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Digital Preservation Awards 2024: Judges
The Digital Preservation Coalition is pleased to announce its international panel of expert judges for 2024: Gustavo Castener Marquardt International Council on Archives Fatima Darries University of South Africa (UNISA) Fatima leads and manages strategic Library initiatives in research data curation, digitisation of heritage and special collections, as well as metadata description of commercial and digital information resources at Unisa Library and Information Services. Her career...
Preserving Born-Digital Design and Construction Records: Member preview of new DPC Technology Watch Report
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has released a Member Preview of a new Technology Watch Report on Preserving Born-Digital Design and Construction Records by Aliza Leventhal and Jody Thompson, today. Preserving Born-Digital Design and Construction Records aims to support archival professionals, as well as active designers and facilities managers, considering acquisition, preservation, and access approaches that account for both the technical and cultural components of the broad range...
Web Archiving & Preservation Working Group - General Meeting - December 2021
Description The DPC Web Archiving and Preservation Working Group (WAPWG) is pleased to announce details of our next General Meeting – which will be free and open to everyone. Web archiving provides the means for collecting organisations to capture, preserve and make available time-stamped archival copies of information published on the Web, before this content changes and is lost forever. Rather wonderfully, a strong and active global community of practice exists around web...
Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation
Digital preservation good practice is not solely about how successfully we preserve the bits and enable access to them, it must also take into account the broader context in which our work sits, and the wider responsibilities we have to society and the environment. Simply put, there is no point in preserving the bits if there is no one left to read and understand them. As a community we must therefore balance risks to the digital content that we hold not only against the financial cost but...
A Hybrid Model for Web Archive Capture
Claire Newing is Web Archivist at The National Archives in the UK 2021 is the year the UK Government Web Archive came of age. On 4 November we celebrated the 25th birthday of our oldest resource - this archived version of the Environment Agency website. Of course it shared its birthday with World Digital Preservation Day 2021 so a double excuse to celebrate.
DPC Rapid Assessment Model: Japanese translation now available!
日本語版が続きます The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to share a Japanese translation of its Rapid Assessment Model (RAM), with thanks to volunteer contributors. Now available as a PDF download in Japanese, the second edition of the DPC RAM is a digital preservation maturity modelling tool that has been designed to enable rapid benchmarking of an organization’s digital preservation capability. “When we first released DPC RAM just over 2 years ago we had no idea it would be...
Environmentally sustainable digital preservation - moving from theory to practice
In April 2020 we held a webinar on ‘Enacting Environmentally Sustainable Preservation’ (DPC Members login to access the recording). In a follow up blog post, we mentioned we’d be keen to see how ideas raised in this webinar were incorporated into future digital preservation projects and initiatives going forward. Revisiting this topic we intend to explore how a range of digital preservation practitioners are addressing the issue, in particular how considerations around environmental...
Digital Preservation and Climate Change: Provocation to and from COP26
I was privileged to contribute to a panel on the fringes of the COP26 conference in Glasgow this morning convened by the UK National Archives with the title 'Archives Supporting Environmental Sustainability' This short post is the text of my presentation which was the five minute provocation at the start of the session. Ladies and gentlemen it’s a pleasure to be invited to speak to you this morning. I want to thank the organizers at the National Archives for their efforts...
Leaning on community resources to build audiovisual transfer capacity at the Borthwick
Mark Simon Haydn is the Digital Preservation Archivist at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York In keeping with other reports from the field on the DPC blog, the last twelve months at the Borthwick have deeply involved increased supply and demand of digital collection material. In addition to daily reprographics work performed by the Institute’s searchroom team, there has been great progress with the delivery of grant projects: from significant Music Preserved...
Considerations on the barriers to the practice of digital preservation
Amarílis Corrêa is an Academic Librarian and Researcher on digital preservation in São Paulo, Brazil / Amarílis Corrêa, Bibliotecária acadêmica e pesquisadora em preservação digital [PORTUGUESE FOLLOWS] For some of us, there seems to be no barriers to digital preservation; for others, too many. Is the grass always greener on the other side of the fence? For me it is, considering I haven’t had the opportunity to implement any part of the digital preservation process...
Lloyds Banking Group: The Dark Horse goes Digital
Peter Judge is Archivist for the Lloyds Banking Group Archives & Museum Prior to 2020 at Lloyds Banking Group Archives we had been making plans to digitise parts of our collections. Then, like so many other organisations, we found ourselves in a situation where lockdown restrictions were limiting our access to the archives. Given how much of our work is tied to a physical space, this added extra impetus to our plans for digitisation.
Audiovisual Preservation at Wellcome Collection
Christy Henshaw is Digital Production Manager at Wellcome Collection in London Wellcome Collection, like many archives, has a tape problem. Video or audio, good condition or bad, tape archives present a major challenge for preservation and access. We hold hundreds of unique and distinctive works on tape formats, and regularly acquire more through our acquisition programme.
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.
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...
Adapting to abrdn – Towards a Sustainable, Open Source response to Digital Preservation
Karyn Williamson is Company Archivist for abrdn. The only thing certain about working for a ftse 100 company is that change is inevitable, and this is certainly true of abrdn. Since Standard Life Aberdeen was formed, the company has transformed from a historic pensions and life insurance business to a rebranded futuristic fully-fledged investment company. As the company worked its way through this transformation, the digital futurist objectives of the company meant that the...
Understanding User Needs: DPC publishes next in Technology Watch Guidance Note Series on Access to digital collections.
The DPC has released the next in its series of Technology Watch Guidance Notes on Access to digital collections. The new Guidance Note entitled Understanding User Needs by Sharon McMeekin is available as a one-month Member preview from today. Understanding User Needs provides a pragmatic approach to conducting and interpreting a user needs analysis, whilst highlighting the importance and significance of the results.
Member preview of new ‘Data Type’ Technology Watch Guidance Note Series
The DPC has released the first four of a brand-new series of Data Type Technology Watch Guidance Notes for Member preview today. The topics covered in the set are documents, email, spreadsheets and databases. Each of the Guidance Notes in the Data Type series is designed to provide a primer on the current state of community knowledge about types of data commonly encountered by those seeking to preserve digital holdings.
5 tips to rock the RAM
Kimberley Harsley is an Archivist at the Natwest Group. The introduction of the DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) in 2019 came at a perfect time for me. Still reasonably new to NatWest Group Archives, it was a great opportunity for me to learn more about our digital preservation work whilst contributing to it. This month, I revisited the RAM to assess how far we’ve come since then. I found it much easier the second time around as I was more familiar with the content and the archive itself....
EPISODE 6: Digital Preservation Futures with Preservica
This series of webinars will showcase the product and service offerings of each of our DPC Supporters in turn, before the DPC staff invite speakers to respond on a series of themes which represent our understanding of member interests.