Blog

Sally McInnes is Chair of the ARCW Digital Preservation Group and Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales.

The ability to remotely connect and network with colleagues has been one of the positives that have arisen from these challenging times. From my home in Aberystwyth, which is not always the most accessible of places by non-digital highways, I am able to engage with experts, learn from their experiences and contribute to discussions on a global basis. Although we have been building digital preservation capacity in Wales for many years, these encounters have inspired us to extend the reach of the work being undertaken to promote digital sustainability. Working with the sector, developing the use of digital technologies and sharing skills are key elements of the National Library of Wales’s (NLW) new strategic plan ‘A Library for Wales and the World, 2021-26’, which will be launched shortly.

Iram Safdar is the Digital Archivist at Historic Environment Scotland. She attended IDCC 2021 and the RDA 17^th Virtual Plenary with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters

Thank you to the Digital Preservation Coalition Career Development Fund, without which I would not have been able to attend the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC21). This year, the IDCC took place virtually, over one day and was a co-located event with the RDA 17^th Virtual Plenary, as part of an Edinburgh week of data management. This is the first time I have been able to attend the IDCC, and coming from a background in the archives profession, specialising in digital archives, I was looking forward to learning more about the ways we can manage and curate our digital data, and make it accessible.

The opening keynote, titled ‘Indigenous Sovereignty of Language Data – the Māori example’, was delivered by Te Taka Keegan, Associate Professor in Computing, and Associate Dean Mãori for the Division of Health, Engineering, Computing & Science at the University of Waikato. A Māori language activist, Te Taka started the keynote with a greeting in his language, roughly translating to ‘Honor and glory above, peace on Earth, goodwill to everyone’.

Te Taka noted that there is a significant community undertaking research based on open data and utilising big data to generate resources and initiatives, however, Te Taka identified a few issues with this in terms of Indigenous data. Te Taka observed the increase in collections using Indigenous data, that Indigenous communities themselves are not aware of. Furthermore, collections are generally not own by Indigenous Peoples, and they don’t have a say on how they are run, what information is stored – the crux of the issue being, Indigenous information is being made available that Indigenous Peoples have no control over.

Natasha Kitcher, Doctoral Researcher in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. She is Research Assistant for the AURA Project, working with Dr Lise Jaillant at Loughborough.

Last September, Dr Annalina Caputo, Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Dublin City University, shared with the DPC community news of the AURA Network (https://www.dpconline.org/blog/aura-unlocking-cultural-assets). This AHRC-IRC research networking project brings together an interdisciplinary group of stakeholders from Digital Humanists to Computer Scientists to consider the past, present, and future of born-digital archives.

Now, almost eight months later, we are able to share some of the findings of the network with you.

Much like the born-digital archives it considers, this network was born-digitally thanks to coronavirus, which has facilitated discussions between a far-flung group of researchers and professionals in Libraries, Archives and Museums. While the group formed to consider access and usability of born-digital archives, the virtual nature of workshop attendance over the last few months has enabled scholars, archivists, librarians and other stakeholders from across the globe and at varying stages of their careers to engage in AURA’s debates.

Carlo Iacono is Head of Library Research Services at the University of Bath

During the torrid time that was 2020 it was both refreshing, challenging and insightful to take up the chance to negotiate a deal with Preservica for the University of Bath.

When preparing for a negotiation (and in fact this negotiation) I start by thinking about the best/worst case scenarios and then pinpoint my specific goal that represents the best case. Given the work that had already gone into looking into Preservica, it was relatively simple for me to understand what the best case was – ‘a deal that  fitted our financial constraints, allowed us  to set up Preservica in a way that worked for our requirements and could develop over time’. My mindset going into an initial online discussion was specifically to expect our requirements at a cost that worked. But, I specifically did not start with a list of requirements in the discussion, as I wanted  to sound out the likelihood of a deal whilst both reflecting on Preservica’s approach and their ability to work with us to get to a deal. Of course, not being able to start this process face to face added a layer of difficulty but underlined a need to be clear, concise and honest. Their initial responses and ability to openly listen to our position gave me the belief to push forward.

