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It’s been a busy time lately for me and Amy Currie, the DPC’s Training Officer! Over a short series of blog posts we’re going to fill you in on some of the recent highlights of the DPC’s Workforce Development activities. First up, I’m going to give a brief run down on the results of our recent training needs survey.

In late Spring 2020 I circulated a survey to DPC members to assess current training needs. The purpose of the training survey was twofold:

Remember remember the 5th November...

For us here in the UK this date usually means fireworks, toffee apples and huddling round a bonfire as we mark Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night. It’s usually freezing, often raining, but a tradition many* observe anyway as it offers the chance to come together as friends and family, and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at an impressive spectacle whilst eating sweets and treats. 

*I know that fireworks are not favoured everyone, most espeically by our dogs of digital preservation. Please enjoy thoughtfully.

I’m not sure there will be many community bonfire-side gatherings this year given the pandemic and various lockdowns still in force, but I’m not at all worried because we have:

via GIPHY

This is a guest post by Annalina Caputo, Assistant Professor in the School of Computing, Dublin City University. She is working on the AURA Project with Lise Jaillant at Loughborough University as well as colleagues from National University of Ireland Galway, Waterford Institute of Technology and The National Archives.

AI is leading the fourth industrial revolution: its enhanced capabilities propelled by large access to big data and more powerful machines are changing the way we think about day-to-day tasks, machines, and society. Far from the fuss of big news titles, which promise new algorithms for driving cars, writing articles, and generating art masterpieces, the real “Intelligent Revolution” is already happening under our eyes, in a more pervasive and subtle way. 

How will this Intelligent Revolution transform born-digital archives? What challenges and opportunities does it open for archives? Which ethical and legal aspects does it imply?

It is one year since DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM) was launched at the iPRES conference in Amsterdam (and in this blog post)

With a busy DPC week of #WeMissiPRES we couldn’t squeeze in a proper first birthday party for DPC RAM, but we do like an opportunity to celebrate so we couldn’t let this special occasion go by unmarked.

A reminder: DPC RAM is a digital preservation maturity model designed to be quick and easy to use. We designed it in conjunction with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in the UK, initially as a means of assessing their digital preservation capabilities and setting goals...but ultimately as a useful benchmarking tool for the whole community.

Mashal Ahmad is a Software Developer and Kathryn Cassidy is a Software Engineer, both working for the Digital Repository of Ireland.  

During the current pandemic, we have seen some wonderful examples of how communities can come together in the face of adversity. We’ve seen everything from viral videos of Italians in lockdown singing from their balconies, images of teddy bears in windows, and a huge range of community efforts to help vulnerable people in their areas. One great initiative that emerged among maker and tech groups was the 3D printing of face shields, at a time when personal protective equipment for health professionals was in short supply world-wide.

Laura Molloy is the Senior Researcher Lead at CODATA.

Digital Preservation Awards season is upon us!  Celebrating excellence in maintaining our digital legacy, the Digital Preservation Awards take place every two years and I’m delighted to be one of this year’s judges.

Digital preservation is a compelling research area as well as the technological bedrock of data infrastructure, and as such the resources and community of the Digital Preservation Coalition are invaluable resources for my work here at CODATA.

Hugh Campbell works in Digital Preservation & Information Systems for the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

Doesn’t time fly when you’re waiting for your slot on the DPC blog rota to come around?! I had spent some time thinking about different aspects of digital preservation before deciding on a topic and drafting my blog. Then, a few days before submission, comes an email from Jen Mitcham asking politely if I had considered writing about Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) as I am a member of the DPC’s EDRMS Preservation Taskforce. A swift change of course later and here are some of my musings on my EDRM experience.

Simon Whibley is Digital Collections Conservator at the British Library

The digital preservation community has invested a great deal of effort over the past decade into developing ways of evaluating the maturity and trustworthiness of preservation processes and services. The tools and frameworks now available to the community vary from relatively simple maturity models to highly-detailed audit standards designed to support the certification of services and organisations.

Over the past few years, the British Library and its partners have used a range of these assessment frameworks as a means of benchmarking our progress and for identifying gaps. This post will explore some of the lessons that we have learned from undertaking these assessments.

John Beaman is the Preservation Repository Manager at the British Library

Many institutions have significant digital content stored outside of a fully-fledged preservation repository system. The content may be waiting for a backlog of other material to be cleared, content-specific pre-ingestion processes to be developed, or even for a preservation repository system to be implemented at the institution. Often the content is stored on standard network storage made available by the institute’s IT department, or on offline storage such as external USB hard drives. This content is inherently at risk since it is not protected by the full range of digital preservation processes within a preservation repository system such as file fixity checking. The longer content remains in this state, the greater the risk of it coming to harm. In response to this, the British Library’s Digital Preservation Team has developed the Minimum Preservation Tool (MPT), a collection of utilities written in Python that can be used to create an interim preservation storage solution, providing a basic minimum level of file preservation in order to reduce risks to content currently stored outside of a preservation repository system.

Back in April I introduced you to the EDRMS task force. 

Our initial plan was to meet for six months and to carry out some of the following activities: