Matthew Addis is Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum.

Introduction

Have you ever wondered what the actual carbon footprint is of doing digital preservation?  For example, what are the CO₂ equivalent carbon emissions associated with archiving and preserving a TB of data for 10 years? 

There’s been some brilliant discussion and ideas in the digital preservation community around environmental sustainability of long-term digital preservation.  The DPC have a page that rounds up many of the resources, reports and blog posts that are available, including my previous blog post on the topic.  But there is a real paucity of quantitative data to support this discussion and debate. 

Arkivum has measured the actual carbon footprint of doing real digital preservation in the cloud.  I don’t think anyone has put numbers out there for the kgCO_­2eq emissions per TB when ingesting and processing different types of data in a real-world digital preservation system (please tell me if I’m wrong!).   This blog post is our attempt to change that.

Tom Wilson is Associate Archivist at United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

Introduction

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has a mandate to support and advocate on behalf of one of the most vulnerable groups of people in the world today. As one of the major issues facing the world today, the plight of refugees, internally displaced people, stateless people and other persons forced to flee is an ever-growing issue. Whilst the title of this post primarily refers to the work of digital preservation, it can also refer to the people that UNHCR supports. The content preserved as part of the work of UNHCR’s Records and Archives Section (RAS) often showcases the resilience of persons forced to flee and how they attempt to continue their lives as best they can under adverse conditions [1].

Zoe Warner is Senior Systems Administrator, Mediaflex at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. She attended IDCC22 with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I am grateful to the DPC in facilitating my first attendance at the annual International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC), held virtually from 13-16^th June 2022. This was a conference that opened my eyes to the big world of data curation (particularly scientific research data) and the challenges therein. These challenges however are still somewhat familiar to my stomping ground at the NFSA (National Film and Sound Archive of Australia).

The topic for IDCC this year (IDCC22) was Reusability, setting off existential thoughtlets about the fundamental purpose of storing, well, anything really, but in this context, data in all its forms and flavours.

Yi-Ting Lin is a PhD student in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow. She recently attended DCDC 2022 with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Thanks to DPC's support, I attended the Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC) conference for the first time last week (#DCDC22) and learnt loads of new development and strategies. In this blog post, I contextualise the content of what I learned with themes and highlight some keywords to track future research and development of practice.

As introduced on the DCDC 2022 official website, the five-day virtual conference (11^th to 15^th July 2022) provided a forum for cultural sectors and academia to exchange experience and knowledge. This allows cultural sectors to construct a common value and share vision for future practice to explore solutions for digital innovations. From the inspiring presentation and animated discussion in Q&A sessions, this year’s cultural sectors addressed a degree of concern over ethical issues, trainings for professionals and participants, digital innovation in archive management, and the challenge and outcome of participatory projects.

Helen Dafter is Archivist at The Postal Museum in the UK.

Background

The Postal Museum was recently involved in a project working with students from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The WPI is a private science technology orientated university based in Massachusetts, United States of America. The museum has a longstanding relationship with the WPI, past projects include developing an e learning product, and exploring the viability of a mobile app to showcase the museum’s stamp collection. This was the first project I had managed.

Stephanie Orphan is the Director of Publisher Relations and Content Preservation at Portico.

Portico recently passed a significant milestone–one that was beyond our imagination when the service was launched. We are happy to report that we are now preserving content from more than 1,000 publishers. At this writing, we are preserving ejournals for 717 publishers, ebooks for 366, and digital collections for 7; all in all, more than 2 billion files are preserved in the Portico archive. We are fortunate to also have the support of more than 1,000 academic and research libraries who participate in Portico and help us meet our mission.

Conor Lynott is a Digital Intern at the National Library of Ireland.

The Problem We Faced

This blog post is an abbreviated version of a longer report that I wrote as part of my National Library of Ireland Digital Internship. This report was written as part of the wider effort to preserve the Census of the Heart project.

Census of the Heart was a project that was led by Mari Kennedy and Kathy Scott. This project was an alternative to the 2016 census and it aimed to capture the emotional state of the nation, rather than traditional data about the demographics of Ireland. The National Library of Ireland is proud to preserve this unique dataset as part of our ongoing commitment to preserving the digital memory of Ireland. The preservation of memory is a key part of the National Library of Ireland’s recently launched 2022-2026 Strategy – available here: https://www.nli.ie/en/reports-and-policy-documents.aspx

Ruth Kusionowicz is the Digital Preservation Project Officer at East Sussex County Council.

I’ve worked in records and archive professions for the past 15 years, completing my Masters in Archive Administration 9 years ago. Throughout my career I’ve always had a keen interest in the challenge of managing and preserving digital records. I even wrote my dissertation on national approaches to web-archiving in the UK, US and Australia. With that interest also comes an acute awareness that things are always changing – whether it’s the technology, approaches, challenges or the teaching. So there’s a need to continuously update my learning and experience if I want to help tackle ‘the digital problem’.

My tips on how to develop, improve and stay in touch

There are many different ways to develop or enhance your knowledge, skills and experience. The first obvious one is training. For digital preservation I found the Novice to Know-How course invaluable. It built on my little existing (outdated) knowledge, gave me the detail where I needed it, and provided links to other resources where I didn’t. But its not just subject specific training that I’ve found helpful. Other courses, like the DPC’s Getting Started With Advocacy course, have developed me in areas that are key to being successful in my job. And completing a records management for M365 and SharePoint course highlighted important risks and issues I should be aware of, while giving me the confidence and language I need to raise concerns with IT about proposed implementations.

Deborah Thorpe was the Education and Outreach Manager at the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) at the time of writing.

This blog explores different perspectives on open licences and looks at how the licences depositors select affect the use and reuse of digital content. It originally appeared on the Digital Repository of Ireland’s blog in July 2022.

An increasing number of organisations, including libraries, galleries, and museums, are choosing to provide open access to their online collections, with fewer and fewer restrictions on how they are used. In 2020, for instance, the Smithsonian Museum released 2.8 million images of its collections into an open access platform. Before that, in 2018, Birmingham Museums Trust took the decision to make medium-resolution images of its out-of-copyright collections freely available with no restrictions. The Rijksmuseum states ‘our collection is for everyone. That’s why the Rijksmuseum makes its digitised collections and metadata available in the highest quality. And we don’t ask for anything in return’. The museum’s Research Services department is also building a digital infrastructure for sustainable Research Data management, inspired by the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. Where copyright and database rights apply to digital reproductions and data, the Rijksmuseum waives these rights by using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) Public Domain Statement.

Rowena Loo is the Director, Digital Archives Innovation and Research at the National Archives of Australia.

Access – it’s the end goal of all digital preservation activity and the true test of our digital preservation efforts. After all, if no one’s going to access it, why preserve it? If it’s not technically possible to access it, how can we claim it’s been preserved? However, it’s all too easy to focus on the more immediate challenges of transfer, ingest and file format preservation, especially when broader public access can be limited due to statutory closure periods, or the sensitivity of the information involved.

While National Archives of Australia has been actively developing its digital archiving capability over many years, and had integrated access to digitised records into its public search engine, it was acknowledged that access to born-digital records had received less attention.