Blog

Kate McCarthy is Special Collections Librarian and manager of digitisation projects at the Houses of the Oireachtas Library

It’s late in the evening. Do you know where your children are? And by children of course I mean all those digital files you’ve happily brought into existence in recent years. The documents, images, and datasets. The hundreds of thousands of tiffs, jpegs, pdfs, mp3s, mp4s and xml files. Are they under the supervision of a digital preservation system? Hanging out on a Cloud account? Loitering on a local server? Idling on an LTO? Waiting to be collected from an external hard drive in a desk drawer that you haven’t opened for two years?

Tom Wilson is Associate Archivist (Digital Preservation) at the UN High Commission for Refugees

Breaking down barriers is something that often appears in the day-to-day work of UNHCR albeit, more often than not, in the metaphorical sense. Whether it’s providing shelter for refugees, access to healthcare, informing the public of the plight of refugees and other persons of concern or one of the many other activities that UNHCR carries out, UNHCR seeks to remove the barriers that can prevent people fleeing from conflict from reaching safety. Part of this work is done on the internet and by amplifying the voices of refugees or advocating on their behalf and this is where UNHCR’s web-archive comes in to help preserve this content for posterity.

Karin Bredenberg, Marjolein Steeman, Tracy Meehleib are part of the PREMIS Editorial Committee

First of all, thank you for the feedback you have given us in response to last year's call to action! We also want to express our big thank you for the Brazilian Portuguese translation of “Understanding PREMIS” and the updates made to all of the other translations! We’ve been busy putting your feedback recommendations into effect and it’s fair to say that 2021 has been a very productive and--at the same time--a very strange year for the PREMIS Editorial Committee! We’ll start with the productive and end with the strange.

Antonio Guillermo Martinez is the CEO and founder of LIBNOVA. 

Este blog está disponible en español a continuación: 

Last year, in our guest post on the DPC blog we wrote about the challenges of the digital preservation of research datasets, and unknowingly it was slightly related to this year's chosen topic: Breaking Down Barriers.

This year, we want to focus on some of the technological barriers that LIBNOVA has broken down to make digital preservation more accessible to the community by simplifying it.

Historically, digital preservation systems have been complex to use and complex to set up. When we first met this community, everything was complicated, everything was difficult to do. LIBNOVA has focused every single day since its inception on breaking down those barriers, empowering the community to do more with less, and optimizing its systems to help them achieve that.

Ya’qub Ebrahim and Thandokazi Maceba are both Data Curation Officers at University of Cape Town Libraries, Digital Library Services.

For a number of years now we have planned and strategised and now it’s time to implement. Implement what you ask? Well, it all started in 2015 when UCT libraries had the vision of creating two Data Curator positions in the Digital Library Services department. Fast forward to 2018 and we have successfully scoped and motivated for implementing a digital preservation system. Finally in 2021, this system, which we have named Izolo (isiXhosa for ‘Yesterday’) is installed and set to store not only historic, or ‘special,’ collections at the University, but all data requiring preservation at UCT^[1]. But, policies aside, as the data curators and preservation experts we see our job as being to ensure that data gets preserved, period.

Ansie van der Westhuizen is Non-commercial Digital Developer (Institutional Repository) and Anri van der Westhuizen is Manager of Archives. They both work at the University of South Africa (Unisa).

The Unisa Institutional Repository (UnisaIR) was launched in May 2009.  Challenges and barriers were the order of the day. During a conference in Senegal, Nkosi (2008) rightfully called these barriers by name: mistrust, resistance and lack of skills. At present the UnisaIR is still operating as a “traditional institutional repository”. However, it became and remains a flagship service offered by the Unisa Library and Information Services and is continuously breaking down barriers.

Svenia Pohlkamp Runs the nestor office at the German National Library

When asked to write a blogpost to be published on this year’s WDPD I started thinking about the motto “Breaking down barriers”, digital preservation and my work at nestor. In the end I had a disturbingly long list of barriers in my mind, that I needed to order and bring into perspective. This text is the result (though it does not deal with every barrier I could think of) and it tries three things at once: Relating my experiences of working in a network while people are advised not to meet, looking into barriers that are relevant to our work in digipres and letting you know what nestor is all about.

Irina Schmid is Digital Collections Archivist for American University in Cairo

https://thesaurus.plus/synonyms/model_of

World Digital Preservation Day is a special day for us to celebrate. Digital preservation is not an easy program to start. Various technologies, a large number of files, not enough financial support, and sometimes just not knowing where to begin. Or it could be a desire for perfection that can halt an idea, without realizing that only imperfections and difficulties can initiate a preservation program. Adding coal to a firebox can start an engine, and at the American University in Cairo (AUC), we are using the same technique. Our small but solid steps act like coal igniting the preservation engine, which leads us to the destination.

Koen Dobbelaere & Quincy Oeyen work at Digital Archives Flanders for the Agency for Facility Operations of the Flemish Government

The expanding digitization of the government brings new challenges regarding the management, the (long term) preservation and the disclosure of digitally created or digitally received information. To tackle these challenges in an efficient way Digital Archives Flanders uses the concept of ‘series’. We define a series as: “An aggregation of files created and maintained by an owner, in the same identifiable sequence, or the result from the same accumulation or filing process, and of similar function, format or informational content”.

Elizabeth Kata is Archives Associate for the International Atomic Energy Agency based in Austria

Let’s face it, there are a lot of barriers to preservation, often due to a lack of resources. An institution needs enough staff and sufficient training opportunities for said staff, technical infrastructure, and an institutional commitment to finance preservation measures. When we began examining our digital holdings in 2020, we encountered a variety of barriers, both anticipated and unexpected.