Blog

It’s my pleasure to announce the official start of World Digital Preservation Day.

It’s both welcome and surprising to realise that we’re now onto our fifth annual event.  In the first couple of years, the simple purpose of connecting people and raising awareness about our work was sufficient.  Even that seemed ludicrously ambitious in 2017.  This year’s theme – Breaking Down Barriers – represents a new confidence, and perhaps a new urgency too. It’s a call to action. It’s a challenge to do something with those connections and insights that we’ve gained in the last four years.  We’ve connected with colleagues around the world and formed those relationships and in 2021 we move forward together.

There’s no shortage of ambition here, but let’s be honest, there’s a need for ambition. There are enough barriers to be broken down.  We’re used to thinking about digital preservation as the intersection of technology, resources and organization. There are barriers to all three of these, and the scale of the challenge only seems to grow.

Rachel MacGregor is Digital Preservation Officer at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, UK.

28^th September 2021 was definitely a day for us to celebrate as we finally went live with ingesting digital material into our preservation system. There was a nervous moment as we uploaded the first SIP and a holding of breath while we waited to see if we had put all the metadata in correctly (we had!) and then a sigh of relief as we had our first successful ingest. To get to this point, as anyone who has already done it knows, requires a huge amount of work in terms of procurement, preparation, collections curation and planning. And whilst it’s a big milestone in one way we know it’s just another step along our digital preservation journey. Sometimes it can seem like getting the system is the end point whereas in reality it’s only one part of the much bigger picture which can help us with preserving material. Digital preservation is journey not a goal but we feel happy that we have made progress with this and are excited about being able to build on our successes.

Andrea Walker is an Archivist at University at Cape Town Library. She attended the ASA 2021 Archives Amplified Conference with support from the Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I recently received a Career Development Fund grant from the DPC to attend the 2021 Australian Society of Archivists' conference, which ended up being entirely virtual. Given the global situation I wasn't planning to make the trip to Australia, but was glad the conference offered virtual options and am still catching up on all the sessions I missed—while I understand the need for parallel sessions, I always, always, every time, without exceptions, miss interesting talks scheduled at the same time as other interesting talks!

Jessica Hooley is a MA Archive and Records Management student at Aberystwyth University. She attended the ARA 2021 Virtual Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

The MA Archive and Records Management course at Aberystwyth University has provided a great basis to start my professional career in archives and records management. Seeing the schedule for the ARA Conference, it sparked my interest as it would support and develop what I had already learnt from Aberystwyth University, as well as hearing from various professionals from multiple archives holding various collections and numerous academic interests.

Mia Willis works at Historic England

As maternity cover for the Historic England Archive’s Digital Preservation Officer I expected to consolidate the work and clear the backlogs caused by the pandemic, develop programmes of work, manage the Digital Preservation Assistant and work with other archive staff and depositors to improve our flowlines and metadata standards. This, on top of re-opening our offices post-pandemic, becoming a manager for the first time and generally looking after and preserving our 66+ TB of data sounded like quite the challenge.

But digital preservation is full of surprises, and the Digital Preservation team at Historic England have been thrown a big surprise: The Repatriation of our Digital Archive.

Janina Ziesche works as an Executive Assistant at the International Atomic Energy Agency. She attended the ARA 2021 Virtual Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I am not (yet, at least) a trained records manager or archivist, but I have practical experience working on projects that aimed to establish or improve records and information management (RIM), as well as knowledge management structures in two different organizations. While I am personally super excited about the positive impact that effective RIM has on the work of an organization, I quickly realized that the biggest challenge is to find a way to share my enthusiasm and convince management and colleagues of the benefits of RIM and the connected digital platforms.

Over the past year or so, hampered by the pandemic and other setbacks, the digital preservation programme at the University has largely been paused. Although not ideal, one benefit of this has been the possibility for the library to focus its attention on the implementation of our new archive collection management system, ArchivesSpace. The successful application of this software will of course be of huge significance to our digital preservation programme, as it will allow us to successfully manage our archival metadata and ensure a single point of truth for information about our collections.

The DPC Representative Council receives a report every three months that describes all our major activities in the previous three months, and previews work in the coming three months. This report is structured around the 7 objectives of the DPC's Strategic Plan:

• Advocacy
• Community Engagement
• Workforce Development
• Capacity Building
• Good Practice and Standards
• Management and Governance
• Scaled to the Global Challenge

Reports for each area are scrutinized by a Sub-Committee of the Board before they reach the Council where they are a prompt for discussion and a record of progress. These reports, and the scrutiny that they undergo meet two requirements of the DPC’s values: that we are ‘transparent in all our dealings’ and that we ‘respond to the needs of members in the delivery of services’.

Jacob Bickford is a Web Archiving Assistant at The National Archives. He recently completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Applied Data Science at Birkbeck with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

At the end of August, I completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Applied Data Science at Birkbeck, University of London. The course came out of the Computing for Cultural Heritage program, developed by the British Library, The National Archives and Birkbeck. It is an intensive course designed to provide applied programming and data science skills to graduates who do not have formal qualifications in computer science.

Karyn Williamson is Company Archivist for abrdn. 

The only thing certain about working for a ftse 100 company is that change is inevitable, and this is certainly true of abrdn. Since  Standard Life Aberdeen was formed, the company has transformed from a historic pensions and life insurance business to a rebranded futuristic fully-fledged investment company.

As the company worked its way through this transformation, the digital futurist objectives of the company meant that the digital preservation aims of the archive became more prevalent and the previous approach of ‘store it all on the archive server and we’ll get to it when we can’ was no longer satisfactory. In addition, abrdn has been very vocal about its commitment to corporate sustainability. With an external pledge from the company to cut carbon emissions in half by 50% by 2025, and a proven track record in responsible ESG investing since the 1990’s, abrdn also encourage every staff member to track their own impact on the environment via the pawprints app^[1]. With the thread of corporate responsibility and sustainability running through everything the company does, the archive was keen to continue this approach throughout our digital preservation process. With confirmation that IT support would be provided as needed, the stage was set to begin work on a sustainable digital preservation solution.

The first decision made was to manage the preservation of our digital records in house. This way, we alone were responsible for the environmental impact that our digital solution  and storage had on a wider scale. This in turn would allow the archive to put plans in place to measure and address this impact as part of our forward planning, making sure the archive functioned within the aims and objectives of abrdn while also being environmentally sustainable.