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This post was written by the team of the Time Machine Organisation.

This year´s World Digital Preservation Day’s theme “Breaking Down Barriers” points to how digitisation is the road into the future and holds numerous opportunities in various areas. Moreover, “the aim of World Digital Preservation Day is to create greater awareness of digital preservation that will translate into a wider understanding which permeates all aspects of society – business, policymaking, personal good practice” (cited from dpconline.org) – a conviction that is shared by the Time Machine network and that we would like to outline for you on this occasion.

Dan Noonan is Associate Professor/Digital Preservation Librarian at The Ohio State University and the Coordinating Committee Chair at NDSA.

This year as we celebrate World Digital Preservation Day, we contemplate how we can break down barriers to enable success, not just for ourselves and our personal institutions and organizations, but for the greater global community. Digital preservation is not a state that is achieved; rather it is a comprehensive set of managed activities that are necessary to provide continued access to digital objects, beyond the limits of media failure or technological change. These managed activities do not happen within one division, department or unit of an institution or organization, nor do they necessarily happen solely within one particular entity. Therefore, it is appropriate to consider the framework for this collective work as an ethos, which is described as the characteristic spirit of a people, community, culture, or organization as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations.

Karen Hanson is Senior Research Developer at Portico.

The scholarly community continues to experiment with new ways to present research. Today’s publications may include features such as interactive visualizations, data-driven experiences, extensive multimedia integrations (often with media hosted on third party platforms), user annotations or comments, non-linear navigation, and more. Meanwhile, keeping pace with preserving this increasingly complex network of born-digital materials is ever more challenging. To preserve these forms of scholarship effectively and at scale, one path forward is for preservation experts, platform developers, and publishers to work together to break down technical barriers for preservation.

Jeanne Kramer-Smyth is Digital Archivist with the World Bank Group Archives. 

There are so many cliches about how hard it is to get from “almost done” to “done”.  Cliches like, “the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time” and  “the last mile is the longest” can feel all too real. The barrier I am most obsessed with these days is the “last mile” between transfer and ingest of digital records.

At the World Bank Group Archives’ digital preservation program we are diligent in our efforts to work on all the traditional components of archival work with digital records, including appraisal, transfer, ingest, description, preservation, and access. Each component presents its own challenges, but getting from transfer (which I define as “bringing digital records into archival custody”) to ingest (which I define as “moving digital records into the Digital Vault, our digital preservation platform”) often feels larger than all the others.

Kate Murray, Digital Collections Management & Services at Library of Congress.

The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Audio-Visual Working Group, a collaborative group of US federal agencies led by Library of Congress since 2007, has had a busy year! We’ve released three updated projects in September to support its ongoing work with developing good practice guidelines and open source tools for digital audiovisual content and digital preservation practices.

Elizabeth England, Digital Preservation Specialist and Leslie Johnston, Director of Digital Preservation both from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

As part of its Digital Preservation Strategy, the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has goals associated with the ongoing review of its program and with ensuring that agency staff have appropriate training. Discussions with our internal digital preservation advisory group confirmed the findings from our ISO 16363 self-audit in 2019 that NARA staff in a variety of roles are unfamiliar with the goals and activities that are part of digital preservation, as well as the technologies used, NARA-specific activities and programs, and the regulations and guidance that NARA produces and abides by to ensure that the permanent born-digital and digitized records of the federal government are managed, preserved, and made accessible.

Teresa Soleau is Digital Preservation Manager and Alexis Adkins is Institutional Archivist. They work at the J. Paul Getty Trust.

As one of the newest members of the DPC we are thrilled to start working more closely with others in the digital preservation community, hearing about their work and sharing ours. As a first step in that direction, we’re going to share with you some web archiving work we’ve done in the past year. At Getty we don’t have a specific person dedicated to web archiving so the work is done collaboratively between staff in Institutional Records and Archives and Getty Digital.

Gabriela Andaur Gómez, Archivera del Archivo Electrónico del Archivo Nacional de Chile // 

Gabriela Andaur Gómez, Archivist of the Electronic Archive of the National Archive of Chile

[ENGLISH FOLLOWS]

Quienes trabajan en instituciones comprometidas con el patrimonio documental, saben que puede resultar desafiante transmitir la relevancia y urgencia de la preservación digital como área de desarrollo permanente. La complejidad del trabajo técnico y la necesaria inversión de recursos que implica, pueden ser difíciles de justificar cuando los resultados no son visibles de manera inmediata. Por el contrario, sabemos que el valor de la preservación digital se revela con particular fuerza en la medida en que transcurre el tiempo, mucho más allá de lo que el corto plazo nos permite anticipar.

Amarílis Corrêa is an Academic Librarian and Researcher on digital preservation in São Paulo, Brazil / Amarílis Corrêa, Bibliotecária acadêmica e pesquisadora em preservação digital

[PORTUGUESE FOLLOWS]

For some of us, there seems to be no barriers to digital preservation; for others, too many. Is the grass always greener on the other side of the fence? For me it is, considering I haven’t had the opportunity to implement any part of the digital preservation process in the institution where I work.

13^th June 2021 was the 10^th anniversary of my first day with the DPC, the point where I made the switch from practitioner to a focus on workforce development. Such a significant milestone has naturally led to time spent reflecting on years past and hopes for the future.

As with any experience in life, my decade with the DPC has brought a combination of highs, lows, and plenty places in between. But thankfully I can report that the highs massively outnumber the lows. In my family, our unofficial motto is that “it’s all about the stories” and I can say with all confidence that my time with the DPC have given me more interesting stories to tell than I could possibly count. So, overall, I think that my time with the organization has been a success.