Blog

Evanthia Samaras is the VERS Senior Officer at Public Record Office Victoria.

Over the past few years, Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) has been working to develop and test solutions to appropriately manage and preserve Lotus Notes email accumulations.

This work has been a part of our wider Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS), which is about ensuring the creation, capture and preservation of authentic, complete and meaningful digital records by the Victorian public sector.

This blog will share some findings from our Stage 2, email appraisal, disposal and preservation project.

Lee-Anne Raymond is the Senior Coordinator (DAMS) at Museums Victoria. 

The recovery rescue of valuable digital images from relative oblivion sometimes takes a pandemic lockdown to achieve. Whilst a viral outbreak of global proportion has delivered us anxious and uncertain times, it has also presented us with unique opportunity.

In late March 2020 as the Covid-19 Pandemic hit Australia’s public institutions, including Museums Victoria (MV), were transformed overnight. Only those with essential worker status were permitted access, ensuring precious collections and infrastructure were safe. MV’s essential workers variously relayed how strange it was to see the place so bereft of staff, volunteers and visitors “...the Museum is so quiet”.

Toni Burton, Collection Curation & Engagement Manager & Bridie Flynn, Senior Librarian Victorian & Australian Collections, State Library Victoria. 

As the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic started to unfold, it was clear that State Library Victoria needed a rapid collecting response to ensure that this event was documented and recorded.

Memory Bank: Collective Isolation Project developed as a cross department initiative to engage audiences in the act of citizen collecting. Using a series of weekly prompts, highlighted by existing collection material, people were invited to contribute their own documentary material to record their individual experiences. The prompts allowed collection and curatorial staff to guide the type of material we would like to receive and consider what might be important for future generations of researchers. A wide range of responses were received but due to the nature of the way people were living most submissions came in the form of digital content.

Ros Malone is a Counsellor for The Australian Society of Archivists. 

It is important for schools in Australia not to misunderstand the central findings and recommendations of the Commonwealth of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, handed down in December 2017.

For school archivists and recordkeepers, the key to understanding is in the title of the enquiry.

Because for many schools across Australia, it was revealed that it was their response to allegations of, and enquiries about, child sexual abuse that was their greatest failing.

Karuna Bhoday is the Assistant Director of the Integrated Archival Management System Project at National Archives of Australia. 

The National Archives of Australia provides leadership in best-practice management of the official record of the Australian Government and ensures that Australian Government information of enduring significance is secured, preserved and available to government agencies, researchers and the community

The National Archives has two key roles under our Act:

• to provide access to the Commonwealth government records which document the memory of our nation (connect Australians with their identity, history and place in the world); and

• to advise government agencies on the creation, management, including authorised disposal, and access of information and data to ensure:

  • government is transparent and accountable;

  • evidence of the actions and decisions of the Australian Government is created; and

  • that information is kept and is accessible for as long as needed.

Andrea Goethals is the Manager of Digital Preservation at the National Library of New Zealand 

This post is about the adjustments our digital preservation team at the National Library of New Zealand made during and after our Covid-19 lockdown.

Before Covid-19, with a couple exceptions, most of the Preservation Research & Consultancy (PRC) team came into the Library building in Wellington to work five days a week. One of us already worked remotely full-time from Auckland, and occasionally a few people worked from home, on the order of a day every other week.

Back in early March 2020, our team had been working on our BCP (business continuity plan) as part of our routine tasks. The BCP had different scenarios to plan for, for example, losing access to our building, which called for working from home as our strategy. We decided to test out our team’s ability to work from home one day - Friday March 20. As it got closer to our test day, the news about Covid-19 started increasing around us. On March 18 the entire Library was told to work from home on March 20 as a test. We started to realize that our test day might intersect with a real call for us to start working from home. A few days beforehand we did two things that turned out to be important in hindsight.

The theme for World Digital Preservation Day (5th November if you hadn’t noticed) is Digits: For Good.

I have improvised the punctuation in my title to look like the old DOS prompt, suggesting crudely that ‘Digits’ are the configured infrastructure which makes everything (anything) possible and ‘For Good’ is the routine we execute: ‘Digits’ as the universal virtual machine: ‘For Good’ our programmatic but achievable goal.

