DPC

DPC Executive Director, William Kilbride, was invited to a small workshop in London at the start of March on the broad topic of ‘Curation and The Cloud’  The manuscript of his invited paper 'Curation, The Cloud and Cultural Heritage' has been released for members: http://www.dpconline.org/component/docman/doc_download/747-curationcloudculturalheritagemarch2012 (login required)

DPC is delighted to offer members a preview of our latest Technology Watch Report ‘Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound’, written by Richard Wright, formerly of the BBC. 

‘Moving image and sound content is at great risk’, explained Richard Wright, the report’s author.  ‘Surveys have shown that 74 per cent of professional collections are small: 5,000 hours or less. Such collections have a huge challenge if their holdings are to be preserved. About 85 per cent of sound and moving image content is still analogue, and in 2005 almost 100 per cent was still on shelves rather than being in files on mass storage. Surveys have also shown that in universities there is a major problem of material that is scattered, unidentified, undocumented and not under any form of preservation plan. These collection surveys are from Europe and North America because there is no survey of the situation in the UK, in itself a cause for concern.’

Preserving Email, a new report from the DPC, gives practical advice on how to ensure email remains accessible

Email is a defining feature of our age and a critical element in all manner of transactions. Industry and commerce depend upon email; families and friendships are sustained by it; government and economies rely upon it; communities are created and strengthened by it.  Voluminous, pervasive and proliferating, email fills our days like no other technology.  Complex, intangible and essential, email manifests important personal and professional exchanges.  The jewels are sometimes hidden in massive volumes of ephemera, and even greater volumes of trash.  But it is hard to remember how we functioned before the widespread adoption of email in public and private life.

Tools and services for digital preservation have been slow to develop and are hard to embed within organisational workflows. Many agencies and sectors report significant gaps in the infrastructure necessary to deliver lasting impact from highly prized and valuable digital resources and those charged with preservation often face complex and highly specialised issues in relative isolation. Arguably, the e-publishing sector is the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps the most advanced part of the digital preservation community, this sector has growing experience in fixing technical challenges and is supported by a well-developed - if complicated and at times dysfunctional - value chain that connects authors, publishers, sellers, purchasers and consumers. A range of service providers and tools now aim to secure this supply chain with digital preservation. Outsourcing - specifically knowing how to trust services that claim to provide digital preservation - has been one of the key barriers to preservation being adopted more widely so the experience of the E-Journal community is of much wider relevance than just the library and academic community.

If the E-Journal market has genuinely solved the 'trust question’ then everyone needs to know about it. If it has not, then consideration of the issues will at least enable a more nuanced reflection on how the wider community might want develop trust in the preservation of more esoteric or challenging content types. Therefore, this DPC briefing day will examine: 

• perceptions and procurement of preservation services for E-journals
• technical architectures for existing services for preservation of E-journals and what they can tell us
• lessons learned, problems solved, experiences to pass on
• trust: how it is established and maintained
• emerging trends for e-journal and e-book preservation

Who should come?

• Collections managers, curators and archivists in all institutions
• Tools developers and policy makers in digital preservation
• Innovators and researchers in publishing policy and management
• Innovators and researchers in computing science
• Vendors and providers of journal content and services
• Innovators, vendors and commentators on digital preservation and cognate services
• Analysts developing tools and approaches for business continuity management.

Provisional Programme (details subject to change and refinement)

1000 Registration and Coffee

1045 Welcome and introductions William Kilbride, DPC

1050 The Nature of the Problem: an introduction to e-journals and their preservation, Neil Beagrie, Charles Beagrie Ltd

1120 Licensing E-Journal Content , Liam Earney (JISC Collections)

1140 Service Providers’ Forum,  Kate Wittenberg (Portico), Adam Rusbridge (UK LOCKSS Alliance), Randy Kiefer (CLOCKSS), Marcel Ras (eDepot/ KB)

