Blog

Michelle Donoghue is the Information Governance Manager at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. 

For the past four years, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has been working closely with colleagues from the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) to leverage good practice amongst the international digital preservation community, developing advice, guidance, and policy to support the NDA’s work in this vital area.

To mark the end of the project and share and celebrate the outcomes, we held a short internal event in March providing a summary of the challenges facing the NDA, and presenting the recommendations and outputs developed as a result of this collaborative work.

Whilst digital preservation isn’t yet a ‘solved problem’, we discussed how this project and the NDA have moved forward with tackling some of the key challenges of safeguarding future access to records that are essential to the UK’s nuclear industry and beyond.

Two of our major DPC resources - the Preservation Policy Toolkit and the Digipres Business Case Toolkit have just been significantly revised and relaunched, keyed in with our broader (re)launch of the DPC Australasia Office. In this blog post I'd like to give a few thoughts on sustainability of these (and other) DPC resources.

The digipres community does not have a great track record on sustaining its own digital outputs. The noughties were dominated by digital preservation projects with short term funding that churned out all sorts of resources, many of which have fallen by the wayside. I hold my hand up here and take some of the criticism as I worked on a number of those projects! At the same time I recognise that building in sustainability is not an easy thing to do. Short term funding focused on innovative R&D is by its very nature difficult to build in a way that will last. Ownership and responsibility is also a key challenge. Who will be the custodian over time and take the difficult decision to take down an old resource if it has genuinely become outdated or obsolete, or invest in the resource to bring it up to date?

In February 2023 I was invited to speak at a workshop organized by the AEOLIAN Network entitled ‘New Horizons in AI and Machine Learning’ Circumstances, including a postponement of the workshop on account of industrial action meant I was not able to attend and present in person. Therefore I have shared this text of my presentation for publication afterwards, with the consent of the organizers.

It’s time we built the basis for a new digital preservation. Emerging technologies, including AI, invite us to rethink what we have been taking for granted for too long.

This may sound like a dramatic development but to those familiar with both disciplines it’s probably a statement of the obvious. Artificial intelligence is, of course, the next big thing in computing: you cannot hide from the hype cycle. Also, AI has been the next big thing for at least four decades. So perhaps this time it will get over the inflated expectations and head for something productive and routine: perhaps it really is the next big thing.

Regardless of how the current headlines about AI pan out, we’ve also, already, and always been needing to imagine a new digital preservation.

Preoccupation (noun) - an idea or subject that someone thinks about most of the time (Cambridge Dictionary)

I guess this is a fair description of my relationship with digital preservation policies over the last week or so as we have been working on a revision of the DPC’s Digital Preservation Policy Toolkit.

What has been so good about having a bit of time to focus on this subject is the extent to which community resources and organizational policies already exist and can be easily located and accessed and more so the fact that many organizations have recently published new policy documents that we can look at for inspiration.

Adam Harwood is the Research Data & Digital Preservation Technologist at the University of Sussex Library.

We all know that there are some policies in our policy portfolio languishing in review limbo. To my surprise, I received an email from Jenny Mitcham at the DPC recently, pointing out that the review frequency of our digital preservation policy at the University of Sussex Library had been pretty constant over the last few years. Since 2020 our policy has been reviewed every year as planned. I didn’t realize we had been that consistent!

Trigger warning: This blog post addresses issues relating to mental health and sexual harassment

The DPC’s organizational motivations for carrying out the Digital Preservation Community Mental Health and Wellbeing Survey are mentioned in its introduction. However, as the member of staff leading on this work, I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about why it is important to me, personally. To share some experiences that I have had that have made awareness raising and good mental health important priorities for me.

In March 2023 I was invited to speak to the International Advisory Committee of the Memory of the World Program at the UNESCO Offices in Paris.  The text that follows is the text of my presentation which is published the following day and with the consent of the Committee.

Ladies, gentlemen and friends and colleagues: the memory of the world should be off limits for cyber-warfare.

Chris Knowles is Digital Archivist at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, UK. He recently participated in the DPC's Digital Preservation Workflow Webinars Series and has written up his presentation.

This blog hopes to demonstrate some simple digital archiving procedures that can be done with base Windows CLI utilities run from PowerShell, without needing additional 3^rd party software, and is aimed at archives with lower resources, or who are unable to use certain software due to institutional policies.

Laura Giles is the Academic and Library Specialist at the University of Hull.

Last November, I was asked to speak at the DPC Ram Jam about our approach at the University of Hull to the section C of the Rapid Assessment Model, which focuses on the Legal Basis.

Speakers who had undertaken multiple RAM assessments and who had moved their organisation from level 2 – Basic to level 3 – Managed in a section were asked to talk a little about their journey. What had changed, what steps had they taken and what might their plans be to move their organisation to the holy grail, level 4 – Optimized?

Louise Preston is a Project Officer at the National Archives of Australia. She attended FDO2022 with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Writing systems developed in Mesopotamia and other ancient societies to manage information because human memory simply could not store all information. It was a new and specialised field that began with only partial script. As writing and recording became more complex, the amount of information stored grew, becoming difficult to find and retrieve. Ancient scribes learnt to use catalogues, dictionaries, tables, forms and calendars to access and retrieve information (Harari, Yuval Noah, Sapiens, 2015).

Today, we are still grappling with how to manage and retrieve information but with the additional tier of machines to store our information. We have developed inexorably large repositories to store vast amounts of digital information kept in different formats in different systems. The 1st International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects (FDO2022), held from 26 to 28 October in Leiden, Netherlands, hosted by the Fair Digital Objects (FDO) Forum, focused on how to apply the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) guiding principles to managing that increased volume and complexity using computational systems. The principles, which apply to data, metadata and the infrastructures maintaining them, were developed in Leiden for the management and stewardship of scientific and scholarly data and published in 2016 (Wilkinson et al., 2016). An international set of principles, they do not prescribe any technology, standard or implementation method.