DPC

IRMS Scotland, in partnership with the Digital Preservation Coalition, National Records of Scotland and Scottish Council on Archives, invites you to a free 1-day seminar on Recordkeeping Informatics, led by a renowned team of leading academics from Monash University in Australia.

This is a rare opportunity for the records management community in the UK to hear directly from Barbara Reed, Frank Upward and Gillian Oliver, who are currently in the final stages of developing a new informatics model which promises to bring significant positive changes in the evolution of records management theory and practice.

Recordkeeping Informatics is a rethink of practical recordkeeping approaches for the digital era, based on two building blocks - continuum thinking and recordkeeping metadata - explored through three facets: information culture, access and business processes.

The workshop will explore the importance of continuum thinking, interdisciplinarity and new ways of presenting recordkeeping metadata. It will feature a case study based around the findings of the Royal Commission on the Home Insulation Programme, enabling lots of discussion and brain storming.

More information about the Commission is available via Wikipedia and the Guardian.

The workshop will be held in the stunning surroundings of Glasgow City Chambers in George Square, and is taking place the day after the end of this year's IRMS Conference, also in Glasgow. The workshop is free to attend, but places are limited, so register now to secure your seat at this fascinating event.

Registration on the day will open at 9:30am for a 10:00am start, and we'll finish at around 4:30pm. The full programme is below. Please note the event will be recorded.

This is the only seminar involving the team from Monash currently planned in the UK, so we're expecting high demand from practitioners, trainers and academics from across the country.

Event partners:

Monash University
IRMS Scotland
Digital Preservation Coalition
National Records of Scotland
Scottish Council on Archives

Programme

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09.30 – 10.00 Registration

10.00 – 10.05 Introductions, outline of day

10.05 – 10.30 Refresher to continuum approaches (using the movie Spotlight)

10.30 – 11.15 Continuum – assumptions and understanding [small group discussions]

11.15 – 11.30 Coffee break

11.30 – 13.00 Overview of recordkeeping informatics

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch

14.00 – 15.15 Case study [small group discussions]

15.15 – 15.30 Coffee break

15.30 – 16.15 Report back from group discussions

16.15 – 16:30 Summary discussion with focus on ethics

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) was presented with the Information and Records Management Society's (IRMS) Award for Innovation of the Year in recognition of its re-imagined and revised Digital Preservation Handbook at an awards ceremony held at the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow on 22nd May.

Revealed by Iron Mountain’s Tim Callister and beating off competition from the UK Government Department for International Development's Vault Project for digital storage, the Digital Preservation Handbook provides an authoritative and practical guide to the complex topic of digital preservation. Supported by a group of external funders, the new handbook was developed by an expert community of international authors, under the editorship of original author Neil Beagrie, in a series of innovative ‘booksprints,’ ensuring it spoke to as wide an audience as possible whilst retaining a deep understanding of the topics covered.

Guest bloggers Dorothy Waugh (Emory University) and Shira Peltzman (UCLA) introduce us to the KryoFlux 

For those of us acquiring (or discovering) piles of floppy disks among our collections, the KryoFlux might just be a solution to our problems. Unlike modern USB floppy disk drives, this little floppy disk controller card can read and capture raw disk images of data stored using numerous disk encoding formats, including some that are especially early or unusual. What’s more, it handles media suffering from degradation or bitrot more effectively than most alternatives. Given these advantages, it’s not surprising that the KryoFlux is increasingly finding their way into archives and cultural heritage institutions.

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Following up from the DPC’s Planning Day at the British Library on 3rd April, this webinar provides a roundup of the feedback received throughout the course of this productive day, with an outline of the next steps, key points from the subsequent iteration of the Strategic Plan 2018-2023 draft for review and the launch of the DPC Dragon's Den 'Big Ideas' for the coalition's next 5 years.

Vote on the DPC's Big Ideas

And so the National Archives has been asked to blog about digital preservation. 

I guess this will be aspirational at best as I think of how we would like to be and where we are.  The National Archives has for the last while been endeavouring to develop a Public Service Records Management plan (PSRM) across the Irish civil service.  The plan is intended to progress the drafting and distribution of guidelines and information notes on how best to manage administrative records and to begin to address the myriad questions we receive on a weekly basis about email management, digital archiving, file naming, version control etc.

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Arkivum provides best-of-breed data safeguarding and long-term digital preservation solutions. Heritage and higher education organisations benefit from a simple, usable and secure digital preservation platform.

In this webinar, Arkivum's Paula Keogh provides practical advice on how to make your digital preservation procurement experience as painless as possible and discuss all that comes afterwards; how preservation can be integrated into day-to-day working practices, and will discuss: 

• How to define realistic and successful criteria when procuring a digital preservation system
• Procurement pitfalls and how you can avoid them
• How preservation techniques can add business value to your digital assets and records by integrating into everyday practice
• The interaction between archiving, preservation and how ‘business as usual’ activities can work seamlessly
• How data flows in and out of an archive and how automation through integration enables joined up workflows
• Taking examples from other sectors e.g. how the finance industry uses large-scale workflows and integration for preserving audio, video, social media and much more

Case studies will be used to illustrate the session, demonstrating how archiving, preservation and public access solutions have been implemented by a range of Arkivum customers, including Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Kramlich Collection, the Linnean Society, MoMA, Tate and the University of Westminster.

At the DPC’s Planning Day at the British Library on 3rd April, we asked attendees to come up with some 'Big Ideas' for the coalition's next 5 years. Now it's time for the rest of the membership (our Dragon's Den) to vote on and finesse these ideas before we add them to our next Strategic Plan, due to be launched at the end of this year.

This poll summarises those ideas - some of them very sensible, and some of them a bit more 'out there' - and now we put it to you...the DPC 'Dragons,' to decide which initiatives should go ahead and which, quite frankly, should not.

If you love an idea and want to give it your backing, give it a 5. If you think the idea stinks and 'you're out' give it a 0 ... or choose a number in between if you don't feel quite that strongly either way.

We’ll gather the results and bring them to our ‘Connecting the Bits’ Members Unconference and Networking Event so the poll will remain open until June 14^th. It should take you about 5 minutes and must be completed in one go. So if you're ready...

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Over the last 18 months I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to reflect, research, and synthesise with colleagues, what we have learnt about costs and benefits from digital curation and preservation. The results are now published in a cost-benefit advocacy toolkit released by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA).

It was a small project focussed on the needs of social science data archives but much of what it has done will be of interest to anyone involved in digital preservation and repositories.

So what have we learnt over recent years, and to borrow from the title of this blog, are we there yet?

At first glance, the terms ‘social media’ and ‘long-term preservation’ do not seem to belong in the same sentence. The two terms are perhaps even incompatible, mutually exclusive, and contradictory.

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Accelerate your Digital Preservation Plans: The 5 Step Journey

One of the main challenges to deploying the right Digital Preservation governance and systems for your organisation can be knowing the best way to get started or how to build the case and get organisational buy-in. In this webinar Preservica's Michael Hope will provide an overview of the key steps to successfully justifying, choosing and deploying a Digital Preservation system using a proven 5 Step Digital Preservation journey as a framework. This will include reference to best practice, template documents and case-studies from over 50 successful implementations.