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It's been all action at the DPC in recent weeks, what with new members of staff and even a new office in Australia, but we've also been beavering away on some new member offerings in the background. In this blog post I'm going to talk about a suite of new (and revised) resources for our members which will be appearing over the next few months.

This time last year, in January 2019, we were about to hold our first DPC Members Lounge. It is an idea we had been toying with for a while… we wanted to provide an opportunity for members to get together and chat informally, without an agenda and just on the topics that were at the front of their minds at that time, kind of like you might around…say… a water cooler?

Often the best ideas come when you give yourself a break, have a chat and let the conversation go whichever way it takes you.

And so the monthly Members Lounge was born (we called it that for want of a better name and because we couldn’t quite replicate a water cooler. A little imagination is required).

Establishing a new programme of work can be incredibly difficult to do if you cannot devote enough focused time and resources towards the objectives you wish to achieve. I bring this up because the DPC has been keen to break into online training provision for several years now, especially with our membership growing in terms of both numbers and diversity of location. It is, however, not an easy thing to do, and even harder to do well.

There needs to be time spent on procuring and implementing a learning management system. You need to test out content creation software and get training in how to use it well once you’ve found the package that’s right for you. You need to think about learner needs and how to manage their training experience.  And all of this (and more!) needs to happen before you even begin to think about designing courses and creating content, which is incredibly labour intensive in itself.

I was asked recently to sketch out some thoughts about archives and artificial intelligence. I am drawn to the topic as usual but with little real clue of where to start, so my point of departure is a comment on ethics. I have no real mandate to frame the ethical tone for what should be a very important debate, but if we don’t start here – if we put technology first – then there’s every possibility that we will end in the wrong place, either through sterile solutionizing, or worse by selling the whole farm to obscure, unaccountable and deeply unattractive corporate interests.

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

Anyone who has ever moved home can probably agree that it is at once a very exciting, yet stressful experience. Fitting your personal belongings into cardboard boxes can be a real mission; delivery vans can sometimes turn up at the wrong address, or not at all; and once you do manage to transport everything across town and country to your new gaff and unpack everything, inevitably something goes missing in transit. In short, moving big collections of stuff significantly increases the risk of loss.

Helen Shalders is Digital Archives and Cataloguing Manager at Historic England

The Historic England digital archive, which forms part of the Historic England Archive (HEA), holds 60TB of data, predominately images in TIF format but also, PDFa, shape, wav and mp3 and some more obscure specialist formats.  We ingest around 100 thousand files per year which is around 5TB. What we hold represents a national data set, and the content has usage potential well beyond the heritage sector. We have recently moved our Archive to the cloud, with mixed results and we use Extensis Portfolio as our platform of choice as well as a plethora of spread sheets to manage our holdings. Digital material for which appropriate rights are held is available to view via our website (archive.historicengland.org.uk). We have just commissioned Golant Innovation to work with us on developing a DAM proposal and business model.

Ray Moore is Digital Archivist at the Archaeology Data Service

Felis ADSus, a breed rarely seen beyond their natural habitat in the King’s Manor (York), were enticed from their lair into the wider world for their annual CATS (Curatorial And Technical Staff) week in September. With the continued support of the ADS director and management team, CATS week has become a feature in the ADS calendar in recent years allowing digital archivists to take time away from their daily activities to work on focused tasks and have those in-depth conversations about process, metadata and formats. The ‘catnip’ for any discerning digital archivist.

Now that the dust has settled after World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) on 7^th November and I have finished travelling around the country for the year (I think), I have had a chance to pause and reflect on what was - quite frankly - another stupendous outpouring of digital preservation community goodness!

Unlike last year when we were in Amsterdam for the Memory Makers Conference and Digital Preservation Awards, I was on home turf in York primed and looking forward to remaining glued to my tweetdeck for a good 36 hours. I was relishing the fact that I could quite literally binge on whatever WDPD was going to throw my way, with no distractions!

And my word, did WDPD throw us digital preservation delights by the bucketload!

Many years ago I ran a half marathon in Bristol but running a book sprint there was an entirely different proposition.

It could be argued however that both were exhausting and rewarding in equal measure!

Last week, DPC staff joined with colleagues from the University of Bristol and a small group of invited experts to work on a new resource for DPC Members - a Digital Preservation Policy Toolkit.

Elisabeth Thurlow is Digital Archives and Collections Implementation Manager at the University of the Arts London. She attended iPres2019 with support from the DPC's Career Development Fund which is generously funded by DPC supporters.

A recurrent theme across many of the papers presented at this year’s iPres conference was the important role of people in digital preservation. Technology tends to dominate conversations around digital preservation, but for digital preservation to ultimately work, we need people too.