Sally McInnes is Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales.
As a small, smart country, we in Wales are well accustomed to undertaking concerted efforts for the common good, notably reflected by our Well-being of Future Generations Act. This Act is unique to Wales and requires public bodies to think about the long-term impact of their decisions and to work collaboratively. We have certainly delivered the Act in the context of digital preservation, influencing decision making through the creation of a national policy, advocating for investment, skills development and through many collaborative initiatives.
The success of the National Library of Wales’s (NLW) advocacy work was recognised in 2022 by being awarded the Dutch Digital Heritage Network Award for Teaching and Communications. One particularly welcome comment from the judges was that ‘It is wonderful to see how the National Library has built and leveraged relationships for the greater good across Wales’. Working together and knowledge transfer have been key to our success. A good illustration of the impact of our concerted effort is the Kickstart Cymru project. This initiative was funded by Welsh Government with the aim of providing public record offices in Wales with the necessary hardware, software (the Bundles) and training to undertake basic tasks in the accessioning of digital records. As well as the Kickstart Bundles themselves, training materials were provided giving instructions on their use, including areas such as ingesting digital records from external physical storage media, running anti-virus software, creating checksums, saving the records to an external storage device and creating and storing metadata.
Elements of the Bundles, including external storage, write blocker, UPS and pre-loaded software
The steps in the guidance document complement the workflow introduced in the NLW ‘Saving the Bits’ training programme. Accompanying videos, PowerPoint presentations and further documentation are available on the Archives Wales Saving the Bits staff toolkit. Guidance was also created on how the steps in the workflow map to digital preservation self-assessment using the DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM) and the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation. The DPC provided valuable input into these documents, which are also available on the Archives Wales.
NLW is also developing its own ingest workflows by working with depositors to ensure that the submission process is not too onerous, but satisfies NLW’s requirement to enable the ingest of reliable and preservable content. The value of this concerted effort has been demonstrated by the recent publication of the Phonology of Rhondda Valleys collection, which is available through the Atom catalogue. The collection involves research which explores the English accent in the Rhondda Valleys, South Wales. It is a complex collection which includes interviews with members of workman's Clubs in the Valleys communities, mp3 audio recordings and multi-page PDF files of transcripts. Providing access to collection involved a number of technical and rights issues, which could only be solved through the combined effort of the depositor, the digital accession archivist, the Archivematica developer and a host of others, which demonstrates that digital preservation is indeed a concerted effort!