James Baker is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. His work sits at the intersection of history, cultural heritage, and digital technologies. He leads Digital Preservation Southampton, a unit that provides flexible digital preservation solutions for organisations in all sectors.
In 2023 I was lucky enough to be awarded funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to do something I really enjoy but rarely have enough time for: spending time with digital preservation professionals, trying to understand what they need, and considering if and in what ways I can be of use. Of course the needs of digital preservation professionals are, as is well documented, many and various.
As recent DPC blogs have shown, community needs extend from wanting a better sense of ‘business-as-usual’ for digital preservation and getting employers to pay closer attention to their mental health and well-being, to the creation of safe spaces in which professionals can share and learn. Rather than try to cover everything, what our project sought to do - in line with the particular funding we received - was to take a commercialisation perspective on need, to ask what problems digital preservation professionals are trying to solve and in turn what new forms of sectoral capacity could benefit the community. To drive this work we hired Joash Johnson, an individual with a background in user discovery and digital product development. He also, importantly as it turned out, had no experience of working in collections contexts and so was usefully unencumbered by preconceptions or existing opinions on digital preservation. From this ‘outsider’ perspective, we then spent the rest of the project visiting collecting institutions in the UK, conducting surveys, and running events that brought together experts and practitioners to share insights and experiences.
The project finished last year and three themes stood out from our interactions with the digital preservation community. First, a sense that digital collections were often perceived as having less organisational value than ‘traditional’ material collections. Second, the many challenges faced by digital preservation professionals in advocating for the resources they need to manage the digital collections in their care. And third, the evolving roles of professionals tasked with the stewardship of digital collections and the tendency for those roles to attain a “miracle worker” status that collapses a range of computational, technical, and media theoretical knowledges and capabilities. Teasing out those knowledges and capabilities into competency frameworks like DPC CAT (now at Version 2!) has - it appears - been useful for digital preservation professionals to underscore the range of skills they require to do effective digital preservation work. At the same time, our work indicates that there may also be some mismatch between the level of competency attributed to digital preservation roles and the realities of digital preservation work: in short, many digital preservation professionals are doing extraordinary work with little time, few resources, inadequate recognition for their tentacular skillset, and insufficient reward for stewarding complex collections into the future. These findings are explored in more detail in our report ‘Understanding Need Among Digital Preservation Professionals’. They may not surprise many people reading this, but we hope nevertheless that the report is a useful addition to existing work on workforce planning in the digital preservation sector, and we thank all those whose participation in project activities made the report possible.