DPC Annual Members Unconference and Networking Event 2024 (Europe)

Timing
(local time UTC+1)

Activity

10.00 – 10.30

Registration open, tea and coffee provided

10.30 – 10.40

Welcome and introduction to the Unconference

10.40 – 11.00

Presentation of the topics for discussion (organised into categories)
Confirmation of programming for morning

11.00 – 11.10

Break: Time to shuffle into groups

11.10 – 11.55

Plenary room

Fixity File Checking in the Cloud

Gen Schmitt, University of Illinois

Medusa, the University of Illinois digital preservation repository system, recently conducted its first comprehensive fixity check of all digital artifacts since transitioning to an AWS cloud-based architecture. This involved calculating the MD5 checksums of over 17 million objects totaling more than 250 TB of data, requiring a careful balance of cost and efficiency. While performing fixity checks was previously a straightforward task, the cloud infrastructure presented new complexities. Now that this process has been successfully completed, we aim to share our methodology, challenges encountered, and our strategy for ongoing data integrity checks in the cloud environment.

Type: Share

Breakout Room 

Developing an Irish language Digital Preservation terminology base

Lisa Griffith, Digital Repository of Ireland

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DR) is working with téarma.ie (the National Terminology Database for Irish), and a wider expert advisory group, to compile a standardised set of Irish language terms relating to Digital Preservation. This list will build on earlier work that has been done to compile standardised Irish language terms for archiving by identifying terms that are missing, compiling standardised definitions for these activities, and then working with Téarma to come up with an Irish language equivalent. The DRI hopes to publish this list on World Digital Preservation Day 2024. The purpose of this session is to seek input and guidance from the community on a draft list of terms, to identify gaps in the list before translation and review English language definitions of terms. The session will be run by the DRI and Téarma. Project advisory member Niamh Ní Charra will also be on hand.

Type: Discuss

11.55 – 12.05

Break + Reshuffle 

12.05 – 12.50

Plenary room

File format identification and validation error treatment

Sofie Ruysseveldt, Digital Archives Flanders

Digital Archives Flanders is a division of the Agency for Facility Operations from the Flemish Government. We provide shared services for preservation, management and dissemination of government information, both records and archives. These shared services are available for all departments and agencies of the Flemish Government, cities, municipalities and other government agencies in Flanders. Regularly, we encounter issues with troubleshooting identification and validation errors when using tools such as Siegfried, JHOVE,… . This is a core process within digital preservation practice. Nevertheless, there is not much shared documentation that describes what to do when files are e.g. not well-formed or invalid, nor best practices on processes and workflows to treat these errors. I am interested to find out how other digital archivists/ organisations are dealing with this:

• Do you have formalised workflows for error treatment?

• Which tools do you use for file format identification and validation? What is covered/is not covered in these tools? Are the validation results complete and correct? How to understand/interprete the output of these tools?

• How can the existing open source identification and validation tools be improved by community feedback?

• What do you do when you get multiple and/or different error messages when cross-checking with other tools?

• How do you fix files?

• Which sources do you consult to address the issues?

• When do you decide not to treat an error?

• How do you save preservation metadata for actions like fixing files?

• How can we collect, share and exchange knowledge and experiences about this topic within DPC?

Type: Discuss

Breakout Room

Reading Club: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Technical Debt in Archives

Jenny Mitcham, DPC

In this DPC Reading Club session we will discuss Toward a Conceptual Framework for Technical Debt in Archives - Déirdre Joyce; Laurel McPhee; Rita Johnston; Julia Corrin; Rebecca Hirsch: https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-85.1.104

We only ask that you have done the reading that has been set before the session and bring along your thoughts and observations to share. When reading the article, have a think about the following questions which we will discuss together:

• What did you learn from the article? Was it an interesting read?

• Was there anything that surprised you in the article …or was there perhaps something that you disagreed with?

• Do you think you will do anything differently as a result of reading this article - does it change your practices or thinking in any way?

• Is there anything we should do as a community or the DPC could help with?

• Any other observations or discussion points also welcome!

