Natalie Anderson is Project Officer, Digital Archives Innovation and Research, at National Archives of Australia. She attended ASA 2022 Here We Are Conference with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.
I was recently the lucky recipient of a #DigitalPreservationCoalition (DPC) grant to support my registration and attendance to this year’s #AustralianSocietyofArchivists (ASA) national annual conference – #HereWeAre2022 in Canberra.
As a staff member of the National Archives of Australia and working in the Digital Archives Innovation and Research section, I am fully aware of the importance of digital preservation. By safeguarding Australian Government digital records and data, we can ensure that future generations will be able to access and use this rich and important digital collection. The ASA is Australia’s peak professional body for archivists and recordkeepers. They advocate on behalf of archivists, and the archival and recordkeeping profession, and seek to promote the value of archives and records, as well as support best practice standards and services. Key themes for this year’s conference included Practice and Identity, Collaboration and Advocacy, and Developing Practices.
Over two days I posted about conference presentations on LinkedIn which related to digital preservation. In this blog I will be sharing one of the presentations that was of particular interest to me.
Lauren Curless, Senior Manager Collection Management, National Film and Sound Archive (NSFA), presented, Evolving Identities: The Modern AV Archivist, discussing the changing roles of Archivists in the Digital Age.
NFSA is the national agency tasked with the visibility, usability, and sustainability of Australia’s audiovisual heritage. This includes everything from radio, television, cinema, home movies, and all other audiovisual media. Their collection sits just under four million items, with over half of those items being digital. They have also recently started collecting video games. The video games industry is a large global industry worth more than the traditional music and film industry combined. The transfer of these complex objects has had a significant impact on NSFA’s collecting activities – requiring NFSA to collaborate with the larger archival community to find solutions for best preservation practices.
NFSA’s access program offers program makers, researchers, and members of the public opportunities to engage directly with their analogue and digital collections. They seek to ensure that Australians see themselves in the collection and have access to – including those who live in remote communities and have limited digital literacy skills. So, with this in mind and to improve digital literacy, the NFSA is a founding member of the Australian Media Literacy Alliance and are currently building an education and media function to assist Australians in engaging with their collection and apply archival values. They have also developed a media literacy program for school children, Media and Me, which aims to empower children to make better choices with how they consume and engage with content online. As collectors of audiovisual material, the NFSA want to emphasise transparency and trustworthiness. Material in the collection has provenance, and no tampering has taken place. This is especially important in recent times which has seen an increasing level of engagement with digital content.
In her presentation Lauren highlighted that digital is not just a format – it is a tool and an infrastructure, which has shaped the way we communicate as a society, and for a geographic region as large as Australia, this has significant impact. Only recently digitisation was considered the end goal however, as we know with long-term preservation – it is just the starting point. When it comes to defining the archivist role in this modern age, are we custodians? Are we protectors or interpreters? Lauren believes our role is to identify, record, and discuss what our collections say about national identity. To encourage users to engage and critique what that is and how it changes over time.
One of the challenging aspects in the archival profession today has been integrating what has been traditionally ICT skills into our job descriptions. We need to be working with the tertiary education sector to provide better frameworks to prepare students for digital archiving roles. The NSFA has challenging skillsets to recruit for, such as knowing tech codes for film and understanding digital preservation tasks like normalisation and fixity checking. Adaptability and problem-solving and ensuring there is space to experiment and make mistakes to find other ways of working are a key focus for the organisation.
NFSA are experimenting with analytics to understand their collection and workflows better, and have also begun to carve out a digital preservation function with dedicated roles that are properly defined. They are also updating their digital infrastructure and are members of the Digital Preservation Coalition – which they have found to be a great forum to collaborate and engage with colleagues from various organisations, as well as access resources to help them access maturity and define future archival roles. In partnership with the Olympic committee, NFSA have also explored the use of synthetic DNA storage. DNA is an interesting development, and it has huge storage efficiency applications that could benefit archival collections. They are also trialling machine learning and AI technology to help make their collections more discoverable.
Overall, the NSFA are embracing experimentation. To paraphrase Lauren, “We know how to digitise and describe our collection, so [now it’s time to] look towards emerging technologies.” With each new project, NFSA is going out of their comfort zone, collaborating with industry experts, and thinking about what Australians expect in an archive in the 21st Century. Their identity has shifted a little but their core values and capabilities as archivists has remained steady. The challenge now is that they do not run out of time to collect content being created for future generations.
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