Blog

Bridie-Ann Carr is the Records and Information Manager at Imperial War Museums. She recently attended the IRMS 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

In mid-May I attended the IRMS Conference with support from the Career Development Fund. This year’s theme was ‘Embracing a New Information Generation’, which felt like a perfect fit, as I am new professional working with electronic records. I have wanted to attend a conference since qualifying as a Records Manager and set myself the aim to come back to IWM with new skills and knowledge I could immediately apply to my work. I also wanted to meet as many people as I could from across our sector. Covid moved many events on online and I feel like I have missed out on learning from others over a cup of tea and a biscuit!

John Dewees is the Digital Asset Management Lead at the University of Rochester and Pauline Schwartzman is the Digital Asset Management Analyst at the University of Rochester.

In this blog post, John Dewees and Pauline Schwartzman write about their experiences using The DPC’s Digital Preservation Competency Framework at the University of Rochester Libraries (URL).

The #DPClinic at the end of May, took the form of a “watch party” on the theme of database preservation. Peter Francis, Manager, Standards and Policy at PROV (Public Record Office Victoria), recently gave a presentation at an online event in Australasia, where he described using the SIARD Suite (Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases) tools to convert and store database content. At the watch party, highlights from a recording of Peter’s presentation were shared with approximately 25 attendees, drawn from Europe and US.

I was honoured to give a keynote lecture at the start of the FIAT/ IFTA’s Media Management Seminar in May 2023. The text below is a slightly adapted version of the talk which was also recorded and will be made available in due course.

It’s wonderful to be with you here in Dublin today and to meet as many friends and colleagues again after so long: this event hasn’t happened in person since 2019 and so it’s a privilege to be invited to be the opening keynote in a face to face meeting. My colleagues discourage me from making jokes on Zoom because they say I am not remotely funny.

I’ve been asked to talk around the theme of ‘Sustainability’. It’s a very big topic as the word is saturated with meanings and over-used. I am going to develop three related themes around the topic of sustainability: economy, environment and people. I’ll need to set the scene a little before I get there too. It’s an important and overdue conversation.

The climate crisis is not coming. The climate crisis is here. 

As we invite new nominations to the Bit List, we have invited DPC Members who have used this resource in support of their own advocacy work to share how they did it and what the results have been. 

Audrey Wilson is Partnerships and Engagement Manager for Scottish Council on Archives and starts us off on this series of 'Byte-sized Bit List' blogposts...

For the iPres Conference in 2022 we used the Bit List for the basis of a poster which set out the key issues surrounding Community Archives and invited contributions from digital preservation professionals to explore ways of helping community groups with their digital requirements.

Nick Bywell is the Digital Library Developer in the library of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He recently attended the PV2023 Conference at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

While at the PV 2023: Adding value (to) and preserving Scientific & Technical data conference, I heard the question posed “Does antimatter fall up or down?” It’s not the sort of question one usually hears at a digital preservation conference, and it took me back to 2012 when I watched the announcement of the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson on television. I didn’t imagine that, as a non-scientist, I might one day be sitting in the same auditorium.

On 15^th March this year, the DPC organized a short webinar on the theme of AI for digital preservation. Recordings of each of the presentations are available via the DPC website (here) for any registered user, but this blog post is an attempt to summarize the key points made by each of the speakers for the benefit of those who do not have access to the recordings.

Contributors: Corey Davis, Chelsea Denault, Rebecca Dickson, Thib Guicherd-Callin, Charles Johnson, Anthony Leroy, Miguel Angel Mardero Arellano, Jamen McGranahan, Aaron Trehub, Hannah Wang, and Alicia Wise, CLOCKSS

LOCKSS stands for “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”. Many people in the international digital preservation community will recognize this as the name of the open source preservation software developed at Stanford University Library.

At the end of March 2023, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Australasia and Asia-Pacific held a series of events around Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand as part of a regional Relaunch Roadshow. The Roadshow was held to replace the planned launch of the DPC’s first international office in 2020 which was cancelled due to the Covid pandemic. The DPC Executive Director, William Kilbride came out from the UK for the events and traveled with Robin Wright, Head Australasia & Asia-Pacific to conduct a series of public events in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Wellington NZ and Adelaide. The roadshow sessions attracted around 200 attendees and were supplemented by a packed schedule of smaller face-to-face meetings which introduced the DPC – and digital preservation more generally – to decision makers and managers in a host of institutions and agencies. The roadshow provided a fantastic opportunity for DPC members and non-members alike with an interest in digital preservation in the Australasian region to come together to meet each other, to find out more about the DPC’s local activities, and to share their experience addressing key challenges affecting those engaged with digital preservation in our region.

Sara Day Thomson is the Digital Archivist at the University of Edinburgh Library as well as a member of the DPC's Web Archiving & Preservation Work Group (WAPWG) Steering Committee. This blog was first posted on the Universtiy of Edinburgh's Website and Communications blog. 

The University of Edinburgh has appointed its first Web Archivist to capture and preserve important University web pages. The University has in fact appointed the very first dedicated Web Archivist of any non-legal deposit university in the UK!

Since early 2022, the University Library has been archiving health-related websites as part of the Wellcome-funded Archive of Tomorrow project. Along with the National Library of Scotland, Cambridge University Library, and Bodleian Libraries, we’ve been building a ‘research-ready’ collection of materials to support current and future research into how information (and misinformation) about health is shared online. As the project draws to a close this month, the team reflects on the achievements of the 12-month pilot as well as the daunting challenges it helped to articulate and bring to light.

First things first – archiving websites? Yes!