I like the theme this year, not just because it tells me that World Digital Preservation Day is mature and ambitious enough to carry a theme greater than the simple ‘connect and communicate’ of previous years. I like it because there’s a double meaning and both of them seem fitting: digits for ‘ever’ and digits for ‘better’.

It’s no surprise that the digital preservation community is interested in the ‘forever’ bit, even if we usually pivot to something shorter than forever. Mostly we don’t mean to keep digits for ever, and mostly we wouldn’t promise it either. It is perhaps less obvious that digital preservation is also for the common good and perhaps it’s time to put that right. This year’s theme reminds me that we don’t do digital preservation for the sake of the bits and bytes: it’s not ‘good for the digits’. We do it because of real world impacts we can have with the digits that we work for. That means we dive deep into file formats and fixity and storage and such, but you’d be wrong if you thought that was also our purpose. Here we are geeking out about representation information and all the while digital preservation helps deliver healthier, wealthier, safer, smarter, greener, more creative and more transparent agencies, communities and individuals: goals which we wouldn’t be able to achieve, or perhaps even imagine, without access to a trusted and secure digital legacy. This year’s theme encourages a reflection on human aspects of digital preservation: the labour that makes it possible and the aspiration that makes it desirable.

Oya Y. Rieger is a Senior Strategist and Rebecca Springer is an Analyst, both working at Ithaka S+R, US

The long-term stewardship of digital cultural materials depends not only on the technical resiliency of preservation systems, but on their financial and organizational sustainability. This need has been underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic as many libraries and other cultural heritage organizations brace for sharp budget reductions in the coming fiscal year and beyond. As an organization that provides research and advisory services in support of enhanced access to and preservation of the scholarly record, Ithaka S+R has been exploring the landscape of digital preservation programs and services in order to contribute to the advancement of strategies in support of future scholarship. To address the need for a greater understanding of the business and operational strategies of digital preservation and curation systems (DPCSs), we have launched a research project to examine and assess how these systems are developed, deployed, and sustained. In this project, we will conduct a series of case studies of the business approaches of community-based and commercial DPCS initiatives, offer lessons learned, and propose alternative sustainability models for long-term maintenance and development.

It is hard to imagine a more interesting time to work in libraries, nor a more challenging one. 

In an era of post-truth obfuscation and sinister deletion, the ability to collect, retain and authenticate is suddenly a super-power; in an era of relentless proliferation, the confidence to select and consolidate, with implied permission to relegate and de-duplicate, is ubiquitously essential; in an era where data is the ‘new oil’ of the ‘information society’, the unassuming librarian holds the keys not only to the past, but now also to the future. One would have thought that this generation more than any other would be the age of the library, an enduring proof of common cause for the common weal: deposit libraries at the summit of our ambition, the record of all we have achieved and source of all we might.  Why does it not feel that way?

It’s not yet clear whether the digital turn will be the making of the library or its undoing, given many of these opportunities are disruptive, mostly provisional, and largely originate outside of the library community.  These challenges arise just at a moment where the social and economic context of operations are profoundly unsettled, whether through the continuing dysfunction of economics, the puzzling impasses of public discourse, or a global crisis of dislocation and dispossession. With such uncertainty about the times in which we will shortly live, this is no time for an identity crisis. Yet there is little prospect of staying unchanged.

Richard Ovenden OBE is the President of the Digital Preservation Coalition

This article was originally published in the FInancial Times on the Wednesday 14th October and this version can be accessed here. 

Deep in the stacks of the Bodleian Library in Oxford is a remarkable sheet of paper written sometime in the 1660s. It contains an exchange of private messages between King Charles II and his chief minister, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. The document contains the handwriting of the two men alternating, as they play out a tetchy exchange concerning the monarch’s expenses, costs which Clarendon was struggling to contain. ‘I would willingly make a visit to my sister at Tonbridge for a night or two at farthest’ states the King at the top of the sheet, ‘when do you think I can I can best spare the time?’ Clarendon, with an eye to the cost, replies below with a suggestion, adding ‘I suppose you will go with a light trayne’. The king’s answer is simply that ‘I intend to take nothing but my night bag.’ Clarendon is incensed by this provocational understatement: ‘God, you will not go without 40 or 50 horse’. The Royal put down is epic in its haughty brevity: ‘I counte that parte of my night bag’.