Blog

Peter Chan is the web archivist at Stanford University Libraries. He served as the project manager for the ePADD initiative from 2012-2019. 

This blog was created with the assistance of ChatGPT.

Introduction

Email archives are a valuable resource for individuals and organizations alike. They contain a wealth of information and insights that can be harnessed for various purposes. However, navigating through extensive email archives can be a daunting task. In this article, we will explore three effective ways to unlock the potential of email archives: search, browse, and question and answer.

This blog was co-written by Svenia Pohlkamp (German National Library (Frankfurt)), Yvonne Tunnat (Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (Kiel)) and Monika Zarnitz (Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (Kiel)), members of nestor, an Allied Organisation of the DPC.

One thing we have learned during the pandemic: We can do lots of things online. At the height of the pandemic, nestor has moved its services to online meetings and to the wiki to keep in touch with its members. Thus, nestor managed to keep involved in the development of current best practices in digital preservation (DP):

nestor is the cooperation network for Digital Preservation. nestor supports knowledge transfer and therefore all institutions dealing with DP.

Bryony Hooper is the Digital Preservation Manager at the University of Sheffield

At the University of Sheffield, we have established a Digital Preservation Advisory Group (DPAG) which is composed of staff across the University who provide support and oversight for the coordination of our Digital Preservation activities. We meet periodically and make recommendations for the University’s Digital Preservation Service, including policy and strategic planning, as well as the development of resources needed to fulfil our mission. That mission is that the Digital Preservation Service seeks to facilitate the long-term discovery of, and access to, key information assets of the University. The University aims to embed good practice in digital preservation throughout the organization to enable new opportunities, while safeguarding institutional and cultural memory.

Our second DPC Reading Club was held last month and focused on an article by Monique Lassere and Jess M. Whyte called “Balancing Care and Authenticity in Digital Collections: A Radical Empathy Approach to Working with Disk Images” (available at https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.125)

This paper was a great follow on from our reading from Thorsten Ries last time as it looked at the topic of digital forensics from a different angle, suggesting a ‘radical empathy’ approach to tackling disk images.

We had another great session, with lots of interesting discussion arising from the article.

Liz Long is Assistant Director DAIR (Digital Archives Innovation and Research) at The National Archives of Australia. She recently attended the AMaGA 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

As a DPC grant recipient, I attended the Australian Museum and Gallery Association’s (AMaGA) conference in Newcastle from 16-19 May 2023. The theme, Discomfort: Brave conversations and new connections in changing environments, was largely explored via two key concepts of rapid technological and socio-cultural change in GLAM institutions. The two main themes of digital disruption and listening to marginalised voices made for a rich program that left me inspired rather than overwhelmed or weighed down by the all-too-common guilt that is felt by cultural heritage workers around our institutions’ past links with colonialism.

Bridie-Ann Carr is the Records and Information Manager at Imperial War Museums. She recently attended the IRMS 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

In mid-May I attended the IRMS Conference with support from the Career Development Fund. This year’s theme was ‘Embracing a New Information Generation’, which felt like a perfect fit, as I am new professional working with electronic records. I have wanted to attend a conference since qualifying as a Records Manager and set myself the aim to come back to IWM with new skills and knowledge I could immediately apply to my work. I also wanted to meet as many people as I could from across our sector. Covid moved many events on online and I feel like I have missed out on learning from others over a cup of tea and a biscuit!

John Dewees is the Digital Asset Management Lead at the University of Rochester and Pauline Schwartzman is the Digital Asset Management Analyst at the University of Rochester.

In this blog post, John Dewees and Pauline Schwartzman write about their experiences using The DPC’s Digital Preservation Competency Framework at the University of Rochester Libraries (URL).

The #DPClinic at the end of May, took the form of a “watch party” on the theme of database preservation. Peter Francis, Manager, Standards and Policy at PROV (Public Record Office Victoria), recently gave a presentation at an online event in Australasia, where he described using the SIARD Suite (Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases) tools to convert and store database content. At the watch party, highlights from a recording of Peter’s presentation were shared with approximately 25 attendees, drawn from Europe and US.

I was honoured to give a keynote lecture at the start of the FIAT/ IFTA’s Media Management Seminar in May 2023. The text below is a slightly adapted version of the talk which was also recorded and will be made available in due course.

It’s wonderful to be with you here in Dublin today and to meet as many friends and colleagues again after so long: this event hasn’t happened in person since 2019 and so it’s a privilege to be invited to be the opening keynote in a face to face meeting. My colleagues discourage me from making jokes on Zoom because they say I am not remotely funny.

I’ve been asked to talk around the theme of ‘Sustainability’. It’s a very big topic as the word is saturated with meanings and over-used. I am going to develop three related themes around the topic of sustainability: economy, environment and people. I’ll need to set the scene a little before I get there too. It’s an important and overdue conversation.

The climate crisis is not coming. The climate crisis is here. 

As we invite new nominations to the Bit List, we have invited DPC Members who have used this resource in support of their own advocacy work to share how they did it and what the results have been. 

Audrey Wilson is Partnerships and Engagement Manager for Scottish Council on Archives and starts us off on this series of 'Byte-sized Bit List' blogposts...

For the iPres Conference in 2022 we used the Bit List for the basis of a poster which set out the key issues surrounding Community Archives and invited contributions from digital preservation professionals to explore ways of helping community groups with their digital requirements.