Issues
Browse the Knowledge Base by a cross section of legal, organisational and technical issues such as File Format Obsolescence, Procurement or Metadata.
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Documents
pdf Directory of Digital Repositories and Services in the UK June 2005
Directory of Digital Repositories and Services in the UK June 2005
Articles
World Digital Preservation Day
About World Digital Preservation Day World Digital Preservation Day is held on the first Thursday of every November. This year, on 7th November 2019, the digital preservation community will come together to celebrate their work - the collections they have preserved, the access they have maintained and the understanding they have fostered by preserving digital materials. Pervasive, changing and ubiquitous, digital technologies are a defining feature...
Web Archiving & Preservation Task Force
Description This gathering of the Web Archiving & Preservation Task Force (WAPTF) will provide an opportunity for delegates to discuss the web archiving and preservation topics important to their institutions, their collections, and their users. Hosted by Tate, the meeting will progress issues raised at the last meeting, such as the formation of sub-groups around specific areas of interest like social media. About the WAPTF The Task Force was first formed in 2010 in an effort to coordinate...
Digital Preservationists Anonymous
Summary Many times what we perceive as an error or failure is actually a gift. And eventually we find that lessons learned from that discouraging experience prove to be of great worth. Richelle E. Goodrich We all know that the most valuable learning is often made when trying things out in practice and sometimes making mistakes. Sharing that experience in a public forum is, unfortunately, not usually an option however. This event, seeks to provide a safe space to share, discuss and...
Digital preservation in a nuclear context - the first six months
Last month I celebrated my 6 month work anniversary at the DPC. Happily, this coincided with our first DPC York team night out. Did it really take 6 months to get the 3 of us out for a drink after work? Apparently yes! My first 6 months at the DPC really has flown by. I haven’t been blogging as much as I expected, but that is largely down to the fact I’ve been keeping my head down, travelling lots and working hard on the project I was recruited for - a collaboration with the UK Nuclear...
Undateables – methods for determining date ranges for born-digital documents when file system dates go bad
Paul Young is Digital Preservation Specialist/Researcher at the National Archives UK What’s the problem? Determining reliable dates for digital records can be a source of frustration, especially when confronted with a large volume of digital files with dates that are obviously incorrect, such as why your Microsoft Word Document 1997 version dates from 1st January 1970. Dates are very important for The National Archives in particular as we look to transfer records from departments under...
The 'Capstone' email appraisal approach
Alexander Roberts is Digital Humanities Manager/Research Data Manager at Swansea University and attended iPRES2018 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by DPC Supporters Welcome to my second blog post relating to themes and projects which sparked my imagination as a result of attending iPres2018, the international digital preservation conference, last September in Boston, USA. As I mentioned in my previous blog post discussing...
The Application of Preservation Planning Templates to a Personal Digital Collection – Reflections on the Process
Introduction The PAWDOC collection was initiated in 1981 to support research into new office systems at the National Computing Centre in Manchester. The author continued to use the collection to manage all his documents throughout his subsequent IT career. The collection’s index contains six fields (Ref No, Title, Movement Status, Publication Date, Date Last Accessed, and Creation Date). Each of the 17,000 Index entries related to one or more of some 29,000 electronic files of a wide variety...
DPA2018 Winners Webinars: EPISODE 3 - Navigating the PDF/A Standard
The Digital Preservation Awards 2018 (DPA2018) Winners Webinar Series provides an opportunity to learn more about some of the latest and best digital preservation initiatives, recently celebrated by the Digital Preservation Awards on World Digital Preservation Day 2018 in Amsterdam. Each episode explores the winning entry for each category of the Digital Preservation Awards, providing an overview of each initiative, investigating how their work might be used within the community, and...
Save Your Social Media: a quick 'how-to' for downloading your valuable photos and content shared online
This post is for anyone with a social media account - not just those working professionally in digital preservation - who want to keep their valuable photos and content safe. Some quick pointers on saving and backing-up social media photos and other content Social media platforms – including Flickr, Facebook (& Instagram), Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other Google services – are designed for sharing not archiving. When you tick ‘agree’ to their User Agreements, you license...
DPA2018 Winners Webinars: EPISODE 2 - Archivists Guide to Kryoflux
The Digital Preservation Awards 2018 (DPA2018) Winners Webinar Series provides an opportunity to learn more about some of the latest and best digital preservation initiatives, recently celebrated by the Digital Preservation Awards on World Digital Preservation Day 2018 in Amsterdam. Each episode explores the winning entry for each category of the Digital Preservation Awards, providing an overview of each initiative, investigating how their work might be used within the community, and...
