Blog

Dr Lorraine Grimes is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Digital Archivist for the Digital Repository of Ireland

The Archiving Reproductive Health Project aims to provide long-term preservation and access to the many at-risk archives generated by grassroots women’s reproductive health movements during the campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. The project will collect, catalogue and preserve in the Digital Repository of Ireland much of the born-digital content generated by grassroots organisations such as Terminations for Medical Reasons, Together for Yes, Coalition to Repeal the 8th and the Abortion Rights Campaign. It will also preserve digitally-born material, particularly the In Her Shoes Facebook page.

In my previous post I set out the context for addressing legacy material held by The Postal Museum. I outlined how I approached the issue of getting content off removable media and work to analysis the file formats. In this post I explain how I am using this experience to plan migration pathways for inaccessible formats, and applying this experience to other material in our collections.

Beth Astridge (Project Archivist, UKPA) and Clair Waller (Digital Archivist), University of Kent Special Collections and Archives.

Contemporary collecting and mapping other collections  

This is our final blog post in a series from the University of Kent Special Collections & Archives describing some of our ongoing work to implement robust workflow and processes for the acquisition and management of born digital records, driven by our work to establish the UK Philanthropy Archive.

Jenny Higham is Head of Special Collections & Archives at the University of Liverpool Library

Amongst many significant changes – including a long period of reading room closure and limited staff access to collections - one lasting impact of Covid-19 on the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections & Archives has been an accelerated transition to delivering more of our service digitally. Unlike some of the other changes, this one is likely to remain permanent as the organisation moves forward with a proposed model of hybrid working.

Helen Dafter is the Archivist for The Postal Museum in the UK

In common with most other archives The Postal Museum’s management of digital records has evolved over time. Since 2017 (and earlier for some records) I have tried to capture as much metadata as possible about digital records at the point of acquisition. This includes documenting file formats on entry.

However, the documentation for digital records received prior to this was less detailed. Our earliest digital records date from the mid-1980s and in some cases I was lucky if the existence of a floppy disc was recorded in the entry documentation. It was not unknown for me to only become aware of digital media in what appears to be an analogue deposit when I opened the box. Another complication with these earlier records is that they are often on obsolete media. Having these on my desk always created lots of curiosity from younger colleagues.

Beth Astridge (Project Archivist, UKPA) and Clair Waller (Digital Archivist), University of Kent Special Collections and Archives.

This is the second in a series of blog posts from the University of Kent Special Collections & Archives describing some of our ongoing work to implement robust workflow and processes for the acquisition and management of born digital records, driven by our work to establish the UK Philanthropy Archive. 

In this blog we discuss how we developed guidelines for the cataloguing of born-digital materials, we share our thinking relating to how we will manage material containing personal data, and we consider how best we can make digital collections accessible for our users.  

Collections Management – Cataloguing, Access and Discovery 

In Special Collections & Archives, our long-term goal is that we are able to showcase our rich and diverse digital collections to a world-wide audience, securely and intuitively, engaging people with our archives, telling the story of the University of Kent, and developing our reputation as a trusted repository for digital content.  

To achieve this vision, we need to address how we approach cataloguing digital material and consider the various factors relating to how to make these collections accessible.  

Marjan Grootveld is Research Data Expert Team Leader at DANS and Ingrid Dillo is Deputy Director at DANS and FAIRsFAIR project coordinator.

Ever since the origin of the FAIR data guiding principles in 2014, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) staff have been involved in activities on thinking about their implications and implementing them. The conviction that research data sets in our long-term repository and in other repositories should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable is deeply ingrained in the DANS organisation and in our services. We were involved as co-authors of the original publication on the FAIR principles, developed and tested FAIR metrics, worked on tools to rate the FAIRness of datasets, evaluated how our own data archives score on FAIRness, compared the principles to the requirements of the Data Seal of Approval and the CoreTrustSeal, and explored the applicability of the FAIR principles to Software Sustainability. At iPRES 2019 we presented an overview of our first five years of FAIR activities.

