Jeanne Kramer-Smyth is the Digital Preservation Program Lead at the World Bank Group Archives
Back in 2018, when the Digital Preservation Program at the World Bank Group had matured enough for me to begin sharing regular progress updates with the broader World Bank Group Archives team, I had an opportunity to redefine what it meant to be “part of” our digital preservation community. With the enthusiastic support of the leadership of the Archives, I hosted a half-day workshop that included all the archives’ staff. My goal was to invite everyone to participate in the creation of the new program. We needed the combined depth and breadth of their expertise. While digital preservation certainly has major technological components, it still needs adherence to standard archival principles and processes to be successful. We needed our subject matter expects in transfer, ingest, appraisal, selection, arrangement, description, and access to tell us what we didn’t know.
Many people assumed our new digital preservation platform would be installed in one fell swoop – perhaps rising as a phoenix from the ashes of a defunct analog archival practice. They imagined the rollout of our Digital Vault (our internal branding at the World Bank for our digital preservation platform) to be akin to the rollout of any new standard software tool.
A phoenix depicted in a book of legendary creatures by FJ Bertuch (1747–1822)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phoenix-Fabelwesen.jpg
But a digital preservation platform is more than just a new repository in which to save files. We have repeatedly discovered r that the thoughtful work done before digital records are added to our Digital Vault is critical to ensure we make the right choices in preparing what goes into the Digital Vault.
So, instead of using a phoenix as our “mascot” for our digital preservation program, I made a very different choice. I chose the Crow.
You may be familiar with Aesop’s fable of the “Crow and the Pitcher”, but to remind you: a thirsty crow comes across a pitcher with a few inches of water at the bottom of it. The crow realizes that it cannot reach the water. If she breaks the pitcher, she will not get to drink either. She comes up with a plan and adds pebbles one at a time until the surface of the water is raised within reach – then she drinks her fill.
I chose this image to remind us that we need to work together, each of us adding the pebbles of our expertise. We can see the water – but we will need persistence before we can slake our thirst.
The Crow and the Pitcher from The Æsop for Children, by Æsop (1919), illustrated by Milo Winter
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Crow_and_the_Pitcher_-_Project_Gutenberg_etext_19994.jpg
At the Digital Preservation Program workshop that I hosted, I challenged all the attendees to make lists of questions: all the questions they believed would need to be answered before we could confidently move forward with using our new Digital Vault. No answers, only questions. Only concerns.
It was a great success! Seated at round tables with members of other teams from across the WBG Archives, the attendees documented dozens of questions and concerns. Grouping them thematically gave us topics around which we could create “focus teams” to consolidate and tackle finding the answers.
These are the focus teams we identified:
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Access and Access to Information Policy
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Appraisal and Selection
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Description
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Long-term Access
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Strategy and Planning
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Transfer and Ingest
These groups of subject matter experts helped us move forward confidently by doing an assortment of key research, including:
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Drafting guidelines of what we put in the Digital Vault
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Identifying the best set of born-digital records to use in our pilot
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Defining a core set of shared metadata, beyond the standard attributes that came with our platform out of the box
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Identify aspects of the transfer processes needing modification for digital transfer
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Starting research into long-term preservation needs of specific file formats
Fast forward to 2024 and our focus teams no longer meet, but their work has led the way to the creation of our Digital Preservation Plans. Each plan is created for a specific record type, defined as existing at the intersection of a business function and a file format. The creation of each new plan leverages the expertise of our staff from across all our functional teams. Even now, with over 12 terabytes of content in our Digital Vault – we know we still need everyone’s expertise to be successful.
So, the next time you are talking about the Digital Preservation “Community”, keep in mind that the community is not just a profession aligning to common standards, techniques, and practices. That community is also inside an organization. For us at the World Bank Group Archives, the expertise found in every member of our team working in every area of archival function is key to our success.