Rosie Dyson is the Digital Collections Officer at Leeds University Libraries and Galleries (Special Collections). She attended the ARA 2024 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.
I was delighted to receive a DPC Career Development Fund Grant to attend the ARA 2024 Conference in Birmingham, UK. As anticipated, it was an excellent opportunity for networking, knowledge-sharing and gaining fresh ideas and perspectives. In this blog, I reflect on my time at the conference and recount some of the top takeaways and practical solutions for reducing our digital carbon footprint.
Photo of Birmingham Council Chambers (where the evening social was held)
The conference theme was ‘Climate and Crisis: Tackling it together’, which comes at a pertinent time not only for archives in general, but also for my own institution, the University of Leeds. Action on climate change is one of the key factors of the University Library’s Forward Plan, and we are currently undergoing a £4.4M Digital Library Infrastructure Project (DLIP) to transform online access to our rare and special collections. This is an appropriate time to take stock of how we can integrate sustainable approaches to digital preservation into our business-as-usual offer at Leeds.
The programme was varied and impressive and covered both specific subject areas and big picture themes. One theme that came up time and again was how we need to just start taking actions towards sustainability, no matter how small, as small actions repeated over time do make a difference. Small actions that were suggested over the course of the conference included really basic things we could all be doing now such as getting rid of files and emails we no longer need, turning off unnecessary versioning on documents and sharing links to documents rather than the documents themselves.
I was inspired by various talks that provided practical solutions for reducing our digital carbon footprint and will reflect on three in particular. Highlights included Laura Peaurt’s (University Of Nottingham) paper “Digital preservation storage. Exploring options to improve sustainability” where she discussed the importance of refining storage to reduce financial costs and digital carbon footprint. Her proposal to move TIFFS to glacial storage and keep low-res access copies in S3 was a practical and sustainable one. She also discussed quick wins for environmental impact such as updating depositor advice to raise environmental impact awareness and putting the onus on depositors to send only relevant files. Changing the “just in case” mentality was another topic she touched on, that if files are preserved correctly, local copies are unnecessary and can be discarded. Other ideas to improve sustainability included querying whether it is necessary to create disk images for all deposits, only converting file types on a risk basis, reviewing cleanup and deletion and building sustainability into retention schedule work.
David Jenkins (University of Leicester) presented a really engaging talk on his promotion of a successful digital cleanup task entitled “Environmental action and records management engagement: reflections on promoting an organisational digital clean-up”. He used World Digital Cleanup Day as a hook to create website engagement activities in order to get buy-in from senior staff. This buy-in meant teams felt empowered to set aside time to attend to the cleanup. He suggested that the digital cloud has a higher carbon footprint than the airline industry and explained how the creation and storage of data involves high energy and water use to power and cool data centres. The transmission of data also has implications for the environment and David suggested that sharing a link rather than the document itself is an easy way to help.
Rachel MacGregor (University of Warwick) gave an upbeat and refreshing presentation “Every bit helps: developing and embedding sustainable practice in digital preservation”. She asked us to take a curious approach to digital preservation, querying whether we need to keep everything, whether we should consider different levels of preservation for different content and consider the processes that are in our control. These include our in-house digital preservation processes and questioning the green credentials of digital preservation system providers. The topic of getting sustainable practice written into policy was raised again, and that although it may not always be possible for depositors to be selective, minimal processing and a lack of appraisal can sometimes be a greener alternative. Rachel raised the argument that more actively managed files mean more effective digital preservation. Her closing remarks were that to do nothing is not an option, which summed up the conference as a whole.
Photo of Ozzy the Bull at Birmingham New Street Station
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., boxxe, Cerabyte, Evolved Binary, Ex Libris, Iron Mountain, Libnova, Max Communications, Preservica and Simon P Wilson. A full list of supporters is online here.