Blog

Annette le Roux is Collection Developer Archival Resources at the University of South Africa (UNISA). She attended IS&T Archiving 2021 with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Annette le Roux is the Collection Developer Archival Resources at the Unisa Library, University of South Africa, with an International Masters in Digital Library Learning (DILL) obtained in 2009. She also completed the Society of American Archivists certificate: Digital Archival Specialist (DAS) in 2019 and the Novice to Know-How: Digital Preservation Skills for Beginners in January 2021.

It was such a privilege to attend the IS&T Archiving 2021 Online conference as a grant recipient of the DPC Career Development Fund. The reason for applying for this grant was worded in my application, mentioning:

The University of South Africa (Unisa), the largest open distance learning institution in Africa, hosts the Unisa Library Digital Collections, including the Unisa Library Archives Online. The urgent digitisation drive of the Unisa Library is closely linked to the following issues:

• Most archival collections located in the Unisa Library are unique and irreplaceable.

• Digitisation limits the physical handling of the original records.

• Digitisation provides access to Unisa’s researchers, as well as to a broad, international user-base.

Dr Deborah Thorpe is Education and Outreach Manager as the Digital Repository of Ireland. This blog is republished from the DRI blog on 4th August 2021. 

In DRI’s Repository, you can discover collections of data that range from the Cork LGBT Archive, to the Jacob's Biscuit Factory Archive, to the Irish Women at Work Oral History Project. The Repository preserves, manages and provides sustained access to this social and cultural content for the long-term future. The DRI team also collaborate with our members to showcase this digital content, working on promoting it and encouraging others to cite and reuse it. One element of our work that can cause confusion, though, is the difference between ownership and stewardship of data.

The data that you find in the Repository has a variety of data owners. These are the organisations that are responsible for the data and primarily comprise DRI’s members. As is outlined in the European Commission’s own data governance and data policy, they are the ‘business owners of data assets’, and are accountable for the quality of the assets [1]. DRI is not the data owner for the majority of the data in the Repository, with a number of notable exceptions including our own Publications and the outputs of some DRI-led research projects. Indeed, in order to ingest digital objects into the DRI Repository, an organisation must hold the rights to the data, or must show that it has the necessary permissions to publish the data (see DRI’s Collection Policy). Though DRI supports the open sharing and reuse of data where possible, depositors control the rights statements and licences attached to their digital assets. Digital preservation with DRI does not compromise the position of the data owner: the original creators retain ownership, copyright, and associated intellectual property rights of all digital objects ingested into DRI.

This post was written by the team at the National Library Board, Singapore

The National Library Board, Singapore (NLB) is the official custodian of Singapore's published and documentary heritage, archival materials of national and historical significance, government records and broadcast archives. As part of NLB’s Libraries and Archives Blueprint 2025, which outlines our evolving roles and priorities over the next five years, we are committed to an ongoing effort to collect, preserve, and make accessible digital content on Singapore.

Carrie Marks is a Digitisation Technician for Still Media at Imperial War Museums (IWM). She attended DCDC 2021 with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Hello Everyone! My name is Carrie and I am the Digitisation Technician for Still Media on the Preservation team at Imperial War Museums. I’m currently working on the Digital Futures project which involves digitising images that are at risk of deterioration over the next 5 years.

I wanted to attend DCDC21 as this year’s theme of ‘Collecting in Crisis’ runs parallel with IWM’s focus on collecting during conflict. I wanted to understand how the content I am creating on the Digital Futures project can be used to bring communities together online, develop new opportunities for researchers as well as open up collections for audiences unable to attend museums in person.

The session ‘Digital Loans using Augmented Reality – Would you?’ really caught my attention as I am passionate about preserving collections and I want to find a way to bring the physicality of photographic ephemera to digital users.

Shalen Fu is a PhD researcher in Digital Heritage and Impact Studies at King's College London.  Shalen attended DCDC 2021 with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

In 2018, I started my PhD journey at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London (KCL). My research looks at how to best assess the impact of digital museum resources in China. Working with museum partners and the general public, I hope to develop an impact assessment framework that helps Chinese memory institutions better perverse their heritage resources, manage digital collections, and engage the audience.

KCL is one of the associated members of the DPC, which allowed me to participate in the Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC) 21 Conference enabled through the DPC Career Development Fund. I would like to express my gratitude to the DPC for providing me with this excellent opportunity to learn from others while reflecting on how my research could best serve memory institutions in the context of uncertainties and changes.

