Blog

William Kilbride is the Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition, and was General Chair of iPres 2022.

My tiny desk is full to overflowing. My keyboard is jammed between assorted packages and boxes waiting for iPres which opens next week in Illinois. DPC is helping to sponsor iPres this year again (more in a moment) so the generous offer of a table in the exhibition hall has precipitated a search for merchandise – tablecloths, stickers, pens, leaflets, brochures - all bound for Urbana Champaign. I’ve tracked down the last two remaining DPC scarves, and the very last DPC tie.  I am sure they will all make a wonderfully, professional splash so please do drop by and admire the artistic effect if you are in town, because it’s a chaotic muddle and crush just now.

Dorota Minkiewicz is Archivist, Long-term Digital and Web Preservation, at the Publications Office of the European Union. She attended the IIPC Web Archiving Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

On a rainy day in May, the Web Archiving community flocked to the Dutch city of Hilversum, where at the stunning home of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision this year’s IIPC Web Archiving Conference took place.

It was my first time at this conference, thanks to the DPC Career Development Fund. And since I’m still a novice in the Web Archiving world, I was particularly keen to listen to the discussions around capture methods, playback tools, and promoting the active use of archives among researchers and students.

Elizabeth Hughes is Digital Preservation Lead for the Digital Archive Team at Queensland State Archives

Queensland State Archives has used the Bit List internally, in a very practical way, to help us organise our digital preservation work, prioritising legacy physical media and file formats for extraction and ingest.

Matthew Addis is the Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum.

If cloud infrastructure providers such as Google, AWS and Azure have net zero emissions from their use of energy, then does this mean we no longer need to worry about the carbon footprint of digital preservation in the cloud? 

The answer is no. 

Carbon emissions from energy consumption is just one part of the story.  The embodied footprint [7] of all the ICT servers that run in the cloud also needs to be taken into account, as does the construction of data centre buildings and their power and cooling plants.  All of this has a carbon footprint.  Embodied footprint is a major contributor to carbon emissions in the construction sector and the cloud certainly involves large scale construction.   But embodied footprint also applies to all the ICT servers (compute, storage, networking etc.) that run in the cloud and get used by digital preservation solutions hosted there.  For ICT servers this includes extraction of raw materials, the manufacture of hardware, transport and installation at data centres, maintenance, and eventual recycling and disposal. As the saying goes, the cloud is “just someone else’s computers” and we should not forget that this physical infrastructure has an embodied carbon footprint.

But how big is the embodied footprint of digital preservation in the cloud? 

This blog posts investigates whether we can get a quantitative answer to this question.

Leo Konstantelos is Digital Archivist at the University of Glasgow

At the University of Glasgow, we have used the Bit List in a couple of ways:

In 2022, we put together a Business Case for funding to set up an Archival Forensics Lab. In this, we referenced the Bit List to demonstrate how many endangered digital species there are in our Archives and Special Collections.

More recently too, we used the Bit List risk classification and the information contained within the ‘Integrated Storage’ and ‘Portable Media’ species as part of a methodology and tool for prioritizing archival forensic processing of digital collections stored in physical storage media.

Paul Shields is Photographer, Information Services at University of York. He attended the IS&T Archiving Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I was asked to write a report about my attendance at the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) Archiving 2023 Conference in Oslo on 19-23 June. The difficulty with this is that there were so many fascinating individual talks from the digitisation of materials in Notre Dame after the devastating fire, the use of smell in how we perceive and enjoy museums and the renovation and care for the Munch murals in the very building we were having the conference in.

So rather than focusing on a single talk I have decided to write about two threads that ran through the conference which came up in talks and networking discussions.

Today’s Reading Club session was a thought provoking discussion inspired by an article from Amber Cushing and Giulia Osti in the Journal of Documentation - “So how do we balance all of these needs?”: how the concept of AI technology impacts digital archival expertise (https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2022-0170).

The article summarized the thoughts and expectations of a focus group of archival practitioners around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the impact on expertise within the sector. After a brief round of introductions and some background on our own individual experiences relating to use of AI in our digital preservation work, we turned to a more general discussion of the article and I’ve tried to sum up a few key points below:

Helen Dafter is Archivist at The Postal Museum in the UK

What’s New DPC CAT?

This blog is based on a presentation given at the DPC Unconference 2023.

The Postal Museum has recently used the DPC’s Competency Audit Toolkit  (CAT) to identify staff skills and skill gaps at an organisational level.

Barbara Fuentes is Web Archiving Officer at National Records of Scotland. She attended the IIPC Web Archiving Conference 2023 with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I recently received a Career Development Fund Grant to attend the IIPC Web Archiving Conference in Hilversum. The conference was held at the colourful Institute for Sound and Vision and KB, National Library of Netherlands.

Jasmine Patel is a Digital Preservation Intern at the University of Edinburgh. This blog post was originally posted on the Information Services Group Student Employee Blog here.

Try, test, fail. Wait a bit, try again, fail, mentally recover, try it on a PC, try it on a Mac, try giving the machine a good bonk on the head (or sending it to the naughty step if you’re feeling nice).

Welcome to the world of Digital Preservation – or, as the cool kids know it: Digipres.