Bridie-Ann Carr is the Records and Information Manager at Imperial War Museums. She recently attended the IRMS 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.
In mid-May I attended the IRMS Conference with support from the Career Development Fund. This year’s theme was ‘Embracing a New Information Generation’, which felt like a perfect fit, as I am new professional working with electronic records. I have wanted to attend a conference since qualifying as a Records Manager and set myself the aim to come back to IWM with new skills and knowledge I could immediately apply to my work. I also wanted to meet as many people as I could from across our sector. Covid moved many events on online and I feel like I have missed out on learning from others over a cup of tea and a biscuit!
At IWM I am based in a small Museum Archive team, which is part of the Governance Department. We are responsible for anything related to the museum’s own information, including records management, the institutional archive, and data protection. This includes responsibility for the digital preservation of our electronic records and archive. My main project is working with departments to organise our shared drives, both for an eventual move off the shared drives, and to make sure we are capturing electronic records for the archive. The benefit of being part of a small team is overseeing every stage of their lifecycle, including digital preservation.
As a records manager interested in digital preservation, I was of course excited to hear Ruth Kusionowicz’s presentation on how and why the two go hand in hand – both are ongoing processes, involve monitoring your files, and responding to change. Ruth highlighted how robust retention schedules can support your digital preservation work, enabling you to target your digital preservation activities to the records that require it. In my current project I have been planning for how we can make archiving and preserving our electronic files easier in the future, but Ruth’s session was a great reminder that with electronic files digital preservation should start when the file is created. Our early specifications have considered how we can transfer files to archive, but her talk made it clear that digital preservation needs to be its own criteria in any system or process we adopt.
My gut response to this is always how can I do this with so much clutter on our shared drives? It was clear from the many chats I had throughout the conference, and from the themes of many of the talks, that I am not the only one feeling like a huge backlog of electronic records is in the way of adopting new records management and digital preservation opportunities.
The ‘Conquering the Digital Heap’ session did provide some answers to this though. David Canning’s presentation on the Cabinet Office’s approach to their digital heap showed what is possible with new technology. They designed a lexicon of search terms, which included high value terms which were likely to indicate a record, and rot words (e.g. ‘blah’) that would identify a file as a candidate for deletion. The occurrence of the words was weighted alongside the file format to design a matrix for identifying files. Their approach is to be transparent with their process and margins of error, and to recognise that the code was not static and could change with their archival and records management needs. I have been able to use this as a baseline to start planning a low-tech version of this approach. Without access to complex search tools and algorithm building, I am planning to design some standard searches and conditions that can be applied when starting to clear a shared drive or appraise part of our electronic archive backlog. I also want to apply this to our email archive. Searching for ‘out of office’ and ‘auto-reply’ to identify content for deletion is such a brilliantly simple easy win, and exactly the kind of practical tip I wanted to learn from the conference.
As a new professional, I picked up many of these small tips and tricks from across the sessions. Ones I have immediately started using are referring to classifications as themes when talking with departments and using active and inactive for sorting files and folders, instead of confusing departments with our terminology. Most notable though, was from Emma Martin’s keynote speech, where she beautifully demonstrated how we can win people over to looking after their information now and in the future. The combination of historical context and simple questions to ask when using information in an organisation are something I want to add to our own training, especially as in a museum, history does tend to win people over extremely quickly.
I am grateful for the DPC Career Development Fund for offering this grant, as I was able to achieve both my early career aim of attending a conference and the aims I set for myself at the conference. With the cost of qualifying as an information professional, rising costs of living, and the lack of funding in the public sector, grants are essential for allowing as many people as possible to become involved in the wider sector events. Many in our profession work alone or in small teams, often with wide remits that require us to learn a range of technical skills, which can feel isolating. Sharing concerns, and solutions for them too, meant I came away from the conference with the sense of being part an information community.
Acknowledgements
The Career Development Fund is sponsored by the DPC’s Supporters who recognize the benefit and seek to support a connected and trained digital preservation workforce. We gratefully acknowledge their financial support to this programme and ask applicants to acknowledge that support in any communications that result. At the time of writing, the Career Development Fund is supported by Arkivum, Artefactual Systems Inc., AVP, Ex Libris, Iron Mountain, Libnova, Max Communications, Preservica and Twist Bioscience. A full list of supporters is online here.