DPC

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!

The DPC is delighted to invite DPC members to register for the first meeting of the reconvened Web Archiving and Preservation Task Force. This DPC member-only event will take place in Dublin on 27 June 2018, hosted by the National Library of Ireland. This gathering will provide an opportunity to discuss and agree the revised Terms of Reference as well as commence discussions on the topics important to participants’ institutions, their collections, and their users.

This event is free and open to all Full and Associate DPC Members. However, spaces are limited so we ask that each institution send one delegate in the first instance and more if the event does not fill up. 

The Revised Terms of Reference are still open for comment by DPC members. 

For more information and to register.  

On February 16 2018, The University of Melbourne Library Digital Scholarship team organised and hosted the inaugural “Australasia Preserves” event. This event brought together 75 people interested in digital preservation in Australia and New Zealand, from a variety of different institutions and organisations.

Our goal was to start to build a community of practice for digital preservation in our region for all interested people and organisations, regardless of institutional affiliation or skill level.  We’ve wanted to get a community like this together for a while. Because we are a very small team working on a very big digital preservation project, we have a keen interest in generating greater connections with other digital preservation initiatives, projects, and work being done, and in exploring opportunities for collaboration.

As a ‘data collector,’ the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is responsible for how personal data is processed and for what purposes. Ahead of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect on 25^th May, we have been making a few adjustments to to ensure we continue to appropriately collect, process and protect personal data.

Words by William Kilbride and Sarah Middleton

In the last few months, we’ve seen a fair bit of ‘newness’ at the DPC: a new chair, a new strategic plan and a new structure have all set us on an exciting path for the coming years. And the new structure and strategic plan, in particular, bring with them new opportunities for DPC members to become more involved in what we do and how we do it.

You may recall that the DPC has a number of sub-committees that help oversee our work and keep us focussed on member needs.  There are currently four sub-committees covering our six main areas of work. These are:

• Community Engagement: enabling a growing number of agencies and individuals in all sectors and in all countries to participate in a dynamic and mutually supportive digital preservation community.
• Advocacy: campaigning for a political and institutional climate more responsive and better informed about the digital preservation challenge; raising awareness about the new opportunities that resilient digital assets create.
• Workforce Development: providing opportunities for our members to acquire, develop and retain competent and responsive workforces that are ready to address the challenges of digital preservation.
• Capacity Building: supporting and assuring our members in the delivery and maintenance of high quality and sustainable digital preservation services through knowledge exchange, technology watch, research and development.
• Good Practice and Standards: identifying and developing good practice and standards that make digital preservation achievable, supporting efforts to ensure services are tightly matched to shifting requirements.
• Management and Governance: ensuring the DPC is a sustainable, competent organization focussed on member needs, providing a robust and trusted platform for collaboration within and beyond the Coalition.

Sally McInnes is Chair of the ARCW Digital Preservation Group and Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales

On International Digital Preservation Day last year, the Archives and Records Council Wales (ARCW) published the first national digital preservation policy.  The policy was produced in recognition of the significant strategic challenge which digital preservation presents to organisations in Wales which are creating, providing access and preserving digital information.  The policy also aims to raise awareness of the importance of effective digital preservation amongst archive institutions, practitioners and managers, through stressing that transparent, responsible and accountable activity relies upon the ability to evidence decision making and to provide a reliable audit trail.