Blog

Kunika Kono is Technical Lead for Digital Humanities at the Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advance Study, University of London

Over the last year, many universities in the UK faced organisational restructure, departmental closures and job cuts. The School of Advanced Study and its institutes were no exception, and in February 2021, the Digital & Publishing department in the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), where I worked, effectively closed.

Garth Stewart is Head of Digital Records Unit at the National Records of Scotland

As a practical discipline, tending to a garden feels quite similar to digital preservation: it can never be considered ‘done’. Whatever the season, wherever you are in the world, there’s always something to do; whether it’s the laying of a new lawn (or the installation of a new piece of digital storage infrastructure), the sowing of a new flower bed (or the ingest of new image files), applying fertiliser (or using characterisation tools to enrich metadata), or the odd bit of dead-heading (or the rare act of de-accessioning). Gardening - and digital preservation - are engrossing, progressive, life-long activities.

Laura Peaurt is Digital Preservation Officer at Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham Libraries.

World Digital Preservation Day always provides a welcome prompt to pause and reflect on our digital preservation journey over the last twelve months. This year we have been asked to consider how digital preservation supports digital connections, unlocks potential and creates lasting value.

At Nottingham Manuscripts & Special Collections we have been begun to realise the opportunity provided by our digital preservation system to encourage broadening access to and use of our digital collections. This includes both our previously hard to access analogue materials (such as VHS and cassette tapes) as well as newly acquired born digital content collected on CDs, DVDs, and floppy disks over the years.

Elisabeth Thurlow is Digital Preservation and Access Manager at University of the Arts London. 

Whilst the first phase of the University of the Arts London (UAL) Digital Archives and Collections project aimed to introduce a digital preservation programme including the implementation of a new digital preservation system, the second phase focused on increasing access to the University’s growing digital collections. This led us to the development and recent launch of a new Digital Collections portal. 

The university-wide Project focused on digital materials found in its archives, museums and special collections - which include images, video and sound recordings, and an increasing number of born-digital artworks.

Alexander Roberts is the Digital Humanities and Research Data Manager at Swansea University. 

Over the last 3 years, Swansea University Library has been on a digital preservation journey to increase access and engagement with two important world-class physical collections currently held in the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin, and the Huntington Library, California.

Daniel Greenberg is Product Manager for Digital Resources Management at Ex Libris.

The theme for World Digital Preservation Day this year is “Breaking Down Barriers,” highlighting how digital preservation supports expanding horizons for libraries and other institutions. For national libraries, this expansion comes with some unique considerations and best practices.

But let’s take a step back and look at the basic challenges national libraries face in managing preservation of their digital assets.

Lamia Sassine is Digital Curation Lab Coordinator at the University of Salford

As a relative newcomer to digital preservation the theme Breaking Down Barriers really spoke to me. My background is in archaeology and museum studies, but I started to get attracted to digital curation during my PhD. My research investigated perceptions of Phoenician collections from 20 different museums, and I envisioned the best way to bring them together would be through a digital platform, but this is a story for another time.

Micky Lindlar is Digital Preservation Team Leader at Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB).

A few weeks ago I watched the recording of Helen Hockx-Yu’s excellent presentation on “The obsession with checksums”. In one of the slides Helen talked about “A matter of where to spend energy”, listing her top 5 priorities. One of those priorities is “overlooked things that have lead to data loss”, e.g. “not collecting content”.  This really reminded me of the current work we – that is  TIB’s digital preservation team – are doing around e-journals and completeness of metadata as well as content.

You might ask yourself now “what does digital preservation have to do with completeness checking and why should I care?”. Life is easy when you interact with a data producer who signs responsible for the completeness of a deposit. But what if you’re tasked to interact with a repository that you harvest data from? Or if you deal with really large deposits (e.g. more than 5 million articles)? And, as a collecting institution, do you blindly trust a manifest given to you by a publisher or do you need to cross-check? Things were easy in the analogue days. The library would receive a journal issue, all articles would be contained within that printed publication and at the end of the year all issues would be bound together in a volume. Not today, my friend!

Almost a year ago now, the DPC published a Technology Watch Guidance Note from Matthew Addis entitled ‘Which checksum algorithm shall I use?’. It was really helpful at the time to summarise and condense advice and good practice on checksums and their use in digital preservation (and of course help people to make that all important decision on which checksum algorithm to pick).

Without a doubt, checksums are of key importance to our work in digital preservation. Use of them is regarded as good practice (as encapsulated in models such as the NDSA Levels of Preservation and DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model and certification standards such as CoreTrustSeal and ISO16363), but there is still a gap in our knowledge.

How do we know exactly when to create them, which tools to use, how frequently to check them, which events would trigger their use, what to do in the event of a failure...and of course, which algorithm we should use to create them? Where is the step by step handbook to provide all the answers?

Of course, there isn’t one.

Dr Deborah Thorpe is Education and Outreach Manager for the Digital Repository of Ireland

This autumn, the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) held an online introductory training programme in digital preservation for our members, with a particular focus on the training and community-building needs of community archivists. This course has been helping with breaking down barriers to digital preservation, by making topics such as appraising your digital collections for preservation, data protection, and metadata preparation understandable, relatable and accessible to all. ‘Understandable’, because we recognise that every individual who attends DRI training has a different level of existing knowledge of digital preservation processes; ‘relatable’, because sometimes it can be difficult to identify how the intricacies of topics such as GDPR or anonymisation relate to a particular digital collection; and ‘accessible’, because many community archivists are volunteers who do not have expanses of time or resources to spend on either undertaking training or preparing their collections for digital preservation.