Blog

Nathan Tallman is Chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Coordinating Committee

The NDSA held its 10th annual Digital Preservation conference on October 12-13 in Baltimore, Maryland, you can read some highlights from NDSA Leadership on the NDSA News blog. During the opening ceremony, while sharing my remarks as Chair, I mentioned that NDSA Leadership worked over the summer and fall to refresh our foundational strategy. What better day to talk about our refreshed strategy than World Digital Preservation Day!

Our mission statement now reflects that NDSA fosters and incubates communities of practice who advocate, support, and provide expertise in digital preservation through their work, to benefit practitioners, service providers, and memory organizations, as well as the creators, owners, and users of digital content. These changes reflect a more dynamic and engaged NDSA that supports the community in furthering our collective goals.

Ellie Burnage works for Exact Editions based in the UK

Exact Editions is thrilled to be celebrating World Digital Preservation Day once again this year alongside the community of data creator, curators and consumers. 

This theme of this year’s event, organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition, is ‘Data For All, For Good, Forever’. With that in mind, we are focussing on some of Exact Editions’ significant events over the past year that have enabled publishers and libraries to improve access to their digital resources both in terms of readership and longevity. 

This blog post was co-authored by Jess Farrell, Educopia and the BCC, and Sharon McMeekin, DPC.

Happy World Digital Preservation Day! 

Today, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the BitCurator Consortium (BCC) are excited to announce the transition of the BCC’s Python Study Groups pilot to a program and a new benefit for DPC and BCC members hosted by the DPC.

The BCC Python Study Groups were launched in 2021 by Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez, David Cirella, Jess Farrell, Shira Peltzman, Dorothy Waugh, and Sara Day Thomson in response to  a conversation at the 2020 BitCurator Users Forum. Their primary goal was to create a welcoming study space that focused specifically on the cultivation of Python skills in order to support library and archives’ tasks and workflows, empowering practitioners to use Python in their everyday work. Many of us have attempted to learn coding languages independently using online resources, and many have reported that a lack of confidence and time has often derailed these efforts. The BCC Python Study Groups aimed to help overcome these obstacles by building intentional space to learn from each other regardless of where we were starting from.

Janet Jennings is Digital Curation Lab Coordinator at the University of Salford in the UK

Tucked into a corner of the University of Salford’s MediaCity Campus, the Digital Curation Lab (DCL) houses an array of equipment which indices both nostalgia and possibility. Super 8 and 8mm projectors sit alongside reel-to-reel tape recorders, cassette decks, mini disc players and a copy stand, amongst an array of other devices. It is a space caught somewhere between the past and the future, providing opportunities for revealing hidden histories and creating digital treasure. I recently started my new role here and am excited and intrigued by the possibilities that lie ahead.

On this World Digital Preservation Day of 2022 I wanted to celebrate file format identification. It is a topic that is central to digital preservation ingest workflows and close to many of our hearts. We are so lucky within this community to have a number of different tools that can carry out and automate file format identification at scale, and of course the amazing resource that is PRONOM that underpins so many of those tools.

Leading up to World Digital Preservation Day I started thinking about what we would do if we didn't have those tools, and also what happens when we have to investigate and interpret each file individually. These thoughts were also triggered by a tweet from Helen Dafter of the Postal Museum about a double file extension that she had recently come across. It was great to see the file format enthusiasts of the digital preservation community piling in to try and help solve the mystery...!

The annual review of The Bitlist, the Global List of Digitally Endangered Species, has been a fixed point for World Digital Preservation Day since its inception.  This year's revisions are the work of a small task force and have been compiled and edited by Dr Amy Currie, general editor of the list.  The following excