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Time has felt a bit elastic over the last few years for all of the obvious reasons; a year has either felt like a decade or 10 minutes. But I can assure you that despite it feeling like the latter, it IS time to relaunch our community call for nominations to the Bit List again! …all in time for our next full revision of the list which will be published on World Digital Preservation Day, 2^nd November 2023.

Over the course of these elastic years, we have welcomed many new members of our digital preservation community, many of whom might be wondering what on earth this Bit List business is all about. There may be some long-standing members of the community thinking the same. So, for you, this blog post is a whistle stop tour of how this all came to be…and what to do with it!

Why do we so often talk about ‘best practice’ in digital preservation when we don’t always have clarity on what that actually looks like? Indeed, if it is our policy to try and carry out digital preservation best practice are we simply setting ourselves up for failure? How is it possible to comply with something that is so hard to pin down? What if what is ‘best’ for one organization is suboptimal for another? 

I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a while as these are questions that have popped into my head frequently since joining the DPC as Head of Good Practice and Standards 4 years ago. I didn’t have any say over the job title I was assigned when I joined the team, but I very much appreciated the foresight my colleagues had when they established the post. It already felt like a daunting role to fill, but if it had been ‘Head of Best Practice’ I might have had serious reservations!

There was a time in mid-March where I felt like I’d never get to write the following words, but they are finally true: the new Novice to Know-How (N2KH) learning pathway on Email Preservation is (nearly) done! I add the ‘nearly’ caveat for two reasons. First, there is a little work still to do on the additional resources that will accompany the main content (more on those later). Second, I don’t think I ever consider an online course truly completed until it’s in the Learning Management System (LMS) and the first learners have started! But a completed set of modules has been passed over to N2KH’s originators and funders, The National Archives (UK), so close enough…

Yesterday was the first meeting of DPC’s Reading Club…I’m hoping the first of many!

A group of DPC Members met over Zoom for a friendly chat to discuss a recent article by Thorsten Ries - Digital history and born-digital archives: the importance of forensic methods.

Michelle Donoghue is the Information Governance Manager at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. 

For the past four years, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has been working closely with colleagues from the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) to leverage good practice amongst the international digital preservation community, developing advice, guidance, and policy to support the NDA’s work in this vital area.

To mark the end of the project and share and celebrate the outcomes, we held a short internal event in March providing a summary of the challenges facing the NDA, and presenting the recommendations and outputs developed as a result of this collaborative work.

Whilst digital preservation isn’t yet a ‘solved problem’, we discussed how this project and the NDA have moved forward with tackling some of the key challenges of safeguarding future access to records that are essential to the UK’s nuclear industry and beyond.

Two of our major DPC resources - the Preservation Policy Toolkit and the Digipres Business Case Toolkit have just been significantly revised and relaunched, keyed in with our broader (re)launch of the DPC Australasia Office. In this blog post I'd like to give a few thoughts on sustainability of these (and other) DPC resources.

The digipres community does not have a great track record on sustaining its own digital outputs. The noughties were dominated by digital preservation projects with short term funding that churned out all sorts of resources, many of which have fallen by the wayside. I hold my hand up here and take some of the criticism as I worked on a number of those projects! At the same time I recognise that building in sustainability is not an easy thing to do. Short term funding focused on innovative R&D is by its very nature difficult to build in a way that will last. Ownership and responsibility is also a key challenge. Who will be the custodian over time and take the difficult decision to take down an old resource if it has genuinely become outdated or obsolete, or invest in the resource to bring it up to date?

In February 2023 I was invited to speak at a workshop organized by the AEOLIAN Network entitled ‘New Horizons in AI and Machine Learning’ Circumstances, including a postponement of the workshop on account of industrial action meant I was not able to attend and present in person. Therefore I have shared this text of my presentation for publication afterwards, with the consent of the organizers.

It’s time we built the basis for a new digital preservation. Emerging technologies, including AI, invite us to rethink what we have been taking for granted for too long.

This may sound like a dramatic development but to those familiar with both disciplines it’s probably a statement of the obvious. Artificial intelligence is, of course, the next big thing in computing: you cannot hide from the hype cycle. Also, AI has been the next big thing for at least four decades. So perhaps this time it will get over the inflated expectations and head for something productive and routine: perhaps it really is the next big thing.

Regardless of how the current headlines about AI pan out, we’ve also, already, and always been needing to imagine a new digital preservation.

Preoccupation (noun) - an idea or subject that someone thinks about most of the time (Cambridge Dictionary)

I guess this is a fair description of my relationship with digital preservation policies over the last week or so as we have been working on a revision of the DPC’s Digital Preservation Policy Toolkit.

What has been so good about having a bit of time to focus on this subject is the extent to which community resources and organizational policies already exist and can be easily located and accessed and more so the fact that many organizations have recently published new policy documents that we can look at for inspiration.

Adam Harwood is the Research Data & Digital Preservation Technologist at the University of Sussex Library.

We all know that there are some policies in our policy portfolio languishing in review limbo. To my surprise, I received an email from Jenny Mitcham at the DPC recently, pointing out that the review frequency of our digital preservation policy at the University of Sussex Library had been pretty constant over the last few years. Since 2020 our policy has been reviewed every year as planned. I didn’t realize we had been that consistent!

Trigger warning: This blog post addresses issues relating to mental health and sexual harassment

The DPC’s organizational motivations for carrying out the Digital Preservation Community Mental Health and Wellbeing Survey are mentioned in its introduction. However, as the member of staff leading on this work, I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about why it is important to me, personally. To share some experiences that I have had that have made awareness raising and good mental health important priorities for me.