Blog

Cristiana Serejo is Deputy Director at Museu Nacional/ Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Due to the great fire, which occurred in September 2018, the collection of the permanent exhibition, as well as part of the scientific collections, were lost. Despite the invaluable loss of historical objects and specimens, the institution has been invested in projects of preservation and digital recovery of its collections as a strategic action to safeguard and preserve collection data for future generations.

Founded in 1818, the National Museum (MNRJ) is the oldest scientific institution in Latin America. For more than two centuries the museum has been and is still a fundamental agent for the cultural and scientific development of the country. Nowadays, in addition to promoting scientific education and dissemination, the institution develops world-renowned research lines in the areas of anthropology, botany, zoology, geology and paleontology.

Frederick Alexander is Digital Archivist at Historic Environment Scotland

The digital archive at Historic Environment Scotland comprises of 42 terabytes of digital materials. This archive, alongside its physical counterpart, contains information relating to the historic environment of Scotland. Scotland’s historic environment is the physical evidence of past human activity, from a prehistoric fort, to a Victorian garden, to a drawing of a cityscape. In this blog post I want to give an example of how we extracted and preserve at-risk digital materials, and in doing so developed our digital preservation skills.

In 2018 we received a deposit of operational records from Reiach and Hall Architects. Reiach and Hall was established in 1965 and has been responsible for the redevelopment of Dundee Council Civic Offices (Dundee), the University of St Andrews Medical Sciences Building (St Andrews), and the Scottish National Blood Transfusion (Edinburgh).This collection comprised of drawings, reports, and project files. There was an additional digital deposit, including seventeen 5.25 floppy disks. 

Kieran O’Leary is Data and Digital Systems Manager at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin

In a moving image archive, there are many objects that can be classified as ‘at-risk’, so it’s hard to pick just one. The one that’s on my mind the most at the moment is optical media, mostly because of an upcoming project involving lots of optical media, specifically DVD-Video. This project is similar to the Loopline Project that resulted in us winning The National Archives Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy from the Digital Preservation Coalition. I would like to talk about how optical media became a major focus of this project, a little bit about format-bias, and outlining some of the research that we will have to do.

This project is supported by the wonderful Broadcasting Authority of Ireland Archiving Scheme, and one of the great things about it is that it allows us to focus on understanding formats and developing migration workflows.

Alistair Goodall is Head of IT for Crossrail Ltd in the UK

Last year we were the proud winners of a Digital Preservation Award for our Crossrail archive and I was lucky enough to experience the passion and enthusiasm for digital preservation at the awards ceremony.

Since then we have successfully closed down some of the applications associated with the early stages of our 10 year project (such as land acquisition and property access requests) and these are now available through our Crossrail archive.  The Crossrail project itself has, however, been delayed beyond December 2018 and we are in our most information intensive stage with testing, commissioning and certification underway.

Jon Tilbury is CTO of Preservica, and is based in the UK

World Digital Preservation Day is all about the global community coming together to share ideas and collaborate. So how can we all work more closely on sharing format preservation information and what is the value of doing this?

Matthew Addis is Co-Founder and CTO of Arkivum based in the UK.

Email Monkey Magic

Email preservation is one of those areas that covers almost every digital preservation issue in the book.  This blog post describes my journey into the world of email preservation - what I learnt, what I did, and what we've now built into Arkivum's Perpetua solution.  To be honest, it did at times it feel more like the trials of Monkey in Journey to the West but I got to do some cool email magic on the way! 

Antonio G. Martinez is CEO & Founder of LIBNOVA and is based in Madrid, Spain

Last year in our guest blog post for the DPC we wrote about “Do you D.P.?” and we commented that there is no “DP yes or no, but, up to what level of DP can you go?”. This year the theme for World Digital Preservation Day is ‘At-Risk Digital Materials´.

As we mentioned last year, it was the less D.P. intense communities that were picking up the tune of the more energetic entities, at many levels. Over the last few years we have been sensing that the ‘At-Risk Digital Materials’ menace is being taken very seriously indeed by big and small cultural heritage institutions across the globe and that those international entities are picking up speed by their own accord. Many of these international entities are turning to other older and established associations to contrast their fears concerning digital preservation. They realise they are not alone on many issues; it is quite an international concern. And this takes me to another point.

Sean Barker is an Information Management Specialist 

I have an embarrassing admission to make. For years, part of me worked on the LOTAR project (1) developing preservation standards for Product Data Management (PDM), while another part was making those standards obsolete by creating an Integrated Design Environment. And I didn't connect the two parts together.

The first thing I should do is not explain PDM - it's too complex for a short blog and people shouldn't worry about it unless their project gets bigger than a team-of-teams (about eighty people). Think of PDM as provenance on steroids, where even a simple sign-off is backed up by a ten-volume procedures manual and where the people who sign the approvals must be approved to do so by an approved organization.

Anna McNally is Senior Archivist at University of Westminster in the UK

The University of Westminster’s Records and Archives team manage the institutional records of the University (founded in 1838), alongside the deposited records of several architects and town planners, and a garment collection (the Westminster Menswear Archive). We started actively managing digital records in 2016 but, in a relatively fast-paced area (compared with paper records!), it’s hard not to always think of yourself as a beginner. In 2017 we recorded a webinar titled ‘Work In Progress’, which - despite having been in production for nearly 3 years now - is still how I would describe our digital preservation activities. While our software solution gives us confidence that we are meeting our targets with the NDSA levels, we’re aware that there is a lot more we could be doing.

Dr David Tarrant is the senior learning advisor at the Open Data Institute (ODI). 

I would first like to thank the work of the BBC for the research behind this article that was broadcast in “Ian Hislop’s Fake News: A True History”. I have added to the story with details not included in the programme and checked these using a combination of sources. 

So what can our memory institutions teach us about fake news?