Type: Discuss

12.50 – 13.00

Regroup and reflect

13.00 – 14.00

Break for Lunch

14.00 – 14.10

Plenary session: Mentimeter voting on priorities for DPC support in the coming year

14.10 – 14.15

Break + shuffle

14.15 – 15.00

Plenary room

DPC-led session

Breakout Room

DPC-led session

15.00 – 15.10

Break + Reshuffle 

15.10 – 15.55

Plenary room

A Lovely Day for Digital Preservation: Two public-facing digital preservation projects at the Guinness Archive

Eibhlin Colgan and Leanne Harrington, Diageo

The Guinness Archive recently embarked on two large collaborative projects with digital preservation and access at their core. The Guinness Adverts project in partnership with the Irish Film Institute and Coimisiun na Meain, sought to remaster, preserve and make available the brand’s advertising legacy of 16mm and 35mm film adverts. Guinness was the most prolific advertiser on Irish television between 1955 and 1995. The advertising collection features a wealth of talent from both behind and in front of the camera. The remastered files have been ingested into the IFI’s digital preservation framework.

The Guinness Archive partnered with Ancestry to digitise employee records from the St. James’s Gate brewery and 250,000 pages of trade ledgers, recording sales to individual bottlers and publicans across Ireland, the UK and further afield from 1860 to 1960. The images and their metadata are hosted by Ancestry and will be preserved and made available at the Guinness Archive using Preservica. The nature of the data has presented complex challenges to work through from both an access and a preservation perspective.

Type: Share

Breakout Room

Appraisal of born-digital archival collections

Nicola Caldwell, NLNZ

I’m interested in finding out how other digital archivists are tackling appraisal of large and complex born-digital archival collections. We carry out quite granular appraisal currently for born-digital collections, but are struggling to scale this for large multi-format cultural heritage collections. Are there tools, frameworks or computational techniques that have worked to reduce the manual, human, time-consuming nature of content appraisal? I’m wondering if anyone is using AI/ML tools - do they work, what are the policy/ethical frameworks used?

I can provide an overview of the case study I am working through at the moment that includes manuscripts, photographs, AV materials, website and social media archives from the one donor. Then could use that as a starting point to discuss how different organisations might tackle that collection if it came to their institutions.

If others are keen to collaborate on a session of this topic, I am very open to that!

Type: Discuss

15.55 – 16.30

Feedback of actions
Wrap up and close

Timing

(local time UTC+1)

Activity

09.15 – 09.30

Tea and coffee

09.30 – 09.40

Welcome back to the Unconference

09.40 – 09.50

Break: Time to shuffle into groups

09.50 – 10.35

Plenary room

Simplifying the ingest workflow– The SIP Creator project

Julie Jordens, Digital Archives Flanders

Digital Archives Flanders is developing a tool that simplifies the ingest towards our digital repository (the E-depot). Currently, our clients often have to re-upload a SIP because various errors were made against our metadata model. With our SIP Creator tool we want to prevent those errors and streamline their ingest workflow.

The creation and uploading of SIPs in the E-depot will be simplified as the tool can easily map our clients’ metadata model to our model, automatically read and fill in metadata in the import template, generate SIPs that conform to the requirements of the E-depot, and finally place the SIP on the customer's FTPS environment, from where it will be picked up by the E-depot.

We have now completed the development of the first phase. In this phase, the basic functionalities for the tool were developed. In the second phase of development, we want to focus on preparing analog archives so that they can also be shown in our E-depot. I would like to showcase the tool as it stands now and receive feedback from the sector. To achieve this, I would like to organise a short demo followed by a discussion where suggestions and comments can be given.

Type: Share/discuss

Breakout Room

Our Heritage, Our Stories: a Towards A National Collection project - Supporting Preservation and Linking of Community Generated Digital Content

Rebecka Rosenberg , Karyn Williamson & Paul Wheatley, OHOS

Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people’s national collection is a Discovery Research Project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as part of the Towards a National Collection programme. The University of Glasgow is working in partnership with DPC to explore all stages in the life cycle of Community Generated Digital Content (CGDC), what makes it inherently fragile, and why it is important to “bake-in” preservation actions throughout its creation, management, and storage. We will explore the wider ecosystem of CGDC: the types of content it includes; the communities of practice that are stakeholders in creating, managing, and using this material, including funders; the known and unknown uses of CGDC; and the underlying infrastructures that support this material: all factors in making CGDC a very endangered species of digital content.

