Blog

Matthew Addis is the Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum.

It was great to be at iPRES 2023 in person again this year.  I was privileged to be invited onto a panel called ‘Tipping Point’ that was run by Paul Stokes and Karen Colbron from Jisc.  The panel questioned the premise that there is so much data being generated each year that we are at the point where we no longer have the ability to process it in any meaningful way, let alone curate and preserve it.  Panellists included Helen Hockx-Yu, Kate Murray, Nancy McGovern, Stephen Abrams, Tim Gollins and William Kilbride.   As you can imagine, the discussion was varied, insightful and thought provoking!  It was perhaps my favourite session at iPRES this year (other than the ever inspiring keynotes). 

For my very small part on the panel, I raised the issue of environmental sustainability and climate change, as did some of the other panellists. 

As an aside, environmental sustainability was a recurring theme of iPRES 2023 and built upon a similar thread that ran through last year’s conference.   A shout out goes to a great paper by Mikko Tiainen and colleagues from CSC on Calculating the Carbon Footprint of Digital Preservation – A Case Study and likewise a great panel from a team at the University of Illinois on The Curricular Asset Warehouse At The University Of Illinois: A Digital Archive’s Sustainability Case Study.

Robin Wright is Head of Australasia and Asia-Pacific for the Digital Preservation Coalition

In January 2018 the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) embarked on a new strategic plan to prepare the transition to a truly global foundation.

That ambition was elaborated on in June 2019 when the DPC’s mission was formally expanded to include the following goal statement: To enhance our members’ experience and the capacity of the digital preservation community around the world through the provision of a stable and trusted platform for collaboration, owned and run for the benefit of the global digital preservation community, and accountable to them through membership.

In 2023, with a membership of 153 members worldwide, the DPC is well on its way to achieving that ambition – certainly a far cry from its humble beginnings in the UK in 2002 with just 20 members.

The DPC now plays a key role in the global discussion and implementation of digital preservation policy and practice around the world and has become a global community, working together to bring about a sustainable future for our digital assets.

The DPC’s activities have certainly flourished in Australasia and Asia-Pacific in the last 5 years, and in fact, last month we celebrated our 20^th member in the region! In Australasia and Asia-Pacific alone, we now have the same number of members the DPC originally started out with in 2002.

Obfuscate and Accumulate

Here’s an idea that comes out of a clear blue sky: we don’t talk enough about technical debt in digital preservation. It’s an important concept and one we could be working with.

Technical debt is a term used in software development to describe the costs that arise when an easy or cheap solution is adopted over a fully worked out, properly documented, long-term solution. Expedient or cheap solutions which don’t have forwards compatibility make future changes costly if not impossible. This cost accumulates "interest" as changes and upgrades are delayed and therefore become harder to achieve over time. The debt is a contingent liability: work can be deferred but cannot be avoided to maintain legacy systems, or to exit them in an orderly fashion. In worsening conditions, investment is diverted towards short term maintenance, which further increase the complexity of a legacy system, making migration harder and stifling genuine innovation. Left unchecked this ultimately reaches a bottom where either the system fails, or the business fails. Sometimes both.

My sense is that many agencies are accumulating technical debt which they don’t fully understand. Indeed, every agency that depends on technology for the delivery of products or services has a theoretical exposure to technical debt, and this has real world consequences.

A bold assertion follows – that, perhaps without fully realising it, the digital preservation community has been quietly and successfully building the tools and services that tackle and prevent the accumulation of technical debt. And so digital preservation is not a niche fixation for specialists, but a pervasive concern through the entire economy.

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: