Issues
Browse the Knowledge Base by a cross section of legal, organisational and technical issues such as File Format Obsolescence, Procurement or Metadata.
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Articles
Isolated Together: Virtual Collaboration for the Advancement of Open Source Digital Preservation Tools
Charlotte Armstrong is Project officer for the Open Preservation Foundation In 2020, amid a global pandemic that isolated many people from their professional communities, the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF)’s Spring Hackathon brought together an international group of contributors to enhance open source digital preservation tools and documentation relied on by digital preservation practitioners around the world.
Long-term sustainability: what does it REALLY mean for your digital content?
Jon Tilbury is Chief Innovation Officer at Preservica Institutions and individuals working in Digital Preservation are rightly concerned about the long-term sustainability of the technology or service providers they trust to look after their material. However, the meaning of “sustainability” is much broader than often appreciated.
Long-term sustainability: what does it REALLY mean for your digital content?
Jon Tilbury is Chief Innovation Officer at Preservica Institutions and individuals working in Digital Preservation are rightly concerned about the long-term sustainability of the technology or service providers they trust to look after their material. However, the meaning of “sustainability” is much broader than often appreciated.
Keeping it FAIR: Providing Access to Reusable Data at the Archaeology Data Service
Olivia Foster is Digital Archives Officer at the Archaeology Data Service in York, UK Staff at the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) have been busy over the last year archiving the data deposited with us, collaborating with partners and rolling out the new OASIS online archaeological reporting system. Digital preservation is one of the core activities of the ADS and as a digital archive we preserve and make publicly accessible archaeological and heritage data in our archives and the ADS...
Evolving File Format Identification, Migration, and Management for Preservation through Tool Development
Tom J. Smyth (Manager, Digital Preservation) and Maxime Champagne (Digital Preservation Repository Supervisor), Library and Archives Canada Early this year, it became a priority for LAC’s Digital Preservation unit to reconsider the context of (and affect a major update to) our policy statement on the file formats we accept for transfer of digital library and archival documentary heritage. In the course of examining the existing documents, a few issues arose for discussion among the...
Breaking down Barriers in Wales Through the Iffy Tiff
Sally McInnes is Chair of the Archives and Records Management Digital Preservation Group at the National Library of Wales In Wales, we have been working for many years to break down barriers to digital preservation through working collaboratively to increase capacity and skills. The publication of the National Digital Preservation Policy and accompanying Technical Appendix, on Digital Preservation Day in 2017, aimed at ensuring digital resources of enduring value would be selected for...
New Models for Preservation: Photogrammetry at the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums
Sean Rippington is Digital Archives and Copyright Manager at the University of St Andrews Photogrammetry – taking overlapping photographs of an object and converting them into 3D digital models – has become business as usual for the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums. Driven by the push to provide more, different, and better types of online access to our collections for teaching and learning during the pandemic, we now have over 170 examples on our IIIF-based Collections...
New Models for Preservation: Photogrammetry at the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums
Sean Rippington is Digital Archives and Copyright Manager at the University of St Andrews Photogrammetry – taking overlapping photographs of an object and converting them into 3D digital models – has become business as usual for the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums. Driven by the push to provide more, different, and better types of online access to our collections for teaching and learning during the pandemic, we now have over 170 examples on our IIIF-based Collections...
Saved by digital preservation
Kunika Kono is Technical Lead for Digital Humanities at the Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advance Study, University of London Over the last year, many universities in the UK faced organisational restructure, departmental closures and job cuts. The School of Advanced Study and its institutes were no exception, and in February 2021, the Digital & Publishing department in the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), where I worked, effectively closed.
On Gardening and Digital Preservation… A year of reflection and better engagement
Garth Stewart is Head of Digital Records Unit at the National Records of Scotland As a practical discipline, tending to a garden feels quite similar to digital preservation: it can never be considered ‘done’. Whatever the season, wherever you are in the world, there’s always something to do; whether it’s the laying of a new lawn (or the installation of a new piece of digital storage infrastructure), the sowing of a new flower bed (or the ingest of new image files), applying fertiliser (or...
