Blog

Bradley Daigle is the Content Lead for the Academic Preservation Trust and Chair of the Coordinating Committee for the NDSA's Leadership Group

While at the most recent PASIG, held in Mexico City, I sat in the audience and responded to a question that I interpreted to be about preservation stewardship responsibility and where it resides. Apparently, the solution I put forward was not something that others had considered or were planning. Therefore, in this post, I am providing some context and explanation of what we are doing at Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) to provide a more rounded approach to preservation responsibility. This overview will be a description of what I call “fire drills” or what our tech team refers to as “test restores”.

We’d like to tell you a little bit about a digital preservation maturity model we have been developing for DPC members.

“What? Another maturity model?” you might say.

Indeed there are many maturity models already available, so why create another?

To answer that, I’ll give you a bit of background as to how this particular piece of work came about and how we have approached it.

Last month I celebrated my 6 month work anniversary at the DPC. Happily, this coincided with our first DPC York team night out. Did it really take 6 months to get the 3 of us out for a drink after work? Apparently yes!

My first 6 months at the DPC really has flown by. I haven’t been blogging as much as I expected, but that is largely down to the fact I’ve been keeping my head down, travelling lots and working hard on the project I was recruited for - a collaboration with the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

Paul Young is Digital Preservation Specialist/Researcher at the National Archives UK

What’s the problem?

Determining reliable dates for digital records can be a source of frustration, especially when confronted with a large volume of digital files with dates that are obviously incorrect, such as why your Microsoft Word Document 1997 version dates from 1^st January 1970.

Dates are very important for The National Archives in particular as we look to transfer records from departments under the 20-year rule of the Public Record Act. When these dates are unknown or obviously incorrect, we cannot be sure if a department is in compliance with the Act.

The National Archives uses the ‘date last modified’ generated by the file system, and extracted via DROID, as the standard ‘go to’ date to populate the official ‘date’ entry in our catalogue. After seeing several collections and scenarios where the ‘date last modified’ did not provide an accurate date for the file we have been doing a bit of investigation of other methods for extracting accurate dates for born-digital records.

Russell Kennedy is Web and Digital Solutions Analyst and Ed Pinsent is Digital Archivist at the University of London

Introduction

You join us at an exciting time. The University of London (UoL) is embarking on an ambitious, collaborative programme of work, which aims to create a culture of digital best practice throughout the institution. Central to this initiative is the long-term digital preservation of content, and our aim is to weave the importance of preservation into the fabric of the University, building it into job descriptions and training provision.

I’ve got a lot of mileage on this blog from writing about our Inclusion and Diversity policy, from the point we decided to create one, to its publication, but this time I’m going to talk about one of the more personal reasons why it was important to me. This week in the UK is Mental Health Awareness Week and I didn’t want it to pass without recognising why it is important and why we need to talk more openly about mental health. Discussion of mental health is still too often taboo and those who suffer from issues stigmatised.  So, when I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression just over two years ago, I decided that I would never shy away from sharing my own experience.

Last week I was happy to be able to tune into the Jisc sponsored DPC briefing day on Software Preservation ‘Insert Coin to Continue: A briefing day on software preservation’.

Did you know that DPC briefing days are recorded and available for DPC members to watch live? This is quite a task, especially when working with a range of different venues, but so important for our international members, and those institutions that do not have a large budget that can be spent on travel.

“Television is no gimmick, and nobody will ever be elected to major office again without presenting themselves well on it.” – Roger Ailes, 1968.

Even though TV and print media still prevail in the Luxembourg political environment, the influence of online information is continually growing. The days when elections are either won or lost, based on the success of online campaigning may not be far away. Recently, Luxembourg has seen an exceptional time in political discourse, since the country held local elections in 2017 and national elections in 2018 (plus the European elections in 2019).

As a pilot project in targeted web crawls, the National Library of Luxembourg has archived over the course of two years: websites, social media profiles and online news media in relation with local and national election campaigns. While we were able to include Facebook and Twitter profiles of candidates and political parties, aiming at completeness in capturing all relevant content from social media was simply out of reach, due to technical hurdles and not being able to keep up with the pace of changing content.

Like many of my digital preservation (DP) contemporaries I too read archaeology, as part of my history degree. My degree encompassed the Neolithic (We played with really sharp flint tools) to the ‘Dirty Harry’ movies (That made my day) If nothing else it taught me the circular nature of history. The past may be a different country but it’s one we seem to visit again and again.

It’s not (Necessarily) a failing of our profession that the same questions are asked again and again, it’s a reflection of change and evolution in things like IT, society and how we move the past into the future. Amidst this change, perhaps because of it, the context of the questions asked changes; ask the same question over twenty years and the answers will vary.

Maria Praetzellis is Web Archiving Program Manager for the Internet Archive

 Community Webs cohort members at Internet Archive Headquarters, San Francisco, CA

We are known for many things at the Internet Archive: a place to play long lost arcade games, listen to old 78 rpm records, or, most recently, finding that old MySpace track “accidently” deleted from the live web. Most people know us by the Wayback Machine, as we are the oldest and largest publicly available web archive.