What do you think about the NDSA Levels of Preservation?
Corey Davis is Chair of the Levels Reboot Project Implementation Subgroup for NDSA and Digital Preservation Coordinator for Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) As many of you will remember, a very smart group of people–including Megan Phillips, Jefferson Bailey, Andrea Goethals, and Trevor Owens–helped the NDSA launched its Levels of Preservation guidelines in 2013. Since then, they’ve become a fixture in the digital preservation community, influencing...
Ironing out the digital: Housekeeping at UAL
Elisabeth Thurlow is Digital Archives & Collections Implementation Manager at the University of the Arts London Across the six colleges which make up the University of the Arts London (UAL)1 we hold over 120 archives and special collections, many of which contain an increasing amount of digital content – both digitised and born digital materials. These collections chart past and contemporary creative arts practice; the development of art and design education; and the emerging digital...
Levels of Preservation Reboot Overview and Update
Bradley Daigle is Chair of the NDSA Coordinating Committee, NDSA Levels of Preservation Working Group and content and strategic expert for the Academic Preservation Trust A little background About the NDSA: The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) is a consortium of preservation-minded organizations scattered across the globe. Do not let the “national” part of the title lead you to believe that this is a US-only effort. We have partners of all shapes and sizes—including some...
A blog on good practice and standards
When I took on my new job as Head of Good Practice and Standards at the DPC I was told by several people not to stop blogging. Luckily, the DPC is an organisation that actively encourages blogging - not just from its staff but also from members. Note to members - Sarah has a blog schedule and you will be on it somewhere - but don’t feel limited by the schedule - you can blog at any time, it really is a great way to share information and make contact with the wider community. When working as...
Cinderella's Stick - A Fairy Tale for Digital Preservation
Yannis Tzitzikas is Associate Professor of Information Systems in the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete and Affiliated Researcher in the Information Systems Lab at FORTH-ICS, Greece and Yannis Marketakis works as an R&D Engineer in the Information System Laboratory at FORTH-ICS. They are authors of Cinderella's Stick: A Fairytale for Digital Preservation Once upon a time, a life changing opportunity is offered to Daphne (our modern-day Cinderella). An...
World Digital Preservation Day - that was fun!
Last year on International Digital Preservation Day (as it was then called) I asked the question “What shall I do for International Digital Preservation Day?” In that blog post I talked about the blogging and tweeting I’d been doing at the Borthwick Institute and ended with “...and of course I now have a whole year to plan for International Digital Preservation Day 2018 so perhaps I'll be able to do something bigger and better?!” A year passes very quickly and any ideas I had for World...
How does it feel? The psychology of digital preservation
Charles Miller is a former BBC documentary producer, currently working for a tech startup in London and studying for a Masters in History. Anchoring will be his second book. In all discussions about digital preservation, there’s an impossible question to answer: how much should I keep? While institutions are limited by budgets and staff time, for individuals, it’s more personal. Decisions about deleting, and the very process of organising and preserving, bring out complicated emotions about...
Thinking Creatively to Understand Complexity: A Workshop for the UK Legal Deposit Libraries’ Emerging Formats Project
Caylin Smith is the Legal Deposit Libraries Senior Project Manager for the British Library Earlier this month, the British Library hosted a workshop for the Legal Deposit Libraries’ Emerging Formats project. The purpose of the workshop was to engage stakeholders and look at some new approaches to address challenges the project has identified. In this post, Caylin Smith, project manager for the Legal Deposit Libraries and a researcher on the Emerging Formats project, outlines the importance...
Cloud-Enabled Preservation of Life in the 20th Century White House
Stephanie Tuszynski is Director of the White House Historical Association Digital Library in Washington DC, USA The White House Historical Association was founded in 1961 to "enhance the understanding and appreciation" of the White House by offering educational resources to students, teachers, scholars, and the general public to help them learn about the building and its history. The WHHA Digital Library is a key piece of our outreach strategy, with more than 10,000 images and...
Perspectives on the Evolving Ecology of Digital Preservation
Oya Y. Rieger is Senior Advisor at Ithaka S+R, based in New York As an organization that provides research and consultancy services to the global higher education community to support the creation, discovery, dissemination, and preservation of scholarship, Ithaka S+R is interested in exploring the current landscape of digital preservation programs and services in order to identify research questions that will contribute to the advancement of strategies in support of future scholarship. To...