The DCDC 21 Conference was held from 26 June – 2 July, which explored “how crisis can act as a catalyst for change within libraries, archives, museums, and cultural organisations”. The conference covered a wide range of topics from digital heritage preservation, accessible and inclusive catalogues, audience engagement to online teaching. Speakers from varied countries and backgrounds shared their viewpoints on the impact of the pandemic and how we could transform crisis into opportunity. This blog will focus on three talks regarding ‘digital loans’, trauma-informed practices in the GLAMA sectors, and digital game creation.

Alexandre Angers is Head of Sector for Long term preservation at the EU Publications Office.

I moved to the Publications Office about a year ago, joining the wonderful long-term preservation team. 

This was my first foray into the world of digital archiving.  I remember, for lack of a better reference, that in my mind came the image of a ‘time capsule’, probably from watching too many movies or television shows.  I knew I was probably off, but had no idea how far off I was.  First, of course, is maintenance – digital preservation is more akin to keeping a life form alive and healthy than storing objects away from the inclement weather.  But more important, even, is how differently time capsules and digital preservation ‘successfully end’.  I put both words in brackets because they deserve a reflection.

Laura Peaurt is Digital Preservation Officer at the University of Nottingham

Manuscripts & Special Collections have an active programme of collecting material supporting the institutional archives and documenting university life. This includes content created by the Students Union as well as student and staff societies.

We have an ongoing relationship with Student Union Officers, offering an annual induction to introduce officers to the archive service, and encourage deposit of material with the archive. We have previously blogged about this collecting work and our efforts to process CDs, DVDs and collect website relating to the student union.

Recently at the University of Melbourne we’ve had a chance to review an existing position description in our Digital Stewardship (Research) team, after the departure of a near and dear colleague.  

We reviewed this position in light of new requirements coming out of our five-year journey to date implementing a digital preservation strategy for the university. 

The position up for review played a crucial role in building the foundations for our digital assets repositories, and so now with technical foundations in place, the shift in this role reflects the maturity of service developments.  

New digital preservation requirements emerging after five years of dedicated digital preservation strategy implementation (a non-exhaustive list!) means we have to:

• Manage a digital preservation repository, including operational services to support the library, archives, and records units at the university 

• Support ongoing skill development for existing distributed staff having digital preservation functions added to their roles 

• Update and share our emerging digital preservation policies and procedures 

• Develop and share our operational framework and service model for doing digital preservation 

• Maintain existing relationships and invest in coordination for new relationship building to support the digital preservation repository across a very distributed staff cohort. Especially given the separation of IT and digital preservation functions in the organisation 

• Advocate for new capacity in terms of human infrastructure to support all of the above (as well as continue advocating for the technical infrastructure we have now put in place!)

It is very difficult to get an entire position dedicated to digital preservation, especially when our team does so many different tasks for the research and staff community across a range of areas – as well as digital preservation we support research data management and curation, open access, and data publishing to name some of the big ones.  

Thus we’ve arrived at the need for a dedicated Digital Curation Technical Specialist as we’re calling it – we are seeking primarily a technical skill set that includes curation and digital preservation knowledge and understanding, as well as data repository and outputs workflows.  

Take a look at what we’ve arrived at – I’d be very interested in comments or even a conversation with others grappling with how best to resource digital preservation requirements. And if you or someone you know would like to join a remarkably collaborative and supportive team, send this job advertisement out!

Lorna Williams is Senior Archivist at the Bank of England

Background

The Bank of England is the UK's central bank. Its mission is to deliver monetary and financial stability for the people of the United Kingdom. The Bank has had an archive function for over 50 years and it is now one of the finest business archives in the country.  The Archive holds nearly 100,000 items covering all aspects of the Bank’s history and operations since it was established in 1694. As well as meeting the internal needs of the business, the Archive is open to external researchers. Although the archives are not public records, the Bank opens material after 20 years in line with the policy of the UK National Archives. 

Caroline Lebre is a Digitisation Technician at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) Duxford in England. She attended IS&T Archiving 2021 with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I have recently started a position as a Digitisation Technician at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) Duxford in England, digitising the still media collection at the demand of the museum’s clients for various projects. As a recent graduate starting my career in the sector, I applied for a DPC Career Development Fund grant to attend the IS&T Archiving 2021 conference to learn about the ongoing research and debates on digitisation and curation and understand the different practices implemented by cultural heritage institutions. However, I was worried that the conference was intended for experts and professionals with several years of experience in the sector and I would not be able to understand the content discussed during the talks. I was very happy to discover that the Technical Papers Program offered a wide range of talks aimed at practitioners from all backgrounds and experience levels and that instructors were always keen on answering all questions. If you are currently involved in your first digitisation project, this conference will be a great platform for you to learn without barriers, just as it was for me.