Digital Curation Lab: leveling up, shortly
Lamia Sassine is Digital Curation Lab Coordinator at the University of Salford As a relative newcomer to digital preservation the theme Breaking Down Barriers really spoke to me. My background is in archaeology and museum studies, but I started to get attracted to digital curation during my PhD. My research investigated perceptions of Phoenician collections from 20 different museums, and I envisioned the best way to bring them together would be through a digital platform, but this is a...
Digital Curation Lab: leveling up, shortly
Lamia Sassine is Digital Curation Lab Coordinator at the University of Salford As a relative newcomer to digital preservation the theme Breaking Down Barriers really spoke to me. My background is in archaeology and museum studies, but I started to get attracted to digital curation during my PhD. My research investigated perceptions of Phoenician collections from 20 different museums, and I envisioned the best way to bring them together would be through a digital platform, but this is a...
Digital Preservation of Community Archives: Breaking down barriers to digital preservation through training
Dr Deborah Thorpe is Education and Outreach Manager for the Digital Repository of Ireland This autumn, the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) held an online introductory training programme in digital preservation for our members, with a particular focus on the training and community-building needs of community archivists. This course has been helping with breaking down barriers to digital preservation, by making topics such as appraising your digital collections for preservation,...
Digital Preservation of Community Archives: Breaking down barriers to digital preservation through training
Dr Deborah Thorpe is Education and Outreach Manager for the Digital Repository of Ireland This autumn, the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) held an online introductory training programme in digital preservation for our members, with a particular focus on the training and community-building needs of community archivists. This course has been helping with breaking down barriers to digital preservation, by making topics such as appraising your digital collections for preservation,...
Update on the work of the PREMIS Editorial Committee
Karin Bredenberg, Marjolein Steeman, Tracy Meehleib are part of the PREMIS Editorial Committee First of all, thank you for the feedback you have given us in response to last year's call to action! We also want to express our big thank you for the Brazilian Portuguese translation of “Understanding PREMIS” and the updates made to all of the other translations! We’ve been busy putting your feedback recommendations into effect and it’s fair to say that 2021 has been a very productive...
Digitisation and Digital Preservation journey at Unisa Library and Information Services
Ansie van der Westhuizen is Non-commercial Digital Developer (Institutional Repository) and Anri van der Westhuizen is Manager of Archives. They both work at the University of South Africa (Unisa). The Unisa Institutional Repository (UnisaIR) was launched in May 2009. Challenges and barriers were the order of the day. During a conference in Senegal, Nkosi (2008) rightfully called these barriers by name: mistrust, resistance and lack of skills. At present the UnisaIR is...
Encountering barriers along the way – Why networks are a part of the solution
Svenia Pohlkamp Runs the nestor office at the German National Library When asked to write a blogpost to be published on this year’s WDPD I started thinking about the motto “Breaking down barriers”, digital preservation and my work at nestor. In the end I had a disturbingly long list of barriers in my mind, that I needed to order and bring into perspective. This text is the result (though it does not deal with every barrier I could think of) and it tries three things at once: Relating...
Encountering barriers along the way – Why networks are a part of the solution
Svenia Pohlkamp Runs the nestor office at the German National Library When asked to write a blogpost to be published on this year’s WDPD I started thinking about the motto “Breaking down barriers”, digital preservation and my work at nestor. In the end I had a disturbingly long list of barriers in my mind, that I needed to order and bring into perspective. This text is the result (though it does not deal with every barrier I could think of) and it tries three things at once: Relating...
Should Digital Preservation be Perfect?
Irina Schmid is Digital Collections Archivist for American University in Cairo https://thesaurus.plus/synonyms/model_of World Digital Preservation Day is a special day for us to celebrate. Digital preservation is not an easy program to start. Various technologies, a large number of files, not enough financial support, and sometimes just not knowing where to begin. Or it could be a desire for perfection that can halt an idea, without realizing that only imperfections and...
Series: an underestimated but valuable concept
Koen Dobbelaere & Quincy Oeyen work at Digital Archives Flanders for the Agency for Facility Operations of the Flemish Government The expanding digitization of the government brings new challenges regarding the management, the (long term) preservation and the disclosure of digitally created or digitally received information. To tackle these challenges in an efficient way Digital Archives Flanders uses the concept of ‘series’. We define a series as: “An aggregation of files...