1240 Discussion

1300 Lunch

1400 The Keepers Registry: Enabling Trust in e-Journal Preservation, Peter Burnhill (Edina)

1430 Publishers’ Perspectives, Fiona Murphy (Wiley)

1500 Publishers’ Perspectives, Richard Kidd (Royal Society of Chemistry)

1530 Coffee

1600 Panel session and discussion, led by Neil Grindley, JISC

1650 Wrapup, William Kilbride, DPC

By 1700 Close

The DPC and the Archives and Records Association are pleased to invite students and researchers in archives, records management and librarianship to a half day conference on practical workplace skills in digital preservation.  Hosted by University College London, and organised in partnership with the University of Aberystwyth and the University of Dundee, this mini-conference will bring a select group of leading practitioners together with the next generation of archivists, records managers and ibrarians to discuss the challenges of digital collections management and digital preservation.  In a lively set of presentations and discussions, each of the speakers will be invited to reflect on 'the things I wish I knew before I started' - 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.

1330 Welcome and introduction (Sarah Higgins – University of Aberystwyth)

1335 Digital preservation – key challenges and key skills (William Kilbride DPC)

1400 Digital archives and digital preservation – what I wish someone had told me before I started (Dave Thompson, Wellcome Library)

1420 Making sense of digital collections – ingest, characterisation and workflows in archives (Adrian Brown, Parliamentary Archives)

1440 A rough guide to digital preservation: the challenges of an increasingly digital world (Andrew Fetherston, Museum of London)

1500 Archiving the UK Web – (Helen Hockx-Yu British Library)

1520 Q&A

1530 Tea and coffee

1600 Panel: the next generation of digital archivist (chaired by Sarah Higgins)

Speakers' Biographies

Adrian is Assistant Clerk of the Records at the Parliamentary Archives in London, where he is responsible for digital and analogue preservation, cataloguing and digitisation. He began his career as a field archaeologist, after studying Medieval Literature at the University of Durham. In 1994, he moved to the English Heritage Centre for Archaeology in Portsmouth, where he was responsible for managing its archaeological archives and other information resources. In this role, he developed and implemented a digital archiving programme to enable the long-term preservation and re-use of the CfA's extensive and diverse digital collections. Adrian moved to the Digital Preservation Department of the UK National Archives in 2002, and was appointed Head of Digital Preservation in 2005. In that role he was responsible for the long-term preservation of born-digital public records created by the UK government and courts, including the development of the PRONOM and DROID tools and a web archiving programme, and led the team which won the international Digital Preservation Award in 2007 and the 2011 Queen's Award for Enterprise in Innovation. He has lectured and published widely on all aspects of digital preservation.

• Sarah Higgins

Sarah Higgins lectures in Archives Administration and Records Management at Aberystwyth University, where her research focuses on the lifecycle management of digital materials by archives services, libraries and other information professionals. She was formerly employed by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) where she led the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model Project and the standards advisory function. She moved to the DCC from the University of Edinburgh where she worked in both Special Collections and the Digital Library undertaking a variety of metadata development and co-ordination roles across their cultural collections. A trained cartographer she was previously in charge of the British Antarctic Survey's Geographical Information Collection and Secretary to the UK Government's Advisory Committee on Antarctic Place-names.

• Helen Hockx-Yu

Helen Hockx-Yu, Head of Web Archiving at the British Library, leads a team of web archivists and technologists to archive and preserve the UK web. Previously, Helen was project manager of the Planets project, a four-year project co-funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework Programme to address core digital preservation challenges. Before joining the British Library, Helen worked as a Programme Manager at the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, overseeing JISC's technology research and development activities in the area of digital preservation. 

• William Kilbride

William is Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a not for profit membership organisation which exists to enable and advocate long term access to digital objects.  William started his career as an archaeologist in the early 1990s when the expertise and enthusiasm to use new technologies to detect and dismantle archaeological sites was not matched by a capacity to preserve the data that resulted. This led him into research in digital preservation.  He was previously Lecturer in Archaeology at Glasgow University, Assistant Director of the Archaeology Data Service in York and research manager at Glasgow Museums.

• Patricia Sleeman

Patricia has worked in digital preservation for more than 10 years at ULCC. Projects she has worked on include: The National Digital Archive of Datasets, EVAMP,The Digital Preservation Training Programme, Digitisation Preservation project (JISC). She has also worked on various consultancies for both UK  and internal organisations. Recent work has included the EU/UNESCO funded House of Books Project working with The Iraq National Library and Archives. She speaks Irish and Spanish and has played an active role in various professional archival organisations, both in the UK and internationally.

• Dave Thompson

Notes from the event

Notes from the event have been kindly provided by Rebecca Volk

The event has also been blogged by Catherin MacIntyre of LSE archives who attended: http://lib-1.lse.ac.uk/archivesblog/?p=4012

DPC is delighted to offer members a preview of our latest Technology Watch Report ‘Preserving Email’, written by Chris Prom of the University of Illinois.
 
DPC Technology Watch Reports identify, delineate, monitor and address topics that have major bearing on ensuring our collected digital memory will be available tomorrow.  They provide an advanced introduction in order to support those charged with ensuring a robust digital memory and they are of general interest to a wide and international audience with interests in computing, information management, collections management and technology.  The reports are commissioned after consultation with members; they are written by experts; and they are thoroughly scrutinised by peers before being released.  The reports are informed, current, concise and balanced and they lower the barriers to participation in digital preservation. The reports are a distinctive and lasting contribution to the dissemination of good practice in digital preservation. ‘Preserving Email’ is the first Technology Watch Report to be published by the DPC in association with Charles Beagrie Ltd. Neil Beagrie, Director of Consultancy at Charles Beagrie Ltd, was commissioned to act as principal investigator and managing editor of the series in 2011.  The managing editor has been further supported by an Editorial Board drawn from DPC members and peer reviewers who have commented on the text prior to release.  The Editorial Board comprises William Kilbride (Chair), Neil Beagrie (Series Editor), Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth), Tim Keefe (Trinity College Dublin), Andrew McHugh (University of Glasgow), Dave Thompson (Wellcome Library).
 

DPC is delighted to welcome the London School of Economics as its newest member.

‘LSE Library has been developing its digital preservation capacity for around two years - since initial planning and making the business case’, explained Ed Fay. ‘We have already made use of the events programme offered by the DPC to train members of our specialist team. Now that our preservation capacity is moving from development to operation we enter a new phase of activity.’

The National Archives is proposing to launch a new phase of development of its DROID tool, and is seeking to engage with various user groups and stakeholders from the digital preservation community, government and the wider archives sector communities to help inform and discuss potential developments and user needs. As part of this process, The National Archives, in conjunction with the Digital Preservation Coalition, invites interested parties to attend a one day workshop, hosted at Kew, to discuss their experiences of using DROID and PRONOM in their respective disciplines, discuss how the tools fit their use case, and describe both positive and negative experiences of the tools and their interaction with The National Archives.

There will be a mixture of invited talks and extensive open discussions; the invited talks may focus on experiences, ideas to augment or improve either service, and may encompass wider ideas and thoughts on file identification in general. The day will commence with a short introduction by Tim Gollins, Head of Digital Preservation at The National Archives, who will set out the case for PRONOM and DROID at The National Archives, and describe the business requirements which have helped shape and drive the tools development to this point. Throughout the day, via twitter and less technology dependent mechanisms, we will seek to gather a list of hot topics and discussion points from the community, which will then be used as the basis for an end of day discussion which will help inform the development of the next iteration of DROID, set to commence in 2012. The result of the day will provide The National Archives with content to begin a broader open consultation between December and January which will see active participants in the DROID community submit requirements for the tool and vote on and discuss existing requirements. The National Archives will use this whole process to help prioritise community requests, alongside its own internal requirements, when work on DROID 7.0 begins.

Programme of Presentations:

• Ross Spencer: Linked Data PRONOM
•  Dr David Tarrant (University of Southampton) - UHT Digital Preservation: Increasing the Shelf Life of our Data, Services and Tools
• Bill Roberts (Open Planets Foundation (OPF), The Nationaal Archief (National Archives of the Netherlands)) – ‘Towards a format registry ecosystem’
• Andy Jackson: Linked People
• Kate Pritchard, Mike Kaye (DEFRA – Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) - ‘DEFRA experiences using DROID and using an IT provider’
• Jenny Mitcham (Archaeology Data Service) - ‘Using DROID to create file level metadata – a case study from the Archaeology Data Service’
• Johan van der Knijff (SCAPE Project / Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands) – ‘Evaluation of format identification tools’