Blog

Andrea Goethals is Digital Preservation Manager | Kaiwhakahaere Matapopore Matihiko, at the National Library of New Zealand | Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

At the National Library of New Zealand, quite a few of us play a role in preserving the nation’s digital heritage. If you were to ask each of us what digital materials are most at risk in New Zealand you would hear a variety of different opinions, depending on where we sit in the Library. Among other things you would hear about at-risk audio-visual collections on obsolete physical media, born-digital archival and special collections material across New Zealand, and social media. It’s true that these are very real challenges, but we are chipping away at many of them through a variety of initiatives at the Library and in collaboration with others. 

So what challenges are we finding especially hard to address? In this post, Steve Knight and I describe some of the key challenges we face. 

Is it World Digital Preservation Day yet?  Yes it is!  Here are some ways you can tell:

• Has the sun come up over the National Library of New Zealand on the first Thursday in November? 

• Is this the first post of a digital preservation themed blog-a-thon on the DPC website?

• Will there be a new edition of the BitList of Digitally Endangered Species before the end of the day? 

• Are there an abundance of stickers in more than a dozen languages, and versions of the swooshie logo available to download in even more?

• Will there be lectures and seminars and workshops and webinars about digital preservation in dozens of countries and perhaps hundreds of venues? 

• Will there be digital preservation themed cake to share, and biscuits and baking?

• Will there be singing and videos to match? 

• Will the fun continue till midnight somewhere out over the Pacific Ocean in about 36 hours from now?

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.

Emulation has a long history. So why has it taken so long to get emulation off the ground as a strategy for digital preservation? For many of us working in the field of digital preservation, emulation has often appeared a highly technical and ambitious task.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a Digital Archives Learning Exchange event at The National Archives and was really pleased to have the opportunity to talk about DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model - a maturity model for digital preservation that we released at the iPRES conference last month.

On 11th September the University of Glasgow held a Research Support Games Day. The purpose of this event was to give support staff the opportunity to experience different games or games-based tools that could be used with researchers for educational or training purposes. The day was very successful with lots of positive feedback - there is definitely interest in organising a similar event in the future. 

The event write-up is here: https://uogopenresearch.wordpress.com/

Dr Kirsty Fairclough is Associate Dean: Research and Innovation at the School of Arts and Media, University of Salford and she attended iPres2019 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by DPC supporters.

Michelle Caswell - UCLA

Whose Digital Preservation? Locating Our Standpoints to Reallocate Resources 

The second keynote comes from Michelle Caswell who is an Associate Professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she also holds a joint appointment with Asian American studies. Her work in critical archival studies engages how individuals and communities activate archives to forge identities, create robust representations, and produce feelings of belonging. Caswell directs a team of students at UCLA’s Community Archives Lab, which explores the ways that independent, identity-based memory organisations document, shape, and provide access to the histories of minoritised communities, with a particular emphasis on understanding their affective, political, and artistic impact.

Dr Kirsty Fairclough is Associate Dean: Research and Innovation at the School of Arts and Media, University of Salford and she attended iPres2019 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by DPC supporters.

Geert Lovink- Institute of Network Cultures

Sad by Design: Politics and Psychology of the Social Media Age

After a very warm welcome to Amsterdam by the iPres 2019 organising team, the conference officially opens with the keynote lecture by Geert Lovink, Dutch media theorist and the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economic change of the new media field through events, publications and open dialogue. Lovink is a Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and a Professor of Media Theory at the European Graduate School. As theorist, activist and net critic, Lovink has shaped the development of the web in a critical sense since the 1990s.

Jon Tilbury is CTO of Preservica

The Digital Preservation domain has always placed a strong emphasis on building communities to share experiences and develop solutions. These communities are often built on geographic, product or functional alignment or created through external grant funded research activities.

At the recent iPres conference in Amsterdam myself, Euan Cochrane from Yale University and Remke Verdegem from the Nationaal Archief presented a paper exploring how the user groups associated with commercial digital preservation products collaborate with other communities and the role they play in advancing digital preservation best practice.

The session provided insights into the evolution of user groups, using the Preservica user group as an example, and sparked a lot of great discussion amongst the community afterward - so I wanted to share a few of the main highlights here:

Leontien is a collaborative PhD student at The National Archives, UK and University College London, her research is about access to born-digital material. She attended iPres2019 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by DPC supporters.

The next session that I will be covering from iPres 2019 is another New Horizons session, this time focusing on access and the FAIR data principles. The FAIR data principles are a set of guiding principles in order to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. If you want further information on the FAIR principles, the LIBER Europe report on FAIR is a great place to start, it gives a good overview of the basic principles and a comprehensive list of references that you can follow up.

As access is one of the main research topics in my PhD project I really wanted to attend this session and see how other organisations and people approach this topic. Just like the previous session that I covered, three papers were presented, with some time left for questioning at the end.

John Pelan is Director of the Scottish Council on Archives and he attended iPres2019 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by DPC Supporters.

I attended iPres 2019 as a representative of the Scottish Council on Archives, not as a digital preservation or records management professional.  In my pre-event blog for iPres 2019, I wrote that I hoped that the conference would improve my knowledge of digital preservation and related issues which, in turn, would help inform SCA’s programme of work.  However, I was not prepared for the incredible diversity, complexity and technicality of subjects covered.  While I did, at times, feel like a fish out of water, I did come away from the event with a better understanding of the importance and increasing urgency of managing and preserving digital material.  My highlights included the presentation on the challenges and lessons of setting up an open access repository with four universities in Palestine; the panel discussion on preserving eBooks; the three keynote speakers; and, of course, chatting to new people at the conference reception.