Preservation Lifecycle

The digital preservation lifecycle refers to all of the stages required to preserve and sustain access to digital content; from creation to ingest, management and administration to access and reuse.

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Access, Use and ReuseCreate or Receive (Acquire)DisposalIngestPreservation ActionPreservation PlanningStorage

Articles

Benchmarking Access at National Archives of Australia

Rowena Loo is the Director, Digital Archives Innovation and Research at the National Archives of Australia. Access – it’s the end goal of all digital preservation activity and the true test of our digital preservation efforts. After all, if no one’s going to access it, why preserve it? If it’s not technically possible to access it, how can we claim it’s been preserved? However, it’s all too easy to focus on the more immediate challenges of transfer, ingest and file format preservation,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Digitisation of The Scotsman Collection: Digital Access and Preservation at Historic Environment Scotland

Christopher Viney is Archive Digitisation Officer at Historic Environment Scotland Over the past decade issues in access to archival collections have been thrown sharply into focus demonstrating the value of digitising analogue archival material. This provides a greater level of access and mitigates potential barriers that can often shut people out of our institutions. Indeed, digitisation and digital preservation provides a key tool in the work of Historic Environment Scotland to...

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Capturing and preserving practice based research

Holly Ranger is Research Data Management Officer in the Research & Knowledge Exchange Office at the University of Westminster Practice Research Voices (PR Voices) is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project led by the University of Westminster. The project is scoping the development of an Open Library of Practice Research for the dissemination and preservation of practice research, building on existing software and standards and guided by open research...

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DPC Rapid Assessment Model: Turkish translation now available!

[Türkçe versiyonu aşağıdadır] The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to share a Turkish translation of its Rapid Assessment Model (RAM), with thanks to Dr. Özhan Sağlik at Bursa Uludağ University in Turkey and Nathalie Defne Gier and Mustafa Ergül at Koç University in Turkey who generously donated their time to make the resource accessible. Now available as a PDF download in Turkish, the second edition of the DPC RAM is a digital preservation maturity modelling tool that has...

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Digital Preservation at BT Archives

Melanie Peart is Archives Specialist at BT Heritage & Archives. BT Archives was set up over 35 years ago to preserve the history of the then recently privatised company, British Telecom.  Now a global telecommunications company, BT has its origins in mid-19th century telephone and telegraph businesses.  Its history includes, amongst many other things, the iconic red telephone box (or more accurately telephone kiosk), undersea cable-laying and memorable advertising...

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Digital Preservation at BT Archives

Melanie Peart is Archives Specialist at BT Heritage & Archives. BT Archives was set up over 35 years ago to preserve the history of the then recently privatised company, British Telecom.  Now a global telecommunications company, BT has its origins in mid-19th century telephone and telegraph businesses.  Its history includes, amongst many other things, the iconic red telephone box (or more accurately telephone kiosk), undersea cable-laying and memorable advertising...

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RAM FAQ for DPC Members

On this page we provide answers to the questions that DPC Members have asked us about using DPC RAM. If you have any other questions you think we should add to this list, please let us know.   What support can I get for completing a RAM self-assessment? All DPC members are eligible for advice and support on their annual RAM assessment from the DPC. We can talk through your assessment with you, discuss your target levels and answer any questions you might have. Do contact us if you...

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Further resources and case studies

Case studies Here are some examples of how DPC RAM has been used by members of the community to help track their progress in digital preservation. If you have a example of DPC RAM in action that you would like to share please contact us: Assessing where we are with digital preservation (2021) - a blog post from Fabiana Barticioti, Digital Assets Manager at LSE Library. From 'starting digital preservation' to 'business as usual' (2021) - a blog post from Anna McNally, Senior...

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How was DPC RAM developed?

How was it developed? The model is primarily based on Adrian Brown's Digital Preservation Maturity Model (published in Practical Digital Preservation: a how-to guide for organizations of any size, 2013). This model was developed with the following guiding principles in mind. It aimed to be: Applicable for organizations of any size and in any sector Applicable for all content of long-term value Preservation strategy and solution agnostic Based on existing good practice Simple to...

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Reflections Following an Online Training Conference: 2022 NEDCC Digital Directions

Mzodidi Tutuka is Principal Library Assistant at University at Cape Town Library. He recently attended the NEDCC Digital Directions Conference 2022  with support from the DPC’s Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters. I am Mzodidi Tutuka from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. I work at the Digital Library Services (DLS) department which falls under the Information and Resources division within the UCT Libraries. Our department consists of 9...

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Twist Bioscience joins the DPC’s Supporter Program

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to announce that DNA storage provider, Twist Bioscience, is the newest organization to join its Supporter Program. Twist Bioscience provides synthetic DNA to those working in the fields of health care, agriculture, industrial chemicals, and academic research, and has recently announced a data storage offering, the Century Archive solution. The company’s Century Archive solution leverages the advantages of DNA as a storage medium. Its...

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DPC Rapid Assessment Model: Italian translation now available!

[segue la versione italiana] The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to share an Italian translation of its Rapid Assessment Model (RAM), with thanks to Giulia Brecciaroli at the British Library and Elena Nepoti at Imperial War Museums in the UK who generously donated their time to make the resource accessible.

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Unprecedented times

Hania Smerecka is Archivist at Lloyds Banking Group I sat down to write this during a violent flurry of Whatsapp pings - friends discussing fresh instructions to work from home. I’m not sure how the latest announcements make me feel. Nervous probably, but lucky too, as we got through the last two years safely, adapted, and are in pretty good shape to face whatever is coming.   Our Preservica cloud instance had not yet gone live when Covid first hit the news. We were still finding our...

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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.

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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...

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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...

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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...

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