Blog

The Warm up

Our annual ‘RAM Jam’ sessions are always a highlight in my DPC calendar. Since we organized our very first event in 2019, these Members-only sessions have provided a small and informal forum for DPC Members to share their experiences of using our Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM) to drive digital preservation forward within their organizations.

This year, to celebrate 5 years of RAM, we encouraged Members to share their tips on how to make the most out of RAM – perhaps lessons learned after using RAM for 5 years, or fresh insights from those who have more recently come to use the model.

We are always looking for new ways to facilitate international dialogue, so staged this event as a ‘virtual relay race’, starting and ending in Australasia and traveling around the time zones. The key to making this format work was finding a way of passing some of the key learnings from each session forward – a kind of virtual baton gathering tips along the way. This was facilitated by the creation of a short highlights video from each DPC event host that could be played at subsequent sessions.

These short videos can be found on the event page (member login to the DPC website required to view). The sessions themselves weren’t recorded, but we’ve distilled the race highlights for you below.

WARNING: May Contain Excessive Whimsy.

'Twas the week before Christmas, when all through DPC,
not a keyboard was silent, mice glid furiously.
With vacation looming, much still to be done,
TODO lists to tame; once short, growing long.

Kari May is the Digital Archives & Preservation Librarian for the University of Pittsburgh Library System and heads the design, development, and management of their digital preservation program. She has worked in digital preservation for 12 years and is currently a Co-Chair of the Best Practices Exchange Program Committee. Kari is also a member of the NDSA Coordinating Committee, the bloggERS Editorial Team, and  SAA’s Collection Management Section Steering Committee.

I’ve been a part of the digital preservation community for nearly 13 years, and the Best Practices Exchange (BPE) was one of the first conferences I was able to attend. I quickly understood why BPE is an unconference, and I adored the benefits of this perspective. Unconference doesn’t mean unprofessional, and unconference definitely doesn’t mean uninformative. In fact, this unconference has offered a safe space that allows professionals to be unselfconscious in discussing a wide range of aspects related to managing and preserving digital content. This safe space has even made it possible for peers to discuss failures and collaborate on strategies to turn them around and sometimes into keystones for new innovations. Over the years, my experience with BPE has moved from attendee, to presenter, to Co-Chair of the 2025 Program Committee. Every step has been a pleasure and has offered new opportunities to grow.

William Kilbride is the Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

One day more.  As the sun sets on the Pacific islands west of the Americas, it’s time to declare an end to World Digital Preservation Day 2024. 

The idea of World Digital Preservation Day is simple – to connect and to raise awareness.  Those connected themes are still true and perhaps more needed than ever before.  The theme this year was ‘Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities’.  So, as well as building and strengthening the digital preservation community, it encouraged us to consider the communities in which and for whom we work.  In a lovely simile, Jeanne Kraymer-Smyth has compared the digital preservation community to the Crow and the Pitcher from Aesop’s fables: that we all can all add a pebble into the pitcher of water, raising the level for each other.

Mari Allison worked as Digital Preservation Intern at the Getty and is now Digital Collections Specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History 

The DPC’s Museum and Galleries working group has been in place for almost a year and a half, and I’ve had the opportunity to join in their meetings during my year at the Getty. I always learn a lot when others discuss their projects, and I’d like to elaborate on a project we’ve mentioned briefly in those meetings, Time Based Media (TBM) artworks at the Getty Museum.

Kelly Stewart is Chief Archivist at Artefactual Systems Inc. 

When I reflect on the features that define the digital preservation community, I see two notable characteristics.  One is slow and cautious, the other fast and free.  While these two aspects may seem to be diametrically opposed, both are nonetheless necessary in the digital preservation community so that our children and grandchildren (and so on) have the best chance of living in a world where cultural memory thrives.

At Artefactual we often turn to the work of Stewart Brand and the Long Now Foundation for inspiration. Stewart Brand approaches civilisation and how it operates as layers:  fashion is the top layer and is always in motion, nature is the bottom layer and changes very slowly.  In between are layers of commerce, governance, and infrastructure. This pace layered approach helps us at Artefactual keep focused on how we approach digital preservation (fashion = software, nature = AIP or digital content). 

Claudia Muñoz López is a student at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and winner of the 2024 Digital Preservation Award for Most Outstanding Student Work in Digital Preservation 

Este blog está disponible en español a continuación: 

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are autonomous, non-profit associations integraded by volunteer citizens who are part of civil society. They are characterized by their focus on specific social work; although their purpose is not to generate financial resources for their members, they have a formal constitution and defined objectives. Additionally, they are independent from the government but can contribute to the development of public policies.

NGOs are important because they have a prominent role in the promotion of human rights and focusing on sectors that the government not always be able to support and manage. They possess unique information about the issues and sectors in which they work. In this way, preserving their information is essential to maintain legal evidence of their activities, transparency requirements, and provide long-term support for the organization’s memory and history. However, according to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), NGOs face specific contexts and challenges, such as a lack of knowledge about digital preservation, insufficient infrastructure and budget, political instability, or inadequate backups, among others.

The chapters and user groups recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation are non-profit associations dedicated to promoting Wikipedia and free knowledge, as well as Creative Commons licenses, open access, and free culture. They are integrated by volunteers and staff and vary in size and scope. This text focuses on Wikimedia Mexico.

Zach Johnson is Associate Director for Digital Special Collections at Vanderbilt University Libraries

World Digital Preservation Day (#WDPD2024) offers the digital preservation community a chance to highlight the importance of preserving our digital legacy through effective strategies collectively created by members of the Digital Preservation Coalition and other institutions around the world. This year’s theme of “Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities” is particularly relevant to Vanderbilt University Libraries. The team at Special Collections and University Archives have made major efforts to address digital preservation needs within the libraries and have expanded the level of support we can offer to Middle Tennessee community groups. We have made this real in the fall of 2023 by hiring Sarah Calise as Metadata Coordinator and Curator of Community Histories who is explicitly tasked with working with local underrepresented communities to expand our community collections. Furthermore, we have acquired new high-quality digitization equipment, and we are continuing to spend significant staff hours documenting a digital preservation strategy, alongside developing comprehensive policies, procedures, and standards.

Amanda Tomé is Preservation Coordinator for the Digital Research Alliance of Canada

Background

2024 is the year of file formats for the Digital Research Alliance of Canada’s Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR). It’s been a year of being confused by file formats, overwhelmed by file formats, and generally trying to figure out what to do with the file formats in our repository.

After reviewing the results of a file metrics scan undertaken on the repository in March 2024, which effectively confirmed our suspicions that many of the file formats in FRDR were not present in file format registries, I knew there was a lot of work to be done to get a better handle on the file formats in our repository. However, I wasn’t entirely sure how to get started or the approach to undertake. I also wanted this work to benefit the Canadian research data community and the digital preservation community.

Hannah Wang is Senior Digital Preservation Specialist at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is pleased to announce that we have a new blog: Fixity Check! Fixity Check will highlight digital preservation efforts at NARA, from updates to our Digital Preservation Framework, to file format deep dives, to interviews with staff across NARA. In addition to our dedicated digital preservation staff, NARA is fortunate to have experts in electronic records and digital preservation working across the agency, from records policy to archival processing – we are excited to share more information about the work that we do across NARA to ensure long-term preservation and access to our nation’s records.