News

The DPC launches an open survey on the mental health and wellbeing of the digital preservation workforce. You are invited to take part in the survey and to share the survey with your friends and colleagues in the digital preservation community.

As an emerging profession with highly distributed practitioners who often work in relative isolation, the digital preservation workforce is unusually vulnerable. There is a growing amount of anecdotal evidence that pressures experienced by digital preservation practitioners in the workplace may be impacting on their mental health and wellbeing. The pressures they experience are especially felt when attempting to balance stresses of work with dedication to their duties. These have recently been brought into focus by issues raised in the 2021 NDSA Staffing Survey (read the report here).

[la version française suit]

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to share translations of two more Technology Watch Guidance Notes from its Data Type series: Preserving GIS and Preserving Spreadsheets.

Now available in French, the Technology Watch Guidance Notes complement the DPC’s popular Technology Watch Report series. Each of the Guidance Notes in the Data Type series is designed to provide a primer on the current state of community knowledge about types of data commonly encountered by those seeking to preserve their digital assets.

The Digital Preservation Coalition has released a new resource designed to help organizations Level-up with RAM and move forward in their digital preservation capabilities using the DPC Rapid Assessment Model (RAM).

Designed to enable rapid benchmarking of an organization’s digital preservation capability, the DPC RAM is a digital preservation maturity modelling tool which is applicable for organizations of any size in any sector, and for all content of long-term value.

With a 6-month DPC Member preview, this new companion resource is designed to help organizations work out how to address any gaps in digital preservation capacity highlighted through their RAM assessments, and to help them move up the levels from ‘Basic’ to ‘Optimized.’ For each of the 11 sections of RAM there are helpful tips, links to useful resources and case studies from others who have already tackled some common digital preservation challenges.

The National Archives (UK) would like to hear from anyone who uses DROID, or is planning to. Whether this is as part of work or for looking after personal records. DROID is a file format identification tool that is used in many digital preservation workflows. We want to better understand who the users are, how it is used and how it can be better. This will help us make decisions on the priorities and direction of DROID in future iterations.