Helen Busby is Archive Manager at University of East Anglia Archives.
For a small archive service, we like to dream big and ‘Do Different’ as the UEA moto goes. The inception of, and growth of our literary archive has been one of hope, ambition and the good will and generosity of our depositors. The British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) lives in the library service at the University East Anglia, the home of the oldest Creative Writing MA in the UK and a centre of literary activity. Alongside the UEA archive and rare books collection BACW proactively collects contemporary literature from Doris Lessing in 1945 through the twentieth century to the poets and prose writers of the present moment.
When you archive the contemporary, you can’t help but live in expectation of what’s coming next. In the last few years, it has become apparent that writers' archives are arriving in increasingly digital formats. Their drafting, correspondence and business lives exist in complex digital media, in proprietary formats and are difficult to capture and display to readers.
With a team of two, a busy public service, a teaching load and an IT service who are also very busy, our capacity to handle digital preservation is limited. We created our own ‘good enough’ solutions for material which inevitably made its way to us, but we knew we were going to need better tools for the job if we were going to be a safe repository for world leading literary archives.
For this vision and ambition I can take no credit. I arrived at UEA to cover our archivist who was engaged in an exciting Mellon Foundation funded project investigating collecting archives from underrepresented writers https://contemporarypoetryarchive.omeka.net/exhibits/show/home/about . I covered the teaching and found my bearings. Just before my contract ran out, our visionary archivist and the driving force of the BACW was promoted away from the service to do great work elsewhere.
This meant that when I took over the archivist role, in this compact and exciting service, we were one week away from embarking on a procurement tender to purchase a digital preservation system.
The formal procurement process had been preceded by a marathon of work; writing digital architecture documents with data diagrams, convincing the data processing team that we hadn’t gone mad with a data processing impact assessment, negotiating with senior leadership for backing, funding and time. For all that work I will be eternally grateful to my predecessor. When complex questions arose, we had diagrams and explanations which had been analysed and approved by the relevant teams in our organisation.
Our management team realised that it takes a village to procure a digital preservation system, so I was given the privilege working with a team of four others from across the library service who met weekly to advise, to support during difficult conversations and who acted as eyes and ears on the tender documents.
The procurement felt a bit like a recruitment process, which is something familiar that I quite enjoy. We were supported and directed by a colleague from the procurement team whose patience was endless. As the subject specialist (the only archivist in the room) I felt a heavy responsibility to make the right calls, to ask the right questions and I had to get over my worry of looking inexperienced in my new role.
I have never been a digital archivist before. In my twelve-year career in archives, I have worked on digitisation projects and on the fringes of born digital preservation. I’ve created catalogues, helped knock SIPs together, ingested packages to someone else’s system but all with a set of instructions and someone to call if it goes wrong. Leading the charge of the procurement of a digital preservation infrastructure felt massive and totally beyond my experience.
Working through the tender documents I found my feet a little, explaining digital preservation concepts and methods to others in the team, questioning my expectations of what a system should do and applying it to our needs. I remembered that I am trained and qualified and had some experience to draw on.
I should confess that I am a digital preservation enthusiast. I am fascinated by progress in digital preservation. My favourite workshop to run is on digital archives, challenging assumptions and misconceptions. Being able to answer the universal question ‘so what are you going to do when it’s all digital?’ makes my eyes light up, while everyone else’s glaze over. Working on digital preservation was the dream, I never thought it would reach me in Norfolk.
Once the procurement process was over, we still had some hurdles to overcome, budget constraints, information security checks and data protection all had to be re-examined and agreed. Our pre-procurement work came in especially handy, and so did senior management involvement when timescales were tight and we were waiting on checks and agreements from other teams in our organisation.
When we got the go ahead to award the tender the end of one tricky journey marked the start of our digital preservation adventure. Suddenly we are a service standing on the frontier of digital preservation. It was my turn to take the first steps and lay the road behind me.
In the ebb and flow between tender award and contract signing my colleague turned to me and asked, ‘so what do we do next, how will it work?’ and that really is the million-dollar question.
In my mind an ideal scenario would have been a two-year lead in time of research, formulating policies, creating workflows and training before anything was switched on, but life doesn’t work like that. We had a matter of weeks in which to prepare for our first steps into our digital preservation system. So here is what we did:
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Created a Gant chart. This started as a to do list of activities I thought needed to happen to enable digital preservation in our service. Some things happened smoothly without action from me, some have shifted back and forth on the timeline as I come to a gap in my knowledge that needs to be filled with research and experimentation.
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Making time. On management advice I blocked out two days a week (50% of my work time) to work on digital preservation. Having concentrated time to dedicate to the subject, I feel I’ve allowed myself to engage in research so I can better understand topics and make informed decisions on technical matters. Making time wasn’t easy and we had to be very clear as a service with our stakeholders that a huge amount of project work was being done ‘behind the scenes’.
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Creating policies. I’ve seen in practice how policies they can help guide, justify and direct a service, acting as bedrock and sail to the archive ship in a storm. The DPC digital preservation policy toolkit (https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/implement-digipres/policy-toolkit) was an absolute life saver, giving me a mental banister rail to hold during the policy writing.
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Getting to know our digital assets. I thought I knew what formats we had in each collection, I had made assumptions about structure, metadata and size. We have a basic digital asset register which records assets at collection level. On closer examination it doesn’t provide the level of detail we need to make operational decisions. On the ‘to do’ list is an exercise in making sure the asset register is fit for purpose, luckily the DPC has a tool kit for that (https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/implement-digipres/dar-toolkit)!
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Realising we are not alone. I have spent a lot of time with my head down, investigating the ins and outs of file formats, ingest workflows, checksums, security tags and more. Issues arise that test your understanding and the road forks all the time, presenting choices. Trusting your own judgement when you are learning a new piece of software, inventing a process and aiming for best practice is hard. Speaking to colleagues in a similar boat or who have experience of the process is like coming up for air. It can confirm your judgment, direct your thinking and allows you to see how far you’ve come. The DPC resources have been invaluable to me, access to reliable, understandable information (with references) has helped me get my priorities straight. Access to training, blogs and the DPC network has made me feel like I’m moving forwards in this process and that as a common-or-garden archivist I can get a handle on the hows and whys in digital preservation.
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Being ‘good enough’. Working out what we are trying to achieve and putting one foot in front of the other is my current methodology. Perfectionism is debilitating and can slow progress. We will make mistakes and will learn more as we undo them. A colleague recently suggested I write a conference paper on digital preservation and my response was “but I don’t know anything yet!” Part of writing this blog, for me, is about surrendering the illusion that I have all the answers, but luckily there is a huge swathe of resources out there to help me find out what I need to know about digital preservation, when I need to know it.
Alongside these lofty aims we are throwing ourselves into all the training that Preservica can offer, we are creating lists of queries and wishes for our Preservica advisors. I’m currently preparing a test collection of digital archives for ingest into Preservica. This involves creating a detailed digital asset register so I know the collection well before we start experimenting.
The process of launching our digital preservation at BACW has happened incredibly quickly. Learning the basics of the system and being operational is our current aim. Although I am starting to think about the amazing things we can do with this system and the opportunities it presents. It won’t be long before we’re dreaming big again.