Briefing Day
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Memories from the Anthropocene: digital preservation in a time of climate crisis
In October 2022 I was privileged to join colleagues virtually for an event organized by UNISA in Pretoria, South Africa. The event marked International Open Access Week 2022 and had the title 'Open for Climate Justice'. This blog is a version of the paper that I presented. (Added 1/11/2022: The slides are available from UnisaIR at https://hdl.handle.net/10500/29530) Thankyou very much for the invitation to join you today to share some thoughts about the relationship between...
ASA 2022 - NFSA: Evolving Identity and Emerging Technologies
Natalie Anderson is Project Officer, Digital Archives Innovation and Research, at National Archives of Australia. She attended ASA 2022 Here We Are Conference with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters. I was recently the lucky recipient of a #DigitalPreservationCoalition (DPC) grant to support my registration and attendance to this year’s #AustralianSocietyofArchivists (ASA) national annual conference...
iPRES 2022: Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability
Matthew Addis is Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum. One area that stood out for me at iPRES this year was the thread of climate change and environmental sustainability that weaved its way through several parts of the conference. In the panel session called ‘”IT'S ALL IMPORTANT OF COURSE, BUT…”, which hotly debated the question of what is the most important challenge in digital preservation (costs, advocacy, and people all came high up the list, and rightly so), I think it was Keith...
Member preview of new DPC Technology Watch Guidance Note: A case study on understanding user needs
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has released a Member Preview of a new Technology Watch Guidance Note on Understanding user needs: A case study from the National Library of Scotland by Chris Fleet today. Access is an important element of digital preservation workflows and ultimately information is preserved so it can be used: so, understanding what users need is a key aspect of successful digital preservation. This case study is a real-world example of how this has been done at one...
Investigating podcast preservation at the University of Kent
Clair Waller is Digital Archivist at the University of Kent Introduction The University of Kent Archive (UKA) is the repository for records created by Kent’s central administration and other constituent parts of the University. It was established in the year of our 50th anniversary, 2015, and has been developing in terms of scope, practice, and content since then. The UKA holds collects and preserves content from across the university, including papers on foundation and establishment of...
Call for Applicants: DPC Grants for 2022 Virtual SARBICA International Symposium
The DPC is pleased to offer two Career Development Fund grants for members to attend the 2022 Virtual SARBICA International Symposium taking place from 15th to 17th November 2022. Each grant will cover 100% of registration fees for the symposium, and applications are welcomed from DPC members until the grant application deadline of 7:00 UTC/15:00 SGT on 2nd September 2022.
Call for Applicants: DPC Travel Grants for the No Time To Wait Conference
The DPC is pleased to announce it is offering two Career Development Fund travel grants to support members attending the 6th edition of The No Time To Wait Conference which will be hosted by the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision and MediaArea.net on October 26th – 28th 2022 at Sound & Vision's media museum in The Hague, the Netherlands. These grants, detailed below, will contribute funding to help with the costs of travel for DPC members attending the conference in person....
Call for Applicants: DPC Grants for International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects (FDO2022)
The DPC is pleased to offer two Career Development Fund grants for members to attend the 1st International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects (FDO2022), taking place on 26 - 28 October in Leiden, The Netherlands. Each grant will cover 100% of conference registration fees as well as a contribution toward travel and accommodation. Applications are welcomed from DPC members until the grant application deadline of 7:00 UTC on 30th August 2022.
IDCC 2022 - Digital Preservation and Reuse: You can’t have one without the other
Zoe Warner is Senior Systems Administrator, Mediaflex at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. She attended IDCC22 with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters. I am grateful to the DPC in facilitating my first attendance at the annual International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC), held virtually from 13-16th June 2022. This was a conference that opened my eyes to the big world of data curation (particularly scientific research data)...
DCDC 2022 - The Future Landscape of Digital Archives
Yi-Ting Lin is a PhD student in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow. She recently attended DCDC 2022 with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters. Thanks to DPC's support, I attended the Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC) conference for the first time last week (#DCDC22) and learnt loads of new development and strategies. In this blog post, I contextualise the content of what I learned with themes and highlight...
DPC RAM: Levelling up
Silvia Gallotti is an Archivist at the LSE Library. The past In 2019, my colleague Fabi Barticioti, LSE Digital Assets Manager, completed the DPC Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) to assess the status quo of LSE Library digital preservation. Fabi wrote a very useful blog post about this, where she also encourages colleagues to use this model. At the time, the Library had only just acquired the DAMS and appointed a Digital Assets Manager. Based on digitised collections only, 6 out of 11...
DPC Launches Beginners Guide to Computational Access
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is pleased to announce the launch of Computational Access: A beginner's guide for digital preservation practitioners for a one-month member preview today. Computational access is a term that is mentioned with increasing frequency by those in the digital preservation community. Many practitioners are aware it might be helpful to them (and their users) but do not have a handle on what exactly it entails, how it is best applied and where to...
Sharing the Load
Helen Dafter is Archivist at The Postal Museum in the UK Readers of this blog will be well aware of the three legged stool of digital preservation. One key element of this stool is staff skills. For some time I have been concerned that digital preservation skills at The Postal Museum are concentrated in one member of staff (myself). This is undesirable in terms of both organisational and individual resilience.
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.
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,...
Breaking down the barriers between refugee voices and the future
Tom Wilson is Associate Archivist (Digital Preservation) at the UN High Commission for Refugees Breaking down barriers is something that often appears in the day-to-day work of UNHCR albeit, more often than not, in the metaphorical sense. Whether it’s providing shelter for refugees, access to healthcare, informing the public of the plight of refugees and other persons of concern or one of the many other activities that UNHCR carries out, UNHCR seeks to remove the barriers that can...
Breaking Down Preservation Barriers, One Small Step at a Time
Elizabeth Kata is Archives Associate for the International Atomic Energy Agency based in Austria Let’s face it, there are a lot of barriers to preservation, often due to a lack of resources. An institution needs enough staff and sufficient training opportunities for said staff, technical infrastructure, and an institutional commitment to finance preservation measures. When we began examining our digital holdings in 2020, we encountered a variety of barriers, both anticipated and unexpected.
Digitisation and digital preservation practice – making archives available and keeping it accessible (part 3)
Ros Malone is School Archivist for Bunbury Cathedral Grammar School in Perth, Australia Image Keys: Easing Barriers to Retrieval in the School Archives It’s a familiar problem for many Schools and School Archives, and indeed for collections of all kinds – what can be done with our vast collection of untitled, un-tagged digital images?
The ASA 2021 Conference: Some Reflections and Highlights from a Virtual Attendee
Andrea Walker is an Archivist at University at Cape Town Library. She attended the ASA 2021 Archives Amplified Conference with support from the Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters. I recently received a Career Development Fund grant from the DPC to attend the 2021 Australian Society of Archivists' conference, which ended up being entirely virtual. Given the global situation I wasn't planning to make the trip to Australia, but was glad the conference offered virtual...
Reflecting on the ARA 2021 Conference as an Archives & Records Management Student
Jessica Hooley is a MA Archive and Records Management student at Aberystwyth University. She attended the ARA 2021 Virtual Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters. The MA Archive and Records Management course at Aberystwyth University has provided a great basis to start my professional career in archives and records management. Seeing the schedule for the ARA Conference, it sparked my interest as it would support and develop what...