Blog

For three years now, the DPC has been working alongside colleagues at the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) on their digital preservation challenges. It has been a little while since we blogged about this project, but I wanted to take the opportunity to let you know about some of the outputs that have been released over the last year and mention some new work to look out for in the near future.

Freddie Alexander is Digital Archivist at Historic Environment Scotland.

In December 2021 Scotland’s Rock Art Project (ScRAP) came to an end. ScRAP was a five-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and hosted by Historic Environment Scotland (HES). It was the first major archaeological research project into prehistoric rock art in Scotland, and one of the largest and most ambitious rock art projects in the world. During the project the ScRAP team co-produced with community groups a wealth of digital data, including photographs, digitised sketches, close-range photogrammetry models, and an extensive database of fieldwork data for over 1100 prehistoric rock art panels across Scotland.

As the song goes, 'it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas', but not any old Christmas: it’s beginning to look a lot like 2020 again.

Granted I am farther behind this year even than last, in part because we’ve been isolating and just a bit distracted lately. (I’ll spare the details except to say the supermarket delivery driver didn’t want his crates back.) I also don’t really remember the stresses and strains of 2020. My self-preserving brain seems to have erased the worst so all I can bring to mind are the kindnesses and patience elicited by that first pandemic Christmas. As for 2021, I find myself staring at a small pile of Christmas cards for close friends and family completely at a loss as to what to write.

This blog is a poor replacement for the DPC Christmas card this year.

 Hannah Smith is the Digital Repository Manager at Historic Environment Scotland.

HES Archives Digital Repository is awarded Core Trust Seal accreditation

“A digital future is really the only hope for these things…” was a comment made to me by a colleague regarding the degradation of some colour slides in our collection. These conversations are becoming more and more prevalent in archives, with digitisation and digital preservation becoming one of the biggest risks to archives in recent years. Historic Environment Scotland has been developing its digital archive since the early 1990s and in recent years has had significant investment to develop further.

In October 2021, the HES Archives Digital Repository was awarded CoreTrustSeal certification. Certification is based on requirements established by the World Data Systems (WDS) and the Data Seal of Approval (DSA) reflecting the core characteristics of trustworthy data repositories. HES is the accredited digital repository for heritage data in Scotland, and along with the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), one of only two accredited repositories for heritage data in the UK. CTS certification provides both depositors and funding agencies with the reassurance that data deposited with HES is preserved and remains accessible for future generations. 

Hania Smerecka is Archivist at Lloyds Banking Group

I sat down to write this during a violent flurry of Whatsapp pings - friends discussing fresh instructions to work from home. I’m not sure how the latest announcements make me feel. Nervous probably, but lucky too, as we got through the last two years safely, adapted, and are in pretty good shape to face whatever is coming.

Our Preservica cloud instance had not yet gone live when Covid first hit the news. We were still finding our way with the application when lockdown entered the banana bread phase. Loo roll shortages were raging while we set up our Calm link and our backlog ingests were running when NHS trusts started appealing for PPE. I was preparing training sessions while *those* Downing Street cheese and wines were or were not taking place.

[sigue la versión en español]

In November I was invited to speak to the members of RIPDASA in Latin America on the theme of environmental sustainability and digital preservation. This presentation gave me scope to expand a short provocation given on the same theme on the fringes of COP26 which we have also published.  It is not exactly a deep dive, but more than a toe in the water.  You can also watch the video of the presentation which includes Spanish subtitles.

Thank you very much for the invitation to join you today to share some thoughts about the relationship between digital preservation and environmental sustainability.  There’s quite a lot we could say on this issue, so I’d like to cover a lot of ground in the next 15 minutes or so.  I have 5 themes.

Firstly, I want to define the digital preservation problem as this will help establish the scope for discussion that follows. Then I want to clarify the relationship between preservation and disposal and look at the opportunities that digital preservation creates to manage and reduce the amount of data we retain.  I will then dig a bit more deeply into the ways in which digital preservation consumes energy and the implications that arise from efforts to reduce this consumption.  The origin of the energy also matters tremendously as do expectations about access. Towards the end I will take a brief detour into the history of digital preservation as this is not irrelevant to our work.  Changes which will disrupt the digital economy will also disrupt our understanding of digital preservation.  Finally, I want to reflect on the DPC and how we’re beginning to make changes in our own work.

Claire Newing is Web Archivist at The National Archives in the UK

2021 is the year the UK Government Web Archive came of age. On 4 November we celebrated the 25th birthday of our oldest resource - this archived version of the Environment Agency website. Of course it shared its birthday with World Digital Preservation Day 2021 so a double excuse to celebrate.

I was privileged to contribute to a panel on the fringes of the COP26 conference in Glasgow this morning convened by the UK National Archives with the title  'Archives Supporting Environmental Sustainability'  This short post is the text of my presentation which was the five minute provocation at the start of the session.

Ladies and gentlemen it’s a pleasure to be invited to speak to you this morning. I want to thank the organizers at the National Archives for their efforts in bringing us together for this timely – long overdue discussion.

I have 5 minutes so will attempt 5 themes in 5 minutes ...

Mark Simon Haydn is the Digital Preservation Archivist at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York

In keeping with other reports from the field on the DPC blog, the last twelve months at the Borthwick have deeply involved increased supply and demand of digital collection material. In addition to daily reprographics work performed by the Institute’s searchroom team, there has been great progress with the delivery of grant projects: from significant Music Preserved digitisation supporting the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage scheme, performed by Nick Melia, to Chris Taylor’s extensive photography of ephemera recording the activities of regional music societies in the InterMusE project, collections have continued to reach users and inform research in spite of all the obvious obstacles to access, a temporary change in behaviour that suggests a new normal of remote access. Since stepping in as the temporary Digital Preservation Archivist in June, I’ve had chance to spend some time building up the capacity to appraise and transfer some of the Borthwick’s magnetic media holdings, audio and video recordings physically cared for by the Institute’s conservation staff but long inaccessible to researchers in the absence of adequate playback equipment.

Keith Pendergrass is Digital Archivist at Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School.

This is a companion post to the Environmentally sustainable digital preservation - moving from theory to practice webinar.

Since the 2019 article and workshop protocol on environmentally sustainable digital preservation that I wrote with Walker Sampson, Tessa Walsh, and Laura Alagna, I have been using our framework to improve the sustainability of Baker Library’s digital archives program. I have written previously about our efforts to integrate sustainability into policies and workflows. For this post, I am going to look at a recent software development project as an example of how we can embed sustainability into our design and use of digital preservation systems and tools.