Blog

Matthew Addis is the Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum.

If cloud infrastructure providers such as Google, AWS and Azure have net zero emissions from their use of energy, then does this mean we no longer need to worry about the carbon footprint of digital preservation in the cloud? 

The answer is no. 

Carbon emissions from energy consumption is just one part of the story.  The embodied footprint [7] of all the ICT servers that run in the cloud also needs to be taken into account, as does the construction of data centre buildings and their power and cooling plants.  All of this has a carbon footprint.  Embodied footprint is a major contributor to carbon emissions in the construction sector and the cloud certainly involves large scale construction.   But embodied footprint also applies to all the ICT servers (compute, storage, networking etc.) that run in the cloud and get used by digital preservation solutions hosted there.  For ICT servers this includes extraction of raw materials, the manufacture of hardware, transport and installation at data centres, maintenance, and eventual recycling and disposal. As the saying goes, the cloud is “just someone else’s computers” and we should not forget that this physical infrastructure has an embodied carbon footprint.

But how big is the embodied footprint of digital preservation in the cloud? 

This blog posts investigates whether we can get a quantitative answer to this question.

Leo Konstantelos is Digital Archivist at the University of Glasgow

At the University of Glasgow, we have used the Bit List in a couple of ways:

In 2022, we put together a Business Case for funding to set up an Archival Forensics Lab. In this, we referenced the Bit List to demonstrate how many endangered digital species there are in our Archives and Special Collections.

More recently too, we used the Bit List risk classification and the information contained within the ‘Integrated Storage’ and ‘Portable Media’ species as part of a methodology and tool for prioritizing archival forensic processing of digital collections stored in physical storage media.

Paul Shields is Photographer, Information Services at University of York. He attended the IS&T Archiving Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I was asked to write a report about my attendance at the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) Archiving 2023 Conference in Oslo on 19-23 June. The difficulty with this is that there were so many fascinating individual talks from the digitisation of materials in Notre Dame after the devastating fire, the use of smell in how we perceive and enjoy museums and the renovation and care for the Munch murals in the very building we were having the conference in.

So rather than focusing on a single talk I have decided to write about two threads that ran through the conference which came up in talks and networking discussions.

Today’s Reading Club session was a thought provoking discussion inspired by an article from Amber Cushing and Giulia Osti in the Journal of Documentation - “So how do we balance all of these needs?”: how the concept of AI technology impacts digital archival expertise (https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2022-0170).

The article summarized the thoughts and expectations of a focus group of archival practitioners around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the impact on expertise within the sector. After a brief round of introductions and some background on our own individual experiences relating to use of AI in our digital preservation work, we turned to a more general discussion of the article and I’ve tried to sum up a few key points below:

Helen Dafter is Archivist at The Postal Museum in the UK

What’s New DPC CAT?

This blog is based on a presentation given at the DPC Unconference 2023.

The Postal Museum has recently used the DPC’s Competency Audit Toolkit  (CAT) to identify staff skills and skill gaps at an organisational level.

Barbara Fuentes is Web Archiving Officer at National Records of Scotland. She attended the IIPC Web Archiving Conference 2023 with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I recently received a Career Development Fund Grant to attend the IIPC Web Archiving Conference in Hilversum. The conference was held at the colourful Institute for Sound and Vision and KB, National Library of Netherlands.

Jasmine Patel is a Digital Preservation Intern at the University of Edinburgh. This blog post was originally posted on the Information Services Group Student Employee Blog here.

Try, test, fail. Wait a bit, try again, fail, mentally recover, try it on a PC, try it on a Mac, try giving the machine a good bonk on the head (or sending it to the naughty step if you’re feeling nice).

Welcome to the world of Digital Preservation – or, as the cool kids know it: Digipres.

Peter Chan is the web archivist at Stanford University Libraries. He served as the project manager for the ePADD initiative from 2012-2019. 

This blog was created with the assistance of ChatGPT.

Introduction

Email archives are a valuable resource for individuals and organizations alike. They contain a wealth of information and insights that can be harnessed for various purposes. However, navigating through extensive email archives can be a daunting task. In this article, we will explore three effective ways to unlock the potential of email archives: search, browse, and question and answer.

This blog was co-written by Svenia Pohlkamp (German National Library (Frankfurt)), Yvonne Tunnat (Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (Kiel)) and Monika Zarnitz (Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (Kiel)), members of nestor, an Allied Organisation of the DPC.

One thing we have learned during the pandemic: We can do lots of things online. At the height of the pandemic, nestor has moved its services to online meetings and to the wiki to keep in touch with its members. Thus, nestor managed to keep involved in the development of current best practices in digital preservation (DP):

nestor is the cooperation network for Digital Preservation. nestor supports knowledge transfer and therefore all institutions dealing with DP.

Bryony Hooper is the Digital Preservation Manager at the University of Sheffield

At the University of Sheffield, we have established a Digital Preservation Advisory Group (DPAG) which is composed of staff across the University who provide support and oversight for the coordination of our Digital Preservation activities. We meet periodically and make recommendations for the University’s Digital Preservation Service, including policy and strategic planning, as well as the development of resources needed to fulfil our mission. That mission is that the Digital Preservation Service seeks to facilitate the long-term discovery of, and access to, key information assets of the University. The University aims to embed good practice in digital preservation throughout the organization to enable new opportunities, while safeguarding institutional and cultural memory.