Simon Wilson is Archives Consultant and DPC Supporter
Background
In August 2023 the City of Doncaster Archives was awarded funding under The National Archives Resilience grant programme. I was brought-in to deliver the project working closely with the Council’s archives and records management colleagues. The project has two distinct strands – to develop a business case for digital preservation to secure, preserve and manage the Council’s born-digital records and this work is still in-progress. The second strand, and the focus of this blog, sought to engage professional heritage communities to increase awareness and confidence with the practical side of digital preservation.
South Yorkshire Archives Partnership
Doncaster’s application sought to utilise its membership of the South Yorkshire Archives Partnership, with a strong desire to build upon this existing collaboration between the four local authority archive services in South Yorkshire – namely Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield. Over several years, with funding from The National Archives, the four services have worked together and looked at common issues including access and engagement, fees and charges and strategic planning.
With each service at a different point on its digital preservation journey, the intention was to focus on practical steps and to cover a broad range of topics designed to increase awareness and confidence. A mix of virtual and in-person sessions was delivered:
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Benchmarking [DPC-RAM] (undertaken online)
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Workflows (in-person at Barnsley)
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DROID (online)
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Digital Asset Register and Write-blockers (in-person at Rotherham)
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Key Performance Indictors and Access (in-person at Sheffield)
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Archiving Email [ePADD] (in-person at Doncaster)
Museum colleagues
Museum Development Yorkshire had been approached to gauge interest in delivering sessions for museum colleagues about digital preservation. In April 2024 Museums Development Yorkshire became Museum Development North (MDN) as part of the Arts Council England continuing support for the museum sector.
MDN had introduced informal drop-in elevenses sessions (they start at 11am) via MS Teams which tended to attract around 15 participants. Each session was an hour long and speakers were asked to keep the presentation to 45 minutes to ensure there was time for questions. Three sessions were delivered:
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Introduction to Digital Preservation (April) – 32 attended
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Practical first steps [Digital Asset Register] (May) - 36 attended
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Taking stock of your digital preservation capability [DPC-RAM] (October) – 25 attended
Some overlap was deliberately built into the session content, but prior attendance was not expected or required. The sessions were designed as an introduction to the topic with delegates being told there were ‘no silly questions’. On the final slide of each session delegates were given a URL to access the slides and for the digital asset register session two versions of the template – one blank and one with sample data to encourage delegates to have a play. A page has been added to the MDN website about the Challenges to Museums of Digital Preservation which serves to link the slides and other resources from the sessions.
Using your digital asset register for advocacy purposes
Confidence and impact
With the South Yorkshire Archives Partnership there was never an intent to get all four services to do things the same way. With it being a small group, working in the same sector, the sessions were relaxed and more akin to a group conversation. In talking about tasks and approaches I was keen to show both the process and the result – whether it is engaging colleagues across the team to support their work with born-digital archives or how a digital asset register supports planning and advocacy work.
After the final session SYAP colleagues were asked for their comments and reflections:
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Meeting over several workshops with other regional colleagues encountering similar barriers, the chance to ask questions, and an emphasis on practical demonstrations improved my understanding more than years of attempted self-study and muddling through my own collections have done.
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The sessions strengthened the SY Archives Partnership and allowed us all to learn together about this new area.
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As a result of increased information and an updated workflow, I have since been able to involve one of our volunteers in digital preservation work. Our service has also submitted a business case for the funding of digital preservation software.
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Having learnt about the value and necessity of Digital Asset Registers (DARs) we have now started to compile one for the first time which is helping us get to grips with our not-insignificant digital collections which we have been acquiring for over 20 years.
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I found the workshop on workflows particularly helpful, as having the opportunity to talk this through with other colleagues allowed me to make practical changes within our service which are already benefitting us such as prompting ongoing conversations with our IT and records management departments.
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Connecting a write blocker (centre) to a SATA drive
For the museum engagement the key objective was to increase awareness and confidence about the topic and to highlight practical steps that could be taken and this was reflected in the feedback received from MDN session attendees:
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It reinforced ideas we were already contemplating, and importantly, proved that we are not alone in pondering the topic!
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It's always great just being able to drop in and join. It was also good to have an entry level session about digital preservation that was clear and didn't use too much technical language.
Digital preservation is as much about confidence to apply what is currently recognised as good practice. I wanted to acknowledge the commitment to attend the training by providing quick, simple and practical next steps to allow the services to establish some momentum.
A generic digital preservation workflow and useful conversation starter