News

The DPC has today published a response to the second phase of consultation on electronic legal deposit which was submitted to the Department for Culture Media and Sport at the end of December. It notes the essential relationship between preservation and access.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome the UK LOCKSS Alliance as its latest associate member.

The UK LOCKSS Alliance is a co-operative organization which ensures continuing access to scholarly work over the long term.  Its focus is on ensuring preservation and continuing access to electronic journals, but has interests and current research work on the preservation of all library collections, thus making it a natural fit within the DPC family.

Appropriate and timely examination of the digital preservation plans of digitization projects can have a lasting impact.  Projects may not know or understand the risks they run. Simple assessment can help them identify and address these risks sooner rather than later.

Comments are sought on the DPC's draft response to the DCMS's consultation on the regulations for Legal Deposit of electronic materials.  The draft response is online at: http://www.dpconline.org/advocacy/direct-advocacy/dpc-response-to-electronic-legal-deposit [pdf, login required] Comments are requested by Monday 13th December. 

In January 2010 the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) consulted on draft regulations for the legal deposit of ‘free of charge’ electronic publications – the ‘free web’.  This consultation was intended to be the first part of a two part process and the DPC responded arguing inter alia that the second phase of proposals be presented without delay as arguably the ‘paid web’ includes material of lasting value and that until regulations were introduced this element of our collected digital memory would be at risk. 

The DPC, JISC and West Yorkshire Archive Service are delighted to announce the release of a new digital preservation case note which examines the practical problems of digital preservation faced by West Yorkshire Archive Service as they negotiated and received their first large digital collection.  They conclude that although digital preservation can seem daunting and although nobody has the perfect answer to digital preservation for every case, that if we try we may fail but if we do nothing we certainly will.

The case note will be released at the end of October: a member's preview of the Case Note is available here (login required).

Glasgow Museums and the DPC, with the assistance of the JISC are delighted to announce the release of a new addition to the Digital Preservation Case Notes series.  In this case note, Glasgow Museums shows that the benefits of digital preservation can be expressed in terms of new opportunities they create in the short and long term.  Even relatively simple steps can bring early rewards if properly embedded within the mission of an organization.

The DPC has responded to the consultation on the Public records review, welcoming the explicit statement that digitized and ‘born digital’ materials constitute a public record, noting and supporting the focus on informational content and the consequent need for ‘technology proofing’ and the management of formats.  The DPC has offered its assistance in identifying and resolving issues that may arise.

The Digital Preservation Coalition is delighted to welcome St Andrews University as its latest associate member.

Birgit Plietzsch, Arts Computing Advisor at the University explained 'Most of today's information is held in a digital format. As a University we need to ensure that digital information remains accessible for as long as required. Our current focus is on the preservation of Arts and Humanities electronic resources. Such resources are often the outcome of expensive publicly funded research projects. It is in the interest of the scholarly community within the University to ensure the data contained within these resources is preserved in the long-term.'

The DPC, with help from the British Library , Portico and ULCC, and with funding from JISC, is pleased to announce the launch of the fourth in a series of Digital Preservation Case Notes.  The Case Notes offer straightforward examples of organisations and individuals tackling the digital preservation challenges that come from mass digitization.  The latest describes the Archival Sound Recordings (2) project from the British Library.  It discusses the benefits that accrue to preservation when content and metadata are wrapped together - and a technology called METS which can help to achieve that.