DPC

Jenny Hunt is the Digital Archivist for the National Records of Scotland Digital Records Unit.

Like many other institutions worldwide National Records of Scotland (NRS) is grappling with digital preservation and finding a solution which will allow the Keeper of the Records of Scotland to carry on his duty to preserve the records of Scotland into the future in a digital age. Our Digital Preservation Programme is currently working on a new digital infrastructure on which to build its repository – so how are we preserving archival digital material in the meantime?

NRS first received archival born digital records in 1998. Since then we have amassed almost 1.07 million digital files in over 130 accessions. We began a formal process of quarantining accessions in the late 2000s, copying each transfer on to a standalone pc with virus-checking software which was updated weekly and scanning it once a week for a period of four weeks. A duplicate of the accession was then produced and sent to off-site storage.

The DPC and Tate invite you to join us for a briefing on applying the principles of significance and authenticity to digital objects. The event provides a forum for practitioners from different backgrounds to explore and exchange approaches and methods. 

Are you running a World Digital Preservation Day activity?

The World Digital Preservation Day Event Pack is a great way to prepare what you need for your event. 

Put together your World Digital Preservation Day Event Pack:

• Set up your WDPD backgrounds - Use on Zoom or Teams when holding your online event:

• Warm up your event attendees with World Digital Preservation Day BINGO as an icebreaker 

• Direct your event attendees to these useful resources on digital preservation: 

  • The Digital Preservation Handbook, a great place to start for getting started with digital preservation 

  • Topical notes on digital preservation, designed for non-digital preservationists

  • Technology Watch Reports, a deeper more technical dive into digital preservation matters

  • The Bit List of Digitally Endangered Species (new edition will be published on 2 November 2023!)

  • The Executive Guide on Digital Preservation, to help talk to others in your organisation about digital preservation

  • And many more!

• Order WDPD Stickers in in a range of languages (SOLD OUT)

Hania Smerecka is an archivist at Lloyds Banking Group. This post recaps her experience at 'Aye Preserve - Digital Preservation in the West of Scotland' on 30 November 2017 at the University of Glasgow.

On Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the Aye Preserve event held at the University of Glasgow. The event was perfectly timed to coincide with the International Day of Digital Preservation, and featured presentations from a number of speakers followed by the launch of the Digital Preservation Coalition BitList, a list of the world’s endangered digital species.

Gemma Batson is a Program Manager for Web Archiving at the Internet Archive. This post recaps her experience at 'Aye Preserve - Digital Preservation in the West of Scotland' on 30 November 2017 at the University of Glasgow.

It was a beautiful St. Andrew’s Day morning as we all made our way to the University of Glasgow for the Aye Preserve event, run by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC). As nervous students prepared for graduation on the main campus, our digital preservation colleagues descended on the campus library to begin discussions about our industry, how to get started, and the projects at the forefront of digital preservation in West Scotland.

The sun has set now on International Digital Preservation Day (IDPD17) around the world, so, at the very last tick of the clocks on the most westerly reaches of the setting sun, we’d like to conclude by offering our thanks to colleagues in all time zones.

We have been astonished, delighted and massively energized by the numbers that participated, by the number of blogs, tweets, emails, messages on every media platform imaginable. There has been a significant effort of disk-imaging, file-migrating, and archive-describing. I never knew that ‘digital preservation cake’ was a thing but there’s been an awful lot of it in show; I didn’t know that a working ‘day’ could last for 39 hours; and I could scarcely have imagined the word ‘cryo-flux-a-thon’.  There has been enthusiasm and generosity, insight and commitment, and a wonderful sense of celebration at the gathering of our dynamic, diverse and dispersed community.

I think it is safe to say that our first International Digital Preservation Day has been a success. 

Natalie Baur is Preservation Librarian at Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas, El Colegio de México in Mexico City.

 The Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas at the Colegio de México in Mexico City is thrilled to announce that we will be the hosts for the next Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group meeting! This exciting conference will be held at the Colegio de México’s installations from February 12-14, 2019, so save the date now! You will not want to miss this unique opportunity to talk digital preservation with colleagues from around the world. PASIG 2019 will be unique in that this is the very first time that the meeting will be held in a Latin American country. Mexico City is a vibrant, cosmopolitan city that will afford lots of excellent discussion on digital preservation advances locally in Mexico and throughout the Caribbean and Latin American region. We plan to have many attendees from across the region present at the meeting and this new infusion of perspectives and experiences will undoubtedly reinvigorate discussions happening in the international digital preservation community.

Chris Loftus is Digital Preservation Manager at the University of Sheffield Western Bank Library in the UK

The first International Digital Preservation day allows us an opportunity to reflect on some of the milestones and significant events so far in the implementation of the University of Sheffield’s Digital Preservation programme. The Library became one of the early adopters of Rosetta, a Digital Preservation solution provided by ExLibris, in 2015. Following installation Rosetta was given the Sheffield brand name ArchiveUS and initial priority focussed on developing ingest routes for our valuable digital material; born digital and digitised collections from Special Collections and the National Fairground and Circus Archive.

In September 2016 the University's Festival of the Mind event gave the Library the opportunity to highlight the thinking behind Digital Preservation through a collaboration with local artist Paul Carruthers. ‘Memories in the digital age’ is a triptych film that featured difficult to access footage from the library’s collections. The piece, which was exhibited at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, explored some of the ideas underpinning Digital Preservation; such as the generation and use of digital information and its relationship to memory.

Kirsty Lee is Digital Archivist for the Division of Library and University Collections at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

I’d like to start International Digital Preservation Day, by putting a conundrum out to the community. My colleague, Lorraine McLaughlin, here at the Centre for Research Collections in the University of Edinburgh, and myself are currently appraising a hybrid collection that documents the history of computing at Edinburgh University from the inception of the Edinburgh Regional Computing Centre (ERCC) in 1966, to its later incarnation the Edinburgh University Computing Service in the 1980s.

The ERCC was to have a considerable impact on computing services as we know them today. Following the Flowers Report in 1966 there was to be regional computing centres set up in London, Manchester and Edinburgh tasked with providing computing services for local university users, research council establishments and other universities.