22-24 March 2018

Web archives can serve as witness to crimes, corruption, and abuse; they are powerful advocacy tools; they support community memory around moments of political change, cultural expression, or tragedy. At the same time, they can cause harm and facilitate surveillance and oppression. 

Tomorrow I jet off to the big apple to attend the National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web hosted by Rhizome, the Documenting the Now project, and partners. 

Introduction

With volumes of data increasing, and budgets to manage these data unable to keep pace, investments in digital preservation must be strategic and targeted to ensure the best value for money more than ever before. To help organisations develop sustainable and cost-effective solutions that meet particular and distinct needs, they will first need to understand what is driving their investment and where it will have the most impact.

This will require decisions around appropriate infrastructure—not only in terms of hardware and software—but also in terms of the skills and resources that can feasibly be employed within the organisation.

One solution for optimising the impact of such investments in digital preservation may be through sharing infrastructure, resources and effort among complementary institutions.

Collaboration requires effort, commitment and a realisation that retaining effective local control might mean letting go of some tasks and commissioning external parties to do things more efficiently on a contractual basis. The switch to collaboration, sharing information and sharing resources to manage budgets for digital preservation may be easily justified in financial terms, but a programme of “education” and “culture change” is inevitable for this approach to be a success.

Whether organisations are reliant on local or external preservation infrastructures, it is widely accepted that we are all required to work smarter and to demonstrate the impact investments year on year. This will remain the same all the way up the infrastructure stack towards national and international provision of infrastructure. The measures of effectiveness may change radically depending on the context but the need to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of investment remains a constant.

This open event is designed to share lessons learned about shared services in the context of research data management, and how these may be applied to groups of complementary organisations of every type, in every sector.

Presentations will:

• Identify the benefits and opportunities which are derived from sharing resources and infrastructure
• Identify the challenges to sharing and how these might be met
• Present use cases where services are currently being shared
• Introduce the Research Data Shared Service as a potential mechanism for sharing services

Would should come?

• Grant holders
• Programme managers
• Collections managers, librarians, curators and archivists across all sectors
• Records managers in institutions with a need for long-lived data
• CIOs and CTOs in organisations with particular dependence on digital records
• Vendors and developers with digital preservation solutions

Programme

• 1000 - Registration open, tea and coffee
• 1030 - Welcome and Introductions with William Kilbride, DPC
• 1050 - 'The Importance of being Comprehensive' with Joost van der Nat, Digital Heritage Network

• 1120 - ‘Collaborative Development Networks: Supporting small archives’ with Meg Venter, The National Archives

• 1140 - ‘Implementing shared services: how does it actually work?’
  • Peter Anderton, Preservica
  • Justin Simpson, Artefactual 

• 1210 - ‘ All for one and one for all: Managing stakeholders and expectations’ with Sally McInnes, National Library of Wales

• 1230 - Q&A
• 1250 - Lunch
• 1330 - 'Who's paying?: Breaking down the costs of shared services' with Paul Stokes, Jisc

• 1400 - 'Data Protection: How is personal data protected within a shared service?' with David Reeve, Jisc

• 1430 - 'Jisc RDSS: Meeting needs outside the research data community' with Rachel Bruce and John Kaye, Jisc

• 1500 - Tea and Coffee
• 1520 - Roundtable discussion chaired by William Kilbride, DPC

• 1600 - Close

Can’t make it?

This is the second in a series of 3 public events scheduled for 2018. If you are unable to attend this session, please follow the DPC website events pages for updates and more opportunities to become involved.

DPC members will be able to watch a live stream of the event from this page on the day, and recordings will be made freely available to all after the event. We’ll also be tweeting from the event using the hashtag #SharedServiceDP

 Illustration by Jørgen Stamp digitalbevaring.dk CC BY 2.5 Denmark

by Jenny Doyle, Joanna Finegan, Della Keating and Maria Ryan, Digital Collections Department, National Library of Ireland. 

DPC members might remember some work we (on the Advocacy & Communications Sub-Committee) started a while ago to create an ‘Executive Briefing Pack’…?

Born out of calls from the Coalition’s membership for more resources to support internal advocacy, the Executive Briefing Pack would sit alongside the Digital Preservation Handbook and the Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit, providing easy access to the straightforward points that need to be understood before decisions on preservation policies can be made and implemented.

Within the pack, a ‘grab bag’ of handy ready-made goodies would enable digital preservationists across all sectors and organization types to create a tailor-made document/ presentation/ letter/ campaign (delete as applicable) to persuade whoever needed persuading within their organisation that DIGITAL PRESERVATION IS A GOOD THING!