News

The Digital Preservation Coalition is delighted to announce that Angela Dappert and Sharon McMeekin will be joining the DPC as Special Project Officers.

‘People are often surprised to discover that the DPC achieves so much with such a small staff complement,’ explained Richard Ovenden, Chair of the DPC.  ‘Appointing two new staff means a 100% increase in staff and a radical expansion in the benefits we can deliver to members. It’s a really exciting development for the Coalition.’

Portsmouth University joins the Coalition

The Digital Preservation Coalition is delighted to welcome the University of Portsmouth as its latest associate member. 

'The Future Proof Computing Group at the University of Portsmouth has a track record of research and development of digital preservation through initiatives like the KEEP project (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable)' explained Dr David Anderson. 'We're about to start a new project, POCOS, funded by the JISC, on the preservation of complex objects, and have interests in topics like the sustainability of computer games technology, the history of computing, emulation, virtualization and data warehousing.

The National Library of Ireland is the latest organisation to join the Digital Preservation Coalition, helping the Library to address the challenges and opportunities associated with long term management of digital collections.

The DPC has today published a response to the second phase of consultation on electronic legal deposit which was submitted to the Department for Culture Media and Sport at the end of December. It notes the essential relationship between preservation and access.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome the UK LOCKSS Alliance as its latest associate member.

The UK LOCKSS Alliance is a co-operative organization which ensures continuing access to scholarly work over the long term.  Its focus is on ensuring preservation and continuing access to electronic journals, but has interests and current research work on the preservation of all library collections, thus making it a natural fit within the DPC family.

Appropriate and timely examination of the digital preservation plans of digitization projects can have a lasting impact.  Projects may not know or understand the risks they run. Simple assessment can help them identify and address these risks sooner rather than later.

Comments are sought on the DPC's draft response to the DCMS's consultation on the regulations for Legal Deposit of electronic materials.  The draft response is online at: http://www.dpconline.org/advocacy/direct-advocacy/dpc-response-to-electronic-legal-deposit [pdf, login required] Comments are requested by Monday 13th December. 

In January 2010 the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) consulted on draft regulations for the legal deposit of ‘free of charge’ electronic publications – the ‘free web’.  This consultation was intended to be the first part of a two part process and the DPC responded arguing inter alia that the second phase of proposals be presented without delay as arguably the ‘paid web’ includes material of lasting value and that until regulations were introduced this element of our collected digital memory would be at risk. 

The DPC, JISC and West Yorkshire Archive Service are delighted to announce the release of a new digital preservation case note which examines the practical problems of digital preservation faced by West Yorkshire Archive Service as they negotiated and received their first large digital collection.  They conclude that although digital preservation can seem daunting and although nobody has the perfect answer to digital preservation for every case, that if we try we may fail but if we do nothing we certainly will.

The case note will be released at the end of October: a member's preview of the Case Note is available here (login required).