DPC

The DPC is delighted to welcome the University of Bath Library as its latest associate member

The University of Bath has an excellent reputation for both teaching and research and has been ranked as the UK's top university in the Times Higher Education (THE) Student Experience Survey 2015. The Library manages and maintains a diverse collection including archival resources, historical records and other publications to support the University's teaching and research activities as well as those in the wider academic community.

This year, DPC's Research and Practice team has been working on two studies commissioned by the UK Data Service as part of their Big Data Network Support. Both Preserving Social Media and Preserving Transactional Data will address the issues facing long-term access to this big, fast-moving data and will be published as Technology Watch reports. As part of Preserving Social Media, this series of posts examines some of the points of tension in the efforts of research and collecting institutions to preserve this valuable record of life in the 21st century.

I'm Sara Day Thomson, Project Officer for the DPC, specialising in the pursuit of new ideas in digital preservation. 

If you want to get involved, follow me on Twitter @sdaythomson and the DPC account @DPC_chatter to get the scoop on upcoming DPC events and activities!

The National Archives of Ireland has today joined the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC).  The DPC is an advocate and catalyst for digital preservation, enabling its members to deliver resilient long-term access to content and services, and helping them derive enduring value from digital collections.  The core mission of the National Archives is to collect, manage, and preserve the public record of Ireland and ensure its long term availability as a research resource and to underpin citizens’ rights.  The long term availability of the public record demonstrates transparency and accountability in the democratic process.

I was reminded this week about the issue of software preservation from a couple of different quarters. First by a slightly random twitter conversation about reading lists, and secondly by the latest blog post from David Rosenthal. The former took me back to one of the first pieces of digital preservation literature I ever read. It was originally recommended to me by former colleague, friend and mentor, David Holdsworth. It helped me to really understand, for the first time, what the challenges of preserving digital stuff were all about. It's a short piece in the Computer Conservation Society bulletin called "The Problems of Software Conservation" by Doron Swade. It delves into what it means to preserve something interactive, where the function is (largely) more important than the physical form. Looking back, what strikes me about this writing is the date of publication. 1993. Despite many advances in digital preservation, so much so that someone touting the existence of a digital dark age provokes a backlash, we still haven't nailed the software preservation problem 22 years later.

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The DPC is delighted to welcome The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority as its latest full member. 

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is a non-departmental public body set up to ensure that the UK’s 17 designated civil public sector nuclear sites are decommissioned and cleaned up safely and efficiently. Managing Director of the NDA National Archives, Simon Tucker recognises the enormous challenge of maintaining access to digital resources and believes 'the DPC’s expertise in long-term digital information management will bring major benefits to our information governance programme.'

SPRUCE (Sustainable PReservation Using Community Engagement) was a collaborative project funded by Jisc and led by the University of Leeds. It offered a series of 'Mash-up' events throughout 2012 and 2013 to put developers and collection owners in touch with each other. DPC supported elements of community engagement in digital preservation and in particular was charged with working up elements of a business case for preservation. Visit the SPRUCE website for more information.

Project highlights:

• Digital Preservation Requirements and Solutions: A living archive of digital preservation practice that captures the preservation challenges faced by over a 100 practitioners from Libraries, Archives, Museums, Galleries and other organisations.
• COPTR: A registry of digital preservation tools to help practitioners find the software tools they need to solve particular challenges.
• The Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit: A comprehensive toolkit to help practitioners and middle managers build business cases to fund digital preservation activities.