Blog

Simon Wilson is Archives Consultant and DPC Supporter

Background

In August 2023 the City of Doncaster Archives was awarded funding under The National Archives Resilience grant programme. I was brought-in to deliver the project working closely with the Council’s archives and records management colleagues. The project has two distinct strands – to develop a business case for digital preservation to secure, preserve and manage the Council’s born-digital records and this work is still in-progress. The second strand, and the focus of this blog, sought to engage professional heritage communities to increase awareness and confidence with the practical side of digital preservation.

Justine Provino just completed a PhD in English at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Leontien Talboom is a technical analyst at Cambridge University Libraries

This blog post highlights the collaboration between the Cambridge University Library (CUL) Transfer Service and a PhD research project on Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992). The joint work of the writer William Gibson, the artist Dennis Ashbaugh and the publisher Kevin Begos Jr, Agrippa is an artist’s book made to self-destruct both in analogue – with disappearing images by Ashbaugh – and in digital – with a poem by Gibson located on a floppy disk only readable once. This post focuses on the access to the digital element of Agrippa, Gibson’s poem on a floppy disk, and it brings to the fore a case study of the multiple uses that can be made of disk images, in libraries.

One of my favourite parts of the Digital Preservation Workbench we launched at iPRES 2024 is the 'Format Diversity Estimation'. It's based on the realisation that we could apply approaches from the study of ecological species diversity to the digital format ecosystem, and use them to estimate how many formats are out there awaiting analysis. This matters because identifying the format of digital resources a crucial step towards understanding the information and software dependencies we need in order to make future access possible.

This game and blog has been created by: Susanne van den Eijkel, Anton van Es, Francesca Mackenzie, Sharon McMeekin, Elaine Murray, Ellie O’Leary, and Lotte Wijsman.

Proudly presenting the game FILE FORMAT FLING, a game quite unlike any other digital preservation game out there. Is it needed? Almost definitely not! Is it educational? A bit! Does it bring something new and different to the pantheon of games that you haven’t seen before? Almost definitely and it  is probably fun too!

In this blog post, you’ll unzip the story behind the game: why we created it, the challenges we encountered, and—most importantly—where you can play your heart out.

William Kilbride is Executive Director at the Digital Preservation Coalition

This interim review of the DPC’s Global List of Endangered Digital Species (the Bit List) offers a moment to reflect on its purpose. The answer is simple: community. On this World Digital Preservation Day, as we ‘Celebrate Communities,’ it’s clear that the Bit List is made by the digital preservation community, for the digital preservation community.

Fundamentally, the purpose of the Bit List is advocacy, bringing attention to at-risk data and providing independently verified evidence to support action and investment. Entries are compiled by open nomination and are reviewed by the Bit List Council drawn from a global expert community. It represents the voice of those charged with ensuring the continuing access to digital materials beyond the limits of technical obsolescence, media degradation or organizational change.

Helen Dafter is Archivist (Digital Preservation) at The Postal Museum

Celebrating communities is core to the work of The Postal Museum. The focus of our audience engagement work is local communities (those in the Camden and Islington boroughs, where the museum is based) and Royal Mail staff. This blog explores how the museum’s work with communities intersects with our collecting activity. 

The Postal Museum holds both museum and archive collections. The archive collections mainly consist of the records of Royal Mail and Post Office Limited. As a business archive it can be difficult to fit community archives to our collecting policy. That is until you shift the lens and realise that staff form a community. This is where the archive focusses its work.  

Ailie O’Hagan is the Digital Preservation Librarian at Queen’s University Belfast

On the surface, the essential goal of digital preservation is simple: to maintain a digital object, its integrity and authenticity, for as long as necessary, while ensuring it remains usable and accessible. However, with the ready availability of digital software and platforms to suit all needs, and with increased complexity and interactivity, concepts of ‘usable’ or ‘authentic’ become harder to define, and the ongoing tasks of digital preservation must adapt to fit within stakeholder capacity.

Niamh Murphy is the Digital Preservation Librarian for the University College Dublin Library. 

A few years ago, I published a series of blog posts for the DPC, where I outlined the benefits of using Brunnhilde and provided a beginner's guide to its installation and use. Since then, I’ve received feedback from members of the digital preservation community, who have incorporated this resource into their training procedures and workflows. However, significant updates have been made to Brunnhilde and its dependencies since those posts were written.

As I continue to use Brunnhilde in my day-to-day work at UCD Library - particularly during an audit of our digital holdings - I’ve begun revising my documentation to reflect these updates.

At iPRES, I casually mentioned to peers that I was considering releasing an updated version of the documentation, and to my surprise, there was great interest.

So, here we are!

Karyn Williamson is a Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition

Digital preservation is complex and there is no one size fits all solution. This is especially true for the community archive sector, where many groups operate with limited resources, budget and specialist help. The Our Heritage, Our Stories project, a research project funded by the AHRC Towards a National Collection fund, has worked with a wide range of community groups and archives to research and document the community archives landscape in the UK.

Francesca Mackenzie works at The National Archives UK; Lotte Wijsman and Susanne van den Eijckel both work at the National Archives of the Netherlands.

Flabbergasted, excited and grateful: This was the rollercoaster of emotions that happened when Matthew Burgess announced that the study group Bits and Bots for developing digital skills won the DP Award in the category Teaching and Communications during iPRES2024. We cannot thank the judges enough for the huge acknowledgement they gave our work, the moment they announced we were on the shortlist. To actually win the award was just the cherry on top!