Blog

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

How many times have you heard this question? When it comes to Digital Preservation though, there’s no such thing as “to do or not to do”. Having worked with and advised all kinds of organisations, from the largest to the most compact, we’ve learnt that almost anything can be considered digital preservation. This means that “Do you DP?” is a hugely misleading question. A question that only allows for binary answers – a yes or a no, a 0 or a 1 – and makes the reply totally irrelevant to the truth. Understanding this key concept is essential for organisations to be able to move forward.

We have to take a step back and take in the full picture so we can then make others -colleagues and stakeholders- understand that there is so much depth to this relatively recent newcomer, digital, to the preservation world that it is not a simple yes or no, but a “What D.P. level shall we go?”.  We have to share our vision and make them (colleagues and stakeholders) understand that we can digitally preserve things in so many different ways and on so many different levels that the simple question of “Do you D.P.?” renders the answer obsolete.  You see, we all know that every little bit counts, and the more bits we actively layer our preservation cake with the more safely we preserve. But do our colleagues and stakeholders know this?  We have to make the case that as we move up layers our digital assets are safer and safer. So the question should be, “Up to what level do we need to D.P.?”.

Alistair Goodall is Head of IT for Crossrail Ltd and Transport for London

Crossrail is an amazing project to be part of and, when the central section opens next year, visitors to London are going to see stunning new stations and travel on new 200 metre long trains capable of carrying up to 1,500 people.

My team in IT has been responsible for most of the enterprise wide applications which are needed on a mega-project.  Some of these we have worked with the vendors over the last 10 years to develop and configure, others have been developed in house by our team to support specific business needs (such as vehicle movement planning and agreements).  These applications now hold over 10 years of project data across all business areas including health and safety, commercial, delivery, programme controls and technical information.

Karin Bredenberg is Chair of the PREMIS Editorial Committee and she works for Riksarkivet/Swedish National Archives

It’s been a very productive year for the PREMIS Editorial Committee!

We’ve brought several projects to fruition and embarked on a number of new efforts since our last WDPD report on PREMIS and Linked Data. As you probably know, we released version 3.0 of the PREMIS Data Dictionary in 2015 and since then we’ve devoted a lot of our resources towards modelling and completing an OWL ontology, creating supporting documentation for the new ontology, and updating the related preservation vocabularies on LC’s Linked Data Service. We are proud to say these are all available now!

Yvonne Tunnat is Digital Preservation Project Manager at Leibniz Information Centre for Economics in Germany

“Are we doing it YET AGAIN?” is the question I would most certainly ask if I were not the one most likely to suggest that we go the next level of certification, or, interchangeably, for the more recent or updated version of a certain certification level.

We have gone through the Data Seal of Approval in 2015, have acquired the nestor Seal in 2017, and at the end of 2018 we will hand in our documentation for the Core Trust Seal. We would certainly have found found us another nice certification process in 2016, but as I was away for maternal leave for a great chunk of that year, we were too busy just archiving stuff.

So, why are we constantly heading for another certificate to prove how trustworthy our Digital Archive is?

Violette Lévy and Béatrice Hérold work at the National Archives of France in Paris

Confronted with the ever-growing surge of digital services used by government agencies, the aim of the ADAMANT Project (Administration of archives and their metadata at the National Archives over time) is to preserve the integrity of the resulting digital archives and to ensure they remain permanently reliable, intelligible and accessible, which is the basic mission of the National Archives.

After two years of gestation, the new platform will launch on November 29, 2018. This first version will focus on the collection and management of digital archives. Versions 2 and 3, expected to be rolled out in 2019 and 2020 respectively, will focus on the consultation and reuse of these archives by the public, as well as long-term preservation.

This post was written by: Shira Peltzman, Digital Archivist for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); Julia Kim, Digital Assets Specialist, Library of Congress; Peggy Griesinger, Metadata Librarian, George Mason University Libraries; Vicky Steeves; Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility, New York University; and Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, Web Archivist, Internet Archive.

As digital preservation programs and stewardship initiatives mature, so may they become more dysfunctional.

One of the most important takeaways from the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) staffing surveys conducted in 2012[1] and 2017[2]-- discussed here last World Digital Preservation Day -- is the increasing dissatisfaction among stewards with the way that digital preservation is organized at their respective institutions.

Perceptions that the digital preservation function at their organizations “works well” among respondents to the NDSA Staffing Surveys of 2012 and 2017.

Tjarda de Haan is Guest Curator for E-culture at Amsterdam Museum in the Netherlands

Since winning the Digital Preservation Award 2016 in the category The National Archives Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy in December 2016 our project accelerated! We have published the 'DIY Handbook for Web Archaeology' and the 'FREEZE! A manifesto for safeguarding and preserving born-digital heritage' and with this we have put web archaeology on the map in the Netherlands. Many initiatives took up the challenge. The KB National Library of the Netherlands has done some remarkable excavations, journals have published articles about web archaeology and the Journal for Media History will publish a special issue next year 'Media history for the future: Web Archaeology'.

Suzan Tunca is a Dance Researcher for ICKamsterdam and this project was undertaken in collaboration with Motion Bank

Heritage preservation of contemporary dance and choreography through research and innovation in digital documentation and annotation of creative processes

ICKamsterdam and Motion Bank.

ICKamsterdam and Motion Bank join forces to optimize caring for the heritage of contemporary dance and choreography through the invention of new forms of digital documentation, notation and transmission of embodied knowledge. This unique collaboration integrates the verbal movement language research of Emio Greco I PC and ICKamsterdam with the annotation systems and goals of Motion Bank software development. In this way digital preservation media development is linked directly to the potential of establishing working vocabularies specific to various choreographers and performing artists. Documenting and annotating processes in performance creation enables the safeguarding of ephemeral and ineffable artistic contents in dance through time.

Roxana Popistasu is Digital Preservation Coordinator at Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg 

“In digital preservation, identification of digital content is essential”, say A. Dappert and A. Farquhar in their iPRES 2017 article Permanence of the Scholarly Record: Persistent Identification and Digital Preservation – A Roadmap. The same idea appeared in the introduction of Robert E. Kahn’s keynote at iPRES 2016:

https://twitter.com/RoxPoNinja/status/782850754059132929

At the National Library of Luxembourg (BnL), we agree unequivocally: we cannot preserve and provide access to our national heritage without taking into account the reliable and sustainable identification of our digital resources. But how do we do that? What is the “best” persistent identifier (PID) system? Are there best practices when it comes to persistent identification? These are some of the questions we set out to answer at the start of our journey into finding the right PID system.

Patricia Sleeman is Archivist (Electronic) at UNHCR in Geneva, Switzerland

Tiffany Chung’s reconstructing an exodus history: boat trajectories in Asia, 2017

To be a digital archivist in UNHCR is interesting, challenging and inspiring all at once. To be part of an organization whose staff are often at the coalface of conflicts and operations which are concurrently taking place all over our world, witnessing the misery of displaced people is a unique experience. A privileged one.