Blog

Happy New Year DPC Members! We're looking forward to another packed 12 months of learning and sharing digital preservation, so here's how to have your say and connect with other members this year:

It’s been just over a year since Elon Musk took over control of X (formerly Twitter), and the major changes that he has made to this popular social media platform have been hard to miss – especially for any organization hoping to archive and preserve posts. So for the last DP Clinic of 2023, a one-hour focussed discussion forum that is open to all, we thought it might be interesting to revisit the whole topic by exploring the question: “What are we going to do about Social Media?”

Back in 2019 the DPC released a new maturity model for digital preservation as part of a project we were working on with the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. We called it our Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM) and we have been really pleased to see how widely used it has been across the digital preservation community. We reviewed RAM in 2021 and moved it to version 2 (read about what changed in RAM version 2 here). After another few years we think it is due for revision again.

Amy Ibbotson is Collection Management Archivist (Digital), Digital Archive Team, at Queensland State Archives. She attended the NEDCC Digital Directions 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Thanks to the DPC Career Development Fund I was able to attend the NEDCC online Digital Directions Conference. While the conference was not time-zone friendly for those of us residing ‘Down Under’ (2am wake up thank you very much!), the early starts soon proved to be worth the effort.

Taryn Ellis is Digital Preservation Technical Analyst at State Library of South Australia, a member of National and State Libraries Australia (NSLA). She attended the iPRES 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

As a relative newcomer to the field of digital preservation (so much to learn, so much to do!) I was keen to attend the iPRES 2023 Panel, “Policies, Risks and Strategies: A File Format Debate” chaired by Sam Alloing from the National Library of the Netherlands (KBNL).

William Kilbride is Executive Director at the Digital Preservation Coalition

•  Coda: a passage that brings a piece or a movement to an end.
• Canon: a theme that is repeated and imitated and built upon by other instruments with a time delay, creating a layered effect.

World Digital Preservation Day 2023 adopted a musical turn of phrase with the theme ‘A Concerted Effort’, emphasizing the need for collaboration and partnership to achieve a shared goal.  As the saying goes, ‘No one can whistle a symphony, it takes a whole orchestra to play it’.  It might be phrased less elegantly: if you’re doing digital preservation on your own, you’re doing it wrong.

In musical terms this blog post is the coda which brings our celebrations to a close.  It’s too early for me to take stock of all the different initiatives and outputs which have been shared over the course of the last 36 (ish) hours. I only have space for a few items which caught my eye so a very limited perspective.  But here are a few things that, if you didn’t already know about, are worth holding on to:

Julienne Pascoe is a Digital Archivist for Library and Archives Canada.

Digital Preservation is a collaborative effort, one that benefits from a variety of perspectives, expertise, and multifaceted participation. As a Digital Archivist at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), I work closely with my team in our section, Digital Integration, as well as colleagues in the Digital Preservation section, to perform a variety of tasks and services in ensuring that digital records are transferred, assessed, and preserved for sustainable access in the future. The stewardship of our digital legacy would not be possible without a collaborative, concerted effort with my colleagues who contain invaluable, diverse expertise and perspectives that combine to research and devise strategies for tackling the many nuanced digital preservation challenges. This collaborative effort to ensure continued access to our digital legacy extends to (and relies upon) the community that we are a part of, the digital preservation community, and it is this subject that I would like to discuss in my blog post today. More specifically I would like to discuss my experience as a ‘first-timer’ with the DPC this year, and the value that such a network brings to my role as a digital preservation practitioner. 

Nance McGovern is Associate for Digital Preservation Practice and Instruction at Global Archivist LLC and a DPC Fellow

Digital preservation at its best is a collaborative sport. As always, the theme for World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is timely and important.

Collaboration has been an important part of digital practice for me since I started preserving digital content in 1986 at the Center for Electronic Records at the U.S. National Archives. We regularly welcomed visitors from all over who were interested in hearing about our program and in sharing what they were working on with us. An open source approach – sharing, using, and contributing back – contributes to the sustainability of good practice for digital preservation. Welcoming visitors – virtually and in-person – is a relatively easy opportunity for organizations engaged in digital preservation to contribute and to be informed.

This blog post has been written by Laurence Brewer, Elizabeth England, Lisa Haralampus, Leslie Johnston, and Markus Most at National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Background

The U.S. federal government has signaled how important web content is to the public documentation and experience of government. According to U.S. government website tracking data, every 90 days there are over 5 billion visits to government websites. Enabling long-term preservation of government website content is critical to public understanding of the government and its history.

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

I talk about digital preservation with IT colleagues regularly and I often feel like I am in a position of perceived weakness - lecturing them on technical matters relating to preserving data. Needing a little confidence boost, I used ChatGPT to see what it had to say about the difference between backup and digital preservation. I posted an interesting outcome of this conversation in the Digital Preservation jiscmail list. Its answers boosted my confidence and I no longer feel those nagging pangs of talking nonsense during technical conversations.