DPC

Prompted by the 2022 Society of American Archivists (SAA) publication of Museum Archives: Practice, Issues, Advocacy (ed. Rachel Chatalbash, Susan Hernandez, and Megan Schwenke), the Yale Center for British Art and SAA's Museum Archives Section are hosting a one-day symposium to examine the current position and future directions of the museum archives field. The symposium will be held in person at the Yale University Art Gallery and livestreamed online. We welcome proposals from new and established museum archivists, and their professional allies, that examine any aspect of the museum archives profession. Themes for consideration include, but are not limited to: 

The Born Digital Cultural Heritage Now #BDCH23 conference https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/bdch-23/ was held at ACMI in Melbourne, Australia from 29 Nov to 1 Dec 2023. It was a forum for researchers, practitioners, artists, historians, cultural theorists, and industry professionals to discuss the challenges of collecting, preserving, and accessing born digital cultural heritage material. Much born digital cultural heritage material such as media art, video games, web content, discussion forum and bulletin board posts, architectural documentation and other digital data created over the last twenty to thirty years is no longer accessible. This is the result of a range of technical and non-technical issues including hardware and software obsolescence, media deterioration, content abandonment, institutional and business decisions, archival practices, legal restrictions, and cultural and audience changes. The #BDCH23 conference focused on how these issues are being addressed in different contexts and the impact this loss on our culture and society.

Mzodidi Tutuka is Principal Library Assistant, Digital Preservation, at University at Cape Town Library. He attended the No Time To Wait 7 conference with support from a travel grant from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Recently, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has afforded me the invaluable opportunity to attend a remarkable NTTW7 conference held in the captivating city of Prague. The event was a convergence of minds, a gathering of experts, scholars, and enthusiasts alike, all fervently dedicated to unravelling the complexities of safeguarding our digital heritage. Over the course of three days (8-10 November 2023) immersed in riveting discussions, illuminating presentations, and networking, I gleaned profound insights that underscored the critical importance of working and preserving our digital legacy for future generations.

Graham Purnell is Digital Preservation Assistant at the National Library of Scotland.

As part of a practical exercise to investigate preservation of modern digital objects at the National Library of Scotland (NLS), Graeme Hawley, our Head of General Collections, drew up a short list of items for investigation and possible addition to the Library’s collections.  This list partly emerged out of discussions with partner Legal Deposit Libraries, including the British Library. A small team from across NLS was assembled to investigate best methods and discover technical and legal barriers. The Bytesize Collection Group was born.

Late last year I was lucky enough to attend and give a paper at NDF Whanake\Evolve 2023 at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 20 – 23 November 2023. NDF is a future and technology conference for the Aotearoa cultural sector. It brings together participants from the cultural sector across the Asia-Pacific region to explore how to tackle global challenges including climate change, inequality, and injustice.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is pleased to announce the general release of a new Technology Watch Report on Preserving Geospatial Data today.

First released to DPC Members in July 2023, Preserving Geospatial Data has been authored by Meagan Snow, Geospatial Data Visualization Librarian at the Geography & Map Division of the Library of Congress. Published by the DPC in association with the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the report is the second edition of an earlier report by Guy McGarva, Steve Morris and Greg Janée, published by the DPC in 2009. Though much of the information in this original report was still relevant, there were many updates necessary given the pace of change in the complex landscape of tools and file formats for geospatial data.