At the end of January 2023 the DPC contacted its Members to find out who would be interested in joining a new DPC Working Group for Museums and Galleries. We had a lot of interest - in fact even from Members who we weren’t aware were looking after collections of this nature. The group now has members from Australia, USA, UK and the Netherlands.
We held our first meeting in March 2023 and have met for an hour every other month since. Though we only advertise our meetings to those who are signed up for the group, we are keen that learnings from our discussions are more broadly shared with the wider digital preservation community. This blog post intends to do just that by summarizing the activities of our first year.
1. Brainstorming
In our first meeting, as well as discussing and agreeing our Terms of Reference, we also had some great discussions (helped by a Jamboard) on some of the big questions such as:
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What are the specific challenges of working in digital preservation in a museum or gallery setting?
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What would you like this group to do?
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What topics would you like to discuss?
It seemed that many of the specific challenges in this sector relate to staff time/capacity and resourcing as well as a very real sense that challenges related to digital collections are typically seen as a lower priority when compared to physical objects, exhibitions and walk-in visitors. There was a sense within the group that museums and galleries are behind the library and archive sectors when it comes to digital preservation. While there are several notable exceptions who have already implemented Digital Preservation Systems, there was a very real desire to ‘catch up’ by other members of the group. There was also a strong theme around the complexity of the digital objects that group members were charged with preserving, and challenges around displaying born digital objects in a physical museum or gallery setting. While Complex Digital Objects do exist in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) collections, there are often more held within the collections of museums and galleries.
Though it was clear that the working group itself could not solve all of these problems, participants were keen to have a supportive space where experiences could be shared and an external perspective could be sought on their challenges. They were keen to be able to benchmark against each other and to develop a community of practice.
Lots of ideas were shared for topics that could be covered in future meetings, including discussions around procedures, tools in use, access strategies, systems integration, and making the case for digital preservation.
2. Benchmarking with DPC RAM
Given one of the themes that came out of our initial discussions was benchmarking against others, for our second working group meeting, in May 2023, group members had prepared by carrying out DPC RAM assessments (specific to their digital museum and gallery collections) and we were able to create some summary graphs that enabled attendees to benchmark against each other. It was noted by a comparison with data from other DPC Members that as anticipated, this community was lagging slightly behind other sectors (though RAM target levels were much the same). There were some interesting observations noted, for example that ‘Content preservation’ seemed to be a higher priority for improvement in this community than for other sectors. This is likely due to the complexity of some of the content held as mentioned previously.
3. Advocacy
Noting that some of the key areas that group members needed to focus on to move forward with DPC RAM related to advocacy, we decided to theme July’s meeting on this topic. DPC’s Head of Advocacy and Community Engagement, Sarah Middleton, joined this meeting to give a short presentation, sharing some relevant tips and tricks from her advocacy training sessions. We were keen that all group members went away with at least one practical action that they could take forward. We also spent some time talking about the DPC’s Executive Guide on Digital Preservation which has a section aimed specifically at the Museums and Galleries sector and includes motivators and other statements that could be used to help persuade others of the importance and relevance of digital preservation.
4. The Collections Toolkit
The Collections Trust Toolkit for Managing Digital Collections was something that had been mentioned by a couple of group members in previous meetings, so we took a deep dive into this in September. It was great to have Sophie Walker (Imperial War Museum, UK) and Elisabeth Thurlow (University of Arts London) at our meeting to talk us through the Toolkit. Both Sophie and Elisabeth had been involved in developing the Toolkit and were able to explain how it had been created and its intended use. It was a useful opportunity to be able to discuss the Toolkit and ask questions.
5. The ‘Bit List’ of Endangered Species
In our November meeting the focus was on the recently published edition of the DPC’s Bit List of Endangered Digital Species and more specifically on the Museums and Galleries section of the list. Somaya Langley (Science Museum Group, UK), who had been on the Bit List Council for the Museums and Galleries species, was able to take the group through the categories and some of the decisions made for this edition. The group went on to discuss which of the categories in the list presented challenges to them in their own work and which they might be looking at moving forward with over the coming years. We discussed how the group could try and influence future iterations of the Bit List by addressing a particular challenge and providing case studies. This is something we may revisit in future meetings.
6. Plans for 2024
In our forthcoming meeting for January 2024 we are going to be talking about plans for the year ahead. There is so much digital preservation work going on in all of the organizations that make up this working group. We get a little flavour of that in the regular updates section of our meetings, but this time group members will all have the chance to flag up three digital preservation activities that they plan to focus on over the next year. Discussing plans in this way will further help us to build that supportive network and community of practice that the group wants. Perhaps it will help us to draw out some key topics to focus on in our meetings or open up collaboration opportunities to group members who are working on similar challenges.
The other important thing that we are going to be doing at the end of this first year of the group’s operation is of course gathering feedback from group members about whether we are meeting their expectations, what we should do differently, and which topics they would like to focus on over the next few months. We will then be able to plan our meetings for 2024 accordingly.
As the Museums and Galleries community within the DPC steadily grows, we are looking forward to more high-quality chats and networking in 2024!
Do get in touch if you are a DPC Member, involved in digital preservation activities in a Museum or Gallery setting, and you would like to join this working group.
Thanks to Somaya Langley (vice chair of the working group) for commenting on a previous draft of this blog post.