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Last week the DPC held an online briefing day on the topic of Preserving Semi-current Records and we heard from a range of speakers who were all facing or considering the challenge of preserving semi-current or semi-active records.

Defining what a semi-active or semi-current record actually is was one of the first challenges of the day and perhaps differs in different contexts and disciplines. Kevin Ashley from the Digital Curation Centre described them as ‘the undead’ - records that are still with us but not quite alive. There is an implication of less use and perhaps greater neglect. 

Colin Armstrong is a Disc Imaging Technician for the British Library.
This blog post has been written in Scots - for those unfamiliar with the language, you may find the Dictionary of the Scots Language handy.

Since lockdown aroon mid-March, like a number o’ folks ma workin’ habits have changed dramatically. Ah’ve been unable to carry oot ma usual role in any normal capacity, and am mostly confined tae remote workin’ fae haim. Imaging disks as pairt o’ the  Flashback Project for the British Library Digital Preservation team at Boston Spa is ‘oot the windae’, and has been temporarily swapped fir home learning, webinars, and online courses (and occasionally screein' blog introductions in Scots). Ah’ve completed 18 courses and attended roughly 15 conference or webinar-type events tae date; but which have topped the list for improvin’ my digital preservation knowledge, professional development, and mayhap fir the team in general? Let’s take a wee gander eh?

Firstly, a huge thank you to the International Council on Archives for inviting us to co-host the ‘What I Wish I Knew... Webinar’ to celebrate digital preservation day on International Archives Week! It was so popular and so well attended that we ran out of time before we even made a dent in the number of questions submitted to our panellists, so as promised we’ve put our thinking caps back on and answered some more in this blog post.

Watch the webinar again

Matthew Addis is the Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum.

Concerns are frequently raised that the way that humanity generates and uses data is simply not environmentally sustainable and is a significant contributor to greenhouse emissions and climate change.   Archives and other organisations who hold and provide access to digital content are justifiably concerned about the part they play and how they can be more environmentally sustainable.

Roxana Maurer is the Digital Preservation Co-ordinator at the National Library of Luxembourg (BnL).

At the National Library of Luxembourg (BnL), we are in the midst of ingesting our Web archive into our Digital Preservation system. Or I should better say trying to ingest… Web archives are different in so many ways from more “traditional” digital content like PDFs or TIFFs, that they come with many challenges and that includes the transfer to a digital preservation system. I would like to present here some of the challenges encountered at the BnL these past weeks, as an introduction to the special meeting of the DPC Web Archiving & Preservation Working Group on the 10^th of June 2020.

Connecting the Bits has always had two objectives:

• To provide members with a face to face networking opportunity, facilitating good productive chat and knowledge exchange

• To gather information from members which will inform the development of a program of DPC activities for the following year.

Conscious that the growth of the Coalition meant that a large proportion of the members would be unable to attend in person and contribute to either of these objectives, last year we trialled an online version of this process. While the information required by the DPC was gathered successfully, members missed the opportunity to network and share ideas with each other – so we had grand plans for a return to the face-to-face networking unconference event(s) for 2020!

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

When I added a note to my diary to remind myself to write a blog piece for the Digital Preservation Coalition I thought I would write about what I was working on at the time - maybe policy writing? Perhaps a tricky file format or some musings on processing workflows*. However as I sit down to write looking out across my suburban cul-de-sac and not at my digital curation workstation I am going to reflect on what I see as my main challenges in working in digital preservation over the coming months (and longer probably).

May 18^th- 24^th 2020 is Mental Health Awareness Week here in the UK, and now, more than ever, it seems apt to turn a spotlight to these issues. This week last year, I wrote a blog post about my own struggles with anxiety and depression, and how they affect my work on a day to day basis. While I now have well established coping mechanisms that help me manage my mental health, the Coronavirus pandemic, and the resulting lockdown, bring with them a whole range of new challenges and I thought I’d write a little about my own experiences so far.

Hannah Merwood is a Research Assistant in the Digital Archiving department at The National Archives.

Last year Sonia Ranade and Alec Mulinder wrote a blog introducing the work we are doing at The National Archives to create a new method to manage digital preservation risk. In January, our lottery funded research project “Safeguarding the Nation’s Digital Memory'' was launched - a collaborative project with statisticians at the University of Warwick and other UK archive partners to develop a risk management decision-support tool based on data and evidence.  

Adam Harwood is a Research Data & Digital Preservation Technologist at the University of Sussex. 

The University of Sussex Library Special Collections is taking a whole new approach to digital preservation this year and will embrace the do it yourself for no money philosophy. The goal is to use a suite of open source tools and existing infrastructure at the University to create a digital archive.

I’ve been testing out a few different open source tools recently and putting together a workflow to process Special Collections' digital archives. I’ve been meaning to test out Bagger to create AIPs for a while now and last week I spent a morning giving it a test run. I know I find it very helpful reading about how other practitioners have been using digital preservation tools and so I wanted to share my experience of testing Bagger. It was a relatively painless experience…