New Members

The United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) becomes the newest organisation to join the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC).

Housed at the Palais des Nations, UNOG serves as the representative office of the Secretary-General at Geneva and in providing key infrastructure and support to the Organization’s efforts to maintain international peace and security.

The Library of the United Nations in Geneva has recently launched its “Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives” project, under the responsibility of the Chief of the Institutional Memory Section. Through the project, the entire content of the League of Nations Archives (registered in the UNESCO’s Memory of the World Registry), consisting of approximately 15 million pages of materials, will be digitized.

Qatar National Library (QNL) has joined the Digital Preservation Coalition, becoming the DPC’s newest Associate member.

Among its mandates, QNL has a remit to collect, preserve and provide access to heritage content and materials representative of Qatar and the wider Arab region. Collections are made available through the Library itself, as well as through its research library function to support education and research at all levels, and through its public library function which serves the metropolitan area. With each of these functions increasingly being fulfilled digitally, addressing issues of digital preservation has become a cornerstone of QNL’s operations.

The Internet Archive (IA) has joined the Digital Preservation Coalition, becoming its 80th Member.

As the world's largest and oldest web archive, and a large-scale digital library committed to ‘universal access to all knowledge,’ the Internet Archive brings significant expertise to acquiring, preserving, and providing access to digital materials.

Based in San Francisco USA, the Internet Archive is the original developer of a suite of web archiving, digitization, and access technologies that remain industry standards and works with national and international libraries, archives, governments, non-profit technology organizations, and community initiatives, for almost two decades to provide digital library, preservation, and archiving services.

Swansea University becomes the newest Associate Member of the Digital Preservation Coalition this week.

Home to the Richard Burton Archives which holds material of local, regional and national significance, the Archives preserves and makes accessible records of historical value created or acquired by the University. Through its holdings and the expertise of its staff, the Archives actively supports the mission of the University to provide an environment of research excellence, to deliver an outstanding student experience with teaching of the highest quality, and to enrich the community and cultural life of Wales and beyond.

The University of Salford has joined the Digital Preservation Coalition, becoming its newest Associate Member.

The University of Salford has a long-standing interest in the heritage of its surrounding environment, made evident from its archival holdings. The institution has also acquired a substantial art collection, which is housed in the Salford Museum and Art Gallery.

As a higher education institution, the University holds a significant amount of research data and associated materials which must be preserved in digital formats. A research data management policy and related service underpin this and provides a snapshot of the University’s current state but will be subject to change as part of the ongoing Catalyst Digital IT strategy. All these aspects have in recent years focused the institution’s attention on digital preservation.

The University of Nottingham has become the latest organisation to join the Digital Preservation Coalition as Associate Member this month.

The University Library has been actively collecting manuscript and archive material for over seventy years and now holds over 3 million records in over 700 archive and manuscript collections. The University also holds over 80,000 rare books and published works in a number of named special collections.

Part of The University of Nottingham Libraries, Manuscripts and Special Collections is acquiring increasing amounts of born digital records, digital images and hybrid collections from both within the University and private owners of archives.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) welcomes RBS Archives as its newest Associate Member this week. 

RBS Archives manages the archive holdings of RBS and around 250 constituent and predecessor companies dating from the 1660s to the present day. In 2015 RBS Archives was the first business archive in Scotland to be awarded UK-wide Archive Service Accreditation status, and two of their collections are inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, in recognition of their national, international and cultural significance.

The University of Liverpool has become the latest organisation to join the Digital Preservation Coalition as Associate Member this week.

Currently exploring digital preservation best practice, the University’s interest in digital preservation is concentrated around the Libraries, Museums, Galleries and Records Management functions which hold institutional records, research articles and theses, research data, born digital archives and archival items in a large range of electronic formats.

A working group from the Library and Computing Services at the University is currently focused on the development of improved workflows and infrastructure to ingest ‘born digital’ material within its institutional and deposited archive collections, and to convert and manage archival material in a range of electronic formats to ensure access in perpetuity.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome Chester Beatty in Dublin as Associate member.

Chester Beatty has been described as the finest collection of manuscripts and books assembled by a private collector in the 20th century. It includes representative samples of the world’s heritage (artistic, religious and secular) from about 2700 BC to the present century.

The museum is beginning a major in-house digitisation programme with the long term goal of digitising the entirety of its collections. This growing body of digital assets will be recognised as a valuable part of Chester Beatty’s organisational holdings and will need to be managed as such.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome the University of East Anglia (UEA) as its newest Associate Member today.

Through its teaching and research activities, the University of East Anglia (UEA) creates and collects a wide range of digital content, much of which needs to remain accessible and usable over time. The driver for the University of East Anglia joining as a Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Associate at this time is for its Archives to develop better workflows and infrastructure to ingest ‘born digital’ material within its literary archive collections.

The University has a number of archives, such as the University Archives, the British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) and the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA), which are each engaged in digitisation and are beginning to collect born digital content. Steps are already in place to transfer and secure the files, but we wish to develop a more robust strategy for dealing with this content.