Adam Bell is Manager, Cultural Outreach at AARNet.

AARNet is Australia’s National Research and Education Network, best known for operating the high-speed, low-latency fibre optic network that interconnects universities, research organisations, schools and major cultural heritage organisations around Australia.

In response to the pandemic and with physical site excursions banned, we saw network traffic from connected GLAM institutions rise in step with an increase in the delivery of education and outreach programs online and supporting remote access for staff.

Recently, AARNet’s role in supporting critical digital activities in organisations has expanded from the provision of network services to include infrastructure and services for data storage, collaboration and security.

As AARNet gears up to deliver new cloud infrastructure and expand existing services to meet the changing needs of the research and education sector we have sought to understand the requirements and responsibilities of researchers, data curators and institutions, including the challenges of digital preservation. AARNet is pursuing this goal through Digital Preservation Coalition membership, an international community that exists to preserve the world’s digital legacy, and by supporting several projects with digital preservation dimensions: Science Mesh, ARCHIVER and Play it Again 2.

Kieran O’Leary is the Digital Preservation Manager at the National Library of Ireland.

I have been working within the Digital Collections department of the National Library of Ireland for close to eight months now. We are working on many exciting born-digital pilot projects, and I look forward to going into more detail on them in a future blog. For now, I just wanted to share some observations on terminology and communication that I've noticed in my Digital Preservation roles over the years, but also within our community as a whole. I specifically want to focus on the terms:   File and Ingest.

In a digital collections department,- one might expect to find a mix of Archivists, Librarians, IT professionals, and people like me who're not quite anything but let’s go with digital preservation specialist for now. Much is often made of GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) efforts to communicate needs with IT professionals, but issues around definitions and namespaces are equally difficult for GLAM workers when talking amongst ourselves. 

Steve Daly is Head of Technology for BBC Archives.

At the BBC Archive we deal with a large variety of different multi-media assets, from physical video and audio tapes through to disk and cloud-based storage.  Our highest-quality, uncompressed master video files are generally stored on LTO data tape, with copies in multiple locations.

This means we’re managing tens of thousands of data tapes and, whilst all these are heavily tracked in our warehouse and data management systems, not all the other data tapes that come into our possession have been looked-after quite so well.

Where we receive or inherit tapes created outside our own operations it can sometimes be difficult to be sure of the exact provenance of the contents and how best to read and understand them.  We want to make sure we’re not creating issues like this for future users of our own data tapes, so we take a few additional steps to ensure the long-term life of our content.

Emma Hancox is Digital Archivist at the University of Bristol and Sam Brenton is a Digital Archives trainee through the The National Archives’ Bridging the Digital Gap scheme.

Despite the disruption caused by the pandemic, the past year at the University of Bristol has been a busy one. As well as implementing Preservica we’ve been establishing our workflows and working on ingesting more of our digital collections.

Excitingly, in the New Year we welcomed Sam Brenton as our Digital Archives trainee through The National Archives’ Bridging the Digital Gap scheme. We wanted to take this opportunity to introduce him to Digital Preservation Coalition members and ask him some questions about his experience so far. 

Paul Gooding is Senior Lecturer in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow. 

The AEOLIAN (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations) Network, funded under the “AHRC and NEH New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions” scheme, aims to bring together scholars, computer scientists, archivists and digital preservationists to investigate the role that Artificial Intelligence can play to in making digital cultural records more accessible to users (and If you’re wondering about the awful pun in the title, the Aeolian harp is a musical instrument that is played by the wind. No, I’m not sorry…). As we prepare for our first workshop (the call for participation is out now), I hope that many of you will consider joining us over the two year project duration. 

The Santa Barbara Statement on Collections as Data has been highly influential in shaping an ethics of curation in heritage organisations (plug alert: the Collections as Data lead, Thomas Padilla, will be on keynote duties at the first AEOLIAN workshop…). In my own research, questions around the application of AI and machine learning are a recurring theme. As the following examples show, though, those questions just as often end up being ethical and political in nature as technical and technological.

Chris Jones works for the State Library of South Australia

The State Library of South Australia has built their very own ingest tool, Jester, to optimise process automation.