This panel session will highlight the progress made to date in the OHOS project in scoping the preservation challenges of CGDC, and what can be done practically to ensure its long-term preservation and recognition as part of the wider national collection of the UK. It will also introduce the idea of how a post-custodial framework for holders of CGDC addresses some of the challenges in managing this material. We will present the project’s draft recommendations around supporting CGDC holders and ensuring the survival and discoverability of this content. We will also share our initial thoughts around our practical toolkit, aimed at holders of CGDC, with practical guidance, sign-posting and advice on good practice. We welcome feedback and initial thoughts by members of the audience, which will further develop our thinking as we move into the last year of the project.

Type: Discuss

10.35 – 10.45

Break + Reshuffle 

10.45 – 11.30

Plenary Room

FAIR-IMPACT support program

Clara Lines and Daniel Turner, DCC

FAIR-IMPACT project aims at supporting the implementation of FAIR-enabling practices, tools and services. One way in which it is doing that is through supporting teams from three key stakeholder groups (research performing organisations, repositories and data services providers, and national level initiatives) with grants or mentoring to help them increase the FAIRness of their practices.

The first round of support actions, now completed, focused on FAIRness assessment methods and FAIR Signposting and RO-Crate. Currently ongoing actions are offering 1:1 support to develop FAIR-Implementation action plans and grants to test different tools and methods such as the guidelines developed in the project to improve the transparency of and trust in repositories developed, or the Compliance Assessment Toolkit (CAT) for self-assessment of compliance with EOSC PID policy (we could discuss this tool in more detail if there is interest). Additional open calls for support will open later in the year.

We would like to offer an overview of these support actions. It would be great if any participants of the support actions are attending the event and they would like to present their experience too.

Type: Share

Breakout Room

Starting a new digital preservation program and using RAM

Jacqueline Devereaux Asaro, Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives

Vanderbilt recently hired a director with a focus on digital preservation. In the past year, the department has initiated a program to develop a sustainable digital program. I recently started in March as the new Born Digital Archivist, and in the first month, I completed a RAM assessment for the department. I would love to make connections with others who are starting off on their digital preservation journey, hear about filling out the assessment, or any other offers of advice for starting out!

Type: Discuss

11.30 – 11.40

Break + Reshuffle 

11.40 – 12.25

Plenary room

Building and supporting the digital preservation community

Sarah Middleton, DPC

As the DPC grows internationally, we are asking ourselves how best to support our members around the world – whilst also interacting with and supporting other aligned and existing networks, associations and communities of practice.

We will be joined at the DPC Unconference by colleagues from Australasia, the Americas, the iPres Conference Steering Committee and the iPres Start to Preserve sub-committee (and most likely others too!) and we’re keen to discuss how we can work together to support each other.

Join this discussion to share your ideas about what a digital preservation community means to you, and the kind of support you’d hope to receive from the community as we grow.

Type: Discuss

Breakout Room

Preserving access-quality born-digital collections

Ailie O’Hagan, QUB

Many born-digital collections were created with access in mind, capturing events ‘of the moment’, using outdated technological standards, or retaining only lower quality, compressed representations, suitable for sharing, but not ideal for longer-term preservation. In some cases, e.g., university e-theses, the procedure for submission (now an entirely digital process), calls only for access copies.

Yet, if we choose to exclude collections based on the unavailability of appropriate preservation originals, do we risk creating inequalities that unintentionally bias our collections in the long-term, against lower-budget, often arts and humanities, and community research?

So how do we address the preservation challenges of our pre-existing digital collections and inherited legacy work? What practical decisions can we make to balance inclusivity with stakeholder capacity? What should be our baseline significant properties? Are there tools and strategies that can make our access-quality files more preservable? And what are the ethical and technical implications of these?

Type: Discuss

12.25 – 13.00

Reflections / Feedback of actions / Wrap up

13.00  

Thanks and close