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Jessica Hooley is a MA Archive and Records Management student at Aberystwyth University. She attended the ARA 2021 Virtual Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

The MA Archive and Records Management course at Aberystwyth University has provided a great basis to start my professional career in archives and records management. Seeing the schedule for the ARA Conference, it sparked my interest as it would support and develop what I had already learnt from Aberystwyth University, as well as hearing from various professionals from multiple archives holding various collections and numerous academic interests.

Mia Willis works at Historic England

As maternity cover for the Historic England Archive’s Digital Preservation Officer I expected to consolidate the work and clear the backlogs caused by the pandemic, develop programmes of work, manage the Digital Preservation Assistant and work with other archive staff and depositors to improve our flowlines and metadata standards. This, on top of re-opening our offices post-pandemic, becoming a manager for the first time and generally looking after and preserving our 66+ TB of data sounded like quite the challenge.

But digital preservation is full of surprises, and the Digital Preservation team at Historic England have been thrown a big surprise: The Repatriation of our Digital Archive.

Janina Ziesche works as an Executive Assistant at the International Atomic Energy Agency. She attended the ARA 2021 Virtual Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I am not (yet, at least) a trained records manager or archivist, but I have practical experience working on projects that aimed to establish or improve records and information management (RIM), as well as knowledge management structures in two different organizations. While I am personally super excited about the positive impact that effective RIM has on the work of an organization, I quickly realized that the biggest challenge is to find a way to share my enthusiasm and convince management and colleagues of the benefits of RIM and the connected digital platforms.

Over the past year or so, hampered by the pandemic and other setbacks, the digital preservation programme at the University has largely been paused. Although not ideal, one benefit of this has been the possibility for the library to focus its attention on the implementation of our new archive collection management system, ArchivesSpace. The successful application of this software will of course be of huge significance to our digital preservation programme, as it will allow us to successfully manage our archival metadata and ensure a single point of truth for information about our collections.

The DPC Representative Council receives a report every three months that describes all our major activities in the previous three months, and previews work in the coming three months. This report is structured around the 7 objectives of the DPC's Strategic Plan:

• Advocacy
• Community Engagement
• Workforce Development
• Capacity Building
• Good Practice and Standards
• Management and Governance
• Scaled to the Global Challenge

Reports for each area are scrutinized by a Sub-Committee of the Board before they reach the Council where they are a prompt for discussion and a record of progress. These reports, and the scrutiny that they undergo meet two requirements of the DPC’s values: that we are ‘transparent in all our dealings’ and that we ‘respond to the needs of members in the delivery of services’.

Jacob Bickford is a Web Archiving Assistant at The National Archives. He recently completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Applied Data Science at Birkbeck with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

At the end of August, I completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Applied Data Science at Birkbeck, University of London. The course came out of the Computing for Cultural Heritage program, developed by the British Library, The National Archives and Birkbeck. It is an intensive course designed to provide applied programming and data science skills to graduates who do not have formal qualifications in computer science.

Karyn Williamson is Company Archivist for abrdn. 

The only thing certain about working for a ftse 100 company is that change is inevitable, and this is certainly true of abrdn. Since  Standard Life Aberdeen was formed, the company has transformed from a historic pensions and life insurance business to a rebranded futuristic fully-fledged investment company.

As the company worked its way through this transformation, the digital futurist objectives of the company meant that the digital preservation aims of the archive became more prevalent and the previous approach of ‘store it all on the archive server and we’ll get to it when we can’ was no longer satisfactory. In addition, abrdn has been very vocal about its commitment to corporate sustainability. With an external pledge from the company to cut carbon emissions in half by 50% by 2025, and a proven track record in responsible ESG investing since the 1990’s, abrdn also encourage every staff member to track their own impact on the environment via the pawprints app^[1]. With the thread of corporate responsibility and sustainability running through everything the company does, the archive was keen to continue this approach throughout our digital preservation process. With confirmation that IT support would be provided as needed, the stage was set to begin work on a sustainable digital preservation solution.

The first decision made was to manage the preservation of our digital records in house. This way, we alone were responsible for the environmental impact that our digital solution  and storage had on a wider scale. This in turn would allow the archive to put plans in place to measure and address this impact as part of our forward planning, making sure the archive functioned within the aims and objectives of abrdn while also being environmentally sustainable.

Anne Cornish MRIM is General Manager of the Records and Information Management Professionals Australasia.

RIMPA is a peak industry body for records and information managers in Australia. Some of you may be thinking…either “what exactly is that?” or “that doesn’t sound sexy!”

Records and records managers are essential to the way businesses conduct their operations; from the sole owner of the local newsagency through to government departments and large global companies. However, as with our digital preservation colleagues, records managers often receive very little exposure or recognition.

Organisations are quick to engage an accountant to manage their finances and an IT guru to manage their operating systems or an engineer to design a brand-new road. But the value of an organisation’s information assets can be overlooked or could be done by anyone.

Organisations provide accountants with the records they need to pay and collect monies; the IT guru refers to manuals and configuration documents in order to maintain the systems and the engineer uses plans to understand where the pipelines are when building roads. All of these functions rely on effective records management to realise the value of information assets.

Oya Y. Rieger is Senior Strategist for Ithaka S+R in the USA

Since it began almost 20 months ago, the pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of our lives. Researchers from all around the world have been mobilized to help understand and combat COVID-19 and communicate public health messages about it to a range of audiences. Critical information about COVID-19 has been flowing through various channels, including social media, news outlets, journals, and preprint servers. Early on, many cultural heritage organizations engaged in initiatives to participate in the curation and archiving of a diverse range of information. Given the ephemeral nature of digital information, preservation is not only a matter of considering the access requirements of tomorrow’s users but also taking into consideration the needs of individuals who are currently studying various scientific, sociological, political, and cultural aspects of the pandemic. These archiving efforts will not only help to capture a significant moment in our history but may also contribute to the prevention or management of future outbreaks.

Fatima Darries is Deputy Director Cataloguing Division at the University of South Africa (UNISA). She attended RDMF21 with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I attended the RDMF21 virtual workshop on Zoom on 12 and 13 July 2021. The workshop, entitled Data Stewardship in Research Institutions, was hosted by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

The two, half day workshops focused on institutional data stewardship roles, and how national-level communities of practice can help institutions coordinate them with the theme coordinating support for research data stewardship for generic and disciplinary roles.

I compiled this post from personal notes, collaborative notes, tweets and presenters’ slide decks.