Kimberley Harsley is an Archivist at the Natwest Group.

The introduction of the DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) in 2019 came at a perfect time for me. Still reasonably new to NatWest Group Archives, it was a great opportunity for me to learn more about our digital preservation work whilst contributing to it. This month, I revisited the RAM to assess how far we’ve come since then. I found it much easier the second time around as I was more familiar with the content and the archive itself. Having completed the RAM twice, here are my top tips.

1.     Talk it over

Although it’s certainly possible to do the assessment as a lone archivist, it’s useful to discuss your scores with someone else. Some parts of the assessment require careful consideration  about your particular situation. For example, working in a large organisation meant that assessing the commitment of senior stakeholders required close thought about who our senior stakeholders actually are. Rationally, the chief executive doesn’t need to be invested in our digital preservation programme for it to be successful (that’s not to say I wouldn’t be delighted if she were to give her support!). Being able to discuss this and challenge each other’s ideas made our eventual assessment more meaningful.

Emily Chen is Digital Archivist at the Parliamentary Archives. 

I actually started in the middle of the pandemic so I can’t tell you what business as usual looks like at the Parliamentary Archives (I’ve been told that biscuits figure hugely in it though). I am part of the Digital Preservation Team here, and so whilst some of my colleagues have begun returning to the office, I have only managed to be on site a grand total of two times since I started. To me working from home IS the norm. The joy and curse of being a digital archivist!

Whilst many things had to be put on hold in the middle of the pandemic, much of our work continued and was indeed able to expand. Primarily, in the areas of ingesting born-digital records into our digital repository and our archiving of the Parliamentary web estate.

A major focus of our ingest was on the roughly quarter of a million records pulled from our decommissioned ERMS (SPIRE), which reached end of life in 2019. Since then we had established a mature workflow that streamlined and automated a great deal of the cataloguing of these records. This meant that even with no prior digital preservation experience, it only took a bit of training for our cross-office colleagues to get to ingesting on their own. They were able to give us their invaluable help and support in steaming ahead with the ingest and over the period of April 2020 to March 2021 we ingested nearly 2/3rds of all the folders exported to date. This was around 13,000 individual folders (each corresponding roughly to one child workflow).

Beth Astridge (Project Archivist, UKPA) and Clair Waller (Digital Archivist), University of Kent Special Collections and Archives.

This is the first in a series of three blog posts from the University of Kent Special Collections & Archives team. In this series, we will be describing some of our ongoing work to implement robust workflow and processes for the acquisition and management of born digital records, driven by our work to establish the UK Philanthropy Archive at Kent. 

In this blog we introduce the UK Philanthropy Archive collection and our thinking relating to the processes involved with the acquisition and transfer of digital records.  

What is the UK Philanthropy Archive? 

The UK Philanthropy Archive is a growing archive collection within the University of Kent Special Collections & Archives department. The archive was established in 2019 with a vision to develop an eminent research resource reflecting the breadth of UK philanthropy.  

The UK Philanthropy Archive identifies, collects and preserves the archives and papers of UK philanthropists, philanthropic trusts and foundations, philanthropic networks, and other material related to philanthropy, grant making and fundraising. These archives and papers form a research collection that represents the history, experiences and perspectives of philanthropists, trusts and foundations and the impact of grant giving and philanthropy on UK society.  

The material in the UK Philanthropy Archive reflects the standard range of formats found across many modern archive collections – including paper records, photographic and audio-visual material, objects, and digital records. The collections that we are processing are usually hybrid collections containing a mix of paper and born digital records, and sometimes entirely born digital collections. Many of the archives reflect the operational aspects of grant giving organisations or projects – similar to a business archive collection. Some also include additional personal or contextual material relating to the individual founder, philanthropist or group that established the trust/foundation.