DPC

Presentation Slides

• Introduction to Digital Preservation - Sharon McMeekin, DPC
• Digital Preservation: An Information Manager's Perspective - Steph Taylor, ULCC
• Digital Preservation: A Technologist's Perspective - Matthew Addis, Arkivum
• Adrian Brown, Parliamentary Archives
• Glenn Cumiskey, British Museum
• Helen Hockx-Yu, Internet Archive
• Ann MacDonald, University of Kent
• Dave Thompson, Wellcome Collection
• ARA: Section for Archives and Technology

Blog Posts About the Event

• Digital Preservation for Students with DPC - Steph Taylor, ULCC
• What I Wish I Knew Before I Started: DPC Student Conference 2016 - Dave Heelas, Hull History Centre
• DAH Blog - Reflections on the DPC Student Conference - Orla Egan, UCC

Event Description

The DPC, with support from the Archives and Records Association, Arkivum, ULCC and the Institute for Historical Research, is pleased to invite students and researchers in archives, records management and librarianship to a one day conference on practical workplace skills in digital preservation. This conference will bring a select group of leading practitioners together with the next generation of archivists, records managers and librarians to discuss the challenges of digital collections management and digital preservation. The day will open with a consideration of digital preservation basics and a scan of emerging trends in digital preservation. In the afternoon, a group of invited speakers will be invited to reflect on 'the things they wish they knew before they started', or 'what I actually do all day' giving students an advantage in their own career development and helping those who frame the curriculum a chance to extend their students' readiness for the workplace.

This conference will:

• Provide participants with a core grounding in applied digital preservation
• Provide an overview of emerging trends in digital preservation
• Present practical examples of the sorts skills that employers are looking from in staff working in digital preservation
• Present role models of practitioners whose careers have taken them to leading positions in digital preservation
• Allow students and their tutors to question practitioners about their day-to-day work and the skills that they reply upon

This day will be of interest to:

• Students and recent graduates in library and archive schools
• Students and recent graduates in information management and records management
• Tutors, lecturers and course convenors in library and archive schools, or who teach records management or information governance
• Innovators, vendors and commentators on digital preservation and cognate fields
• Employers seeking to understand the skills needed to operate digital preservation facilities or seeking to recruit new entrants

Places are strictly limited and should be booked in advance. Priority will be given to DPC members and to students from relevant information management programmes.

Programme

09:30 Registration Opens

10:00 Session One – Getting Started with Digital Preservation
Welcome
Introduction to Digital Preservation – Sharon McMeekin, DPC
Digital Preservation, an Information Manager’s Perspective – Steph Taylor, ULCC
Digital Preservation, a Technologist’s Perspective – Matthew Addis, Arkivum
Sponsor Presentations

12:00 Lunch – Sandwich lunch and refreshments provided

12:45 Session Two – What I Wish I Knew Before I Started
Presentations from the following Invited Speakers on working within the Digital Preservation field.

• Adrian Brown, Parliamentary Archives
• Glenn Cumiskey, British Museum
• Helen Hockx-Yu, Internet Archive
• Ann MacDonald, University of Kent
• Dave Thompson, Wellcome Collection

14:25 Comfort Break - Tea and coffee provided

14:45 Session Three – Roundtable with the Day’s Speakers

15:30 Thanks and Close

Digital preservation, from almost every angle, resolves to a question of metadata and people. If the core challenge of digital preservation is that software and hardware and people change, then fundamental to any remedial action will be some documentation about the configuration of software and hardware and people at the point of creation. Metadata is such an obvious solution to so many of our questions, but it comes at some considerable price. It has long been realised that generating all this metadata is expensive and repetitive. Considerable effort has been expended on tools that can generate metadata directly from collections and on services (ie registries) to support consistency and reduce one-off costs. Standards like PREMIS and METS allow that metadata to be expressed consistently and tied to that which they describe. It’s expansive in the present and it ought to expand through time as new preservation actions are executed and new uses documented. So digital archives become freighted with documentation of the when and the why and the who and the how of their existence. One is tempted to ask how much metadata is it realistic to gather, and how do we know when we’ve got enough?

If the purpose of digital preservation is dependable long-term access, then ensuring that users have sufficient documentation to locate, access and interpret archival holdings is the only true measure of success. Any objects which don’t serve this purpose are probably superfluous; any omission that prevents confident use is probably a dereliction of duty. So it’s perhaps surprising that the digital preservation community doesn’t spend more time considering our user communities. Only if we can understand the changing needs of our user communities can we assess whether our metadata efforts are in vain. Only when we understand our users can we properly understand the value we offer.

This workshop will review and update DPC members on current themes in preservation metadata, paying special attention to the role of user communities can offer as a partner and benchmark for metadata creation. It will examine mechanisms for tracking users through time, using their requirements to frame practical preservation activities.

Participants at the workshop will:

• Better understand the OAIS concept of the ‘designated community’ and how it can be used to shape preservation outcomes
• Understand the potential of users in the assessment and generation of preservation metadata
• Discuss the role of users and attendant metadata in the assessment of preservation services
• Share practical examples of preservation metadata from a range of perspectives
• Explore emerging themes in metadata standards and their relevance to digital preservation

Who should come?

This briefing day will interest:

• Archivists, librarians, curators or data managers with digital collections
• Digital preservation specialists and tool developers
• Chief information officers or chief technology officers of agencies with needs for longterm data retention
• Information professionals interested in new developments in digital preservation and community engagement
• Managers in public sector agencies and universities interested in impact and assessment
• Cultural planners interested in public engagement

Indicative Programme

10.00 Registration, Tea & Coffee
10.30 Briefing Day Open & Introductions
10.35 Key Note: Preservation and People: understanding designated communities (Christian Keitel)
11.05 What metadata does the Digital Repository of Ireland want, and how much do they actually get? (Kathryn Cassidy)
11.35 How much metadata can archivists really expect (Alex Green)
12.05 What metadata do users want and need, and how much can we get out of them (Katie Green)
12.35 Discussion
12.45 Lunch
13.30 Designated communities, OAIS and assessment (Herve L’hours)
14.00 Emerging Nuances of Digital Preservation Metadata (Angela Dappert)
14.30 Metadata and other stories online (Yunhyong Kim)
15.00 Semi-automated metadata extraction in the long term (Emma Tonkin)
15.30 Tea & Coffee
15.45 Panel discussion with speakers (Paul Wheatley discussant)
16.30 Thanks and Close