Blog

Dave Heelas is the Archivist and Records Manager for Unilever Art, Archives & Records Management.
This post is the second in a series of three.

A second area that has been raising a lot of questions for digital preservation within Unilever’s collections is the Audio-Visual collections. As we have more and more digitised material it became a priority to move these from the external storage they were on into a more managed and protected environment in the form of the digital preservation repository.

In this short blog I will focus on the digitised AV collections within Unilever.

Sharon Webb is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex Humanities Lab

Now that the dust has settled on our first 'Digital Archives in Communities – Practice and Preservation' workshop held in June this year, I finally have a chance to contemplate and reflect on the highlights, outcomes, tensions, challenges, and next steps of this project. Rather than go through the presentations and speakers in chronological order, I will instead try to summarise some of the themes and areas of coalescence that emerged.

Charlie McCann is Archive Manager for BBC Scotland

Here at the cultural and current affairs coalface of BBC Scotland’s archives we’re getting used to a new position under the corporation’s Scottish commissioning wing and taking the opportunity to shift our gaze a little and do some more work to focus on the fruit of all our data preservation labours: our collections’ content. To be perfectly honest, it feels a little as if we’ve been neglecting “the content” of late, focussing so much as we do on “the data”- cleaning it, giving it a machine-readable makeover, digitising it into new formats and storage, figuring out new ways of sending it zooming around the globe at fantastical speeds and even building it a digital library to live in- generally working terribly hard to take very good care of all those zeros and ones. All of this has doubtlessly created new methods and means of security, stability and accessibility, but it has also raised a great many new questions and challenges for archivists. For example, has the tumultuous environment of the tech-driven approach to archiving caused us to lose something of our metaphysical understanding of our collections and in turn let our users and stakeholders down?

Faye Lemay is Digital Preservation Manager at Library and Archives Canada

The team at Library and Archives Canada have written a 4-part series for the blog. This is the first installment...

In the past three years, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has intensified its efforts to improve its capabilities to preserve Canada’s documentary heritage. In a bid to step up its mandate to preserve and protect Canada’s digital holdings, the Digital Preservation (DP) team has forged a new path, converting what was once a series of short-term projects aimed at stabilizing the current infrastructure into building a strong foundation for an enduring and sustainable program. The main driver accelerating the momentum toward program development has been organizational support from the most senior levels of management at LAC, providing the impetus to set new directions for change.

Phil Clegg is Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of MirrorWeb

We were recently invited to join the first episode of the Digital Preservation Futures webinar series by the DPC.

The webinar provided a valuable opportunity for us to learn more about the digital archiving community. We were also able to share what we have learned from projects we’ve worked on across the public and private sectors, as well as what our customers look for in a digital archiving and preservation solution.

In our experience, there are four key capabilities our customers seek from a digital archiving solution. In collaboration with our partners at TNA, we developed a set of procedures we call C.A.P.S:

The last DPC staff meeting ended somewhat surprisingly with a number of late night poetry recitals.  In honour of that unexpected turn I am going to start this post in the company of Walt Whitman:

Dave Heelas is the Archivist and Records Manager for Unilever Art, Archives & Records Management

I have been in my role as an Archivist and Records Manager here at Unilever Art, Archives & Records Management (UAARM) for three months now, the focus of my role is to lead on the Digital and Audio Visual collections. We are taking stock of our current digital preservation practices and in order to determine what challenges we may encounter in the future and how we can develop our current approach to digital preservation.

Jon Tilbury is the Founder and CTO of Preservica

You may have seen the announcement this week about a joint project funded by Jisc and combing the research efforts of Arkivum, Archivematica, Preservica and the Open Preservation Foundation to share information on digital preservation best practice. As part of this new team I am happy to share my thoughts on how it came about and where it could lead to. This could be the start of a new era in collaborative research between all the innovators in digital preservation and could deliver two very important benefits – to make digital preservation better and to make it easier.

Having worked in Digital Preservation for approaching 20 years it is one of my personal frustrations that many islands of best practice are isolated from each other and shared only through local groups, at conferences and within certain product communities. Many never get further than the originating institution despite the creativity and detailed research that has gone into them. This is ironic as the community is largely non-competitive and is happy to learn from each other but lacks an efficient mechanism to do so. At several PASIG talks I urged for more collaboration between all the players in this field.

Rachel MacGregor is the Digital Archivist at Lancaster University

We are members of the Digital Preservation Coalition which is a members organisation which exists to secure our digital legacy. Members include businesses, HE institutions, funding bodies, national heritage and cultural organisations and are drawn from every continent.

Last week all members were invited to the annual un-conference where we come together not only to share experiences and network but also to help set the Digital Preservation Coalition’s training and development agenda for the year ahead. The ideas is that members have the opportunity to raise the issues which really matter to them and then discuss how the DPC can take action to move forward on these issues.

So… many of us are offering services around repositories and archives and the data they contain. But the different uses of the term ‘service’ can muddy the water. The UK Data Archive name implies a traditional OAIS-style preservation repository but we’ve always provide additional ‘services’ and through the UK Data Service we belong to a partnership whose name puts a ‘service’ at the heart of the brand. For us these include the archival services of deposit, curation and data publishing, but also extensive support and training.