DPC

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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.

On Sale at All Good Pharmacies: Eternal Life

There’s a paradox that links digital preservation with medicine. Digital preservation systems are subject to the same obsolescence that they exist to guard against: and even great doctors catch colds. I believe my doctor is mortal but that doesn’t mean I reject her advice. Her advice is not intrinsically dependent on her own experience but is situated within a global, dynamic community of research and practice. The medical profession deals with the problem of its own mortality by shifting the locus of their competence from the specific to the general. So, if mortality is to medicine what obsolescence is to digital preservation, and if really great doctors don’t have to prove themselves by living forever, what about digital preservation tools? What should we do about the problem of obsolescence? Should truly great digital preservation systems demonstrate their worth by living forever? What is the locus of their competence?

Last month I emailed William Kilbride at DPC with a query about file formats for quantitative data for long term preservation and, as a result of that email and the ensuing conversation, I appear to have agreed to write a blog post about the topic. Here is that blog post.

In his most recent blog post, William Kilbride reminded us that we in the digital preservation community “cannot make the case [for preservation] on our own terms. We need to make the case in terms that our audience understand” so that “preservation becomes an intrinsically achievable goal from the outset, not something we need to tack on at the end.”

Well, with any luck things aren’t so bad that all hope is lost. But freedom, or at least enlightenment, may well be on the horizon!

What do you mean it's not supposed to look like that?!

(Image courtesy of glennbphoto, The Atlas of Digital Damages)

Last summer, beneath the lofty cathedral-esque ceiling of York’s Guildhall, a group of troubled digital preservationists held their heads in their hands.

‘If only there was a way we could talk openly about our workflow woes,’ they cried.

‘It would make the task seem so much easier if I could just share what’s going wrong with someone who understands what I am going through,’ they confessed.

The Bodleian Libraries have partnered with Cambridge University Library on a two-year collaborative project: Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge (DPOC). Funded by the Polonsky Foundation, the project is  researching and developing requirements for each library’s digital preservation programmes. Both libraries have appointed three Polonsky Fellows each, specialising in the following areas: Policy and Planning, Outreach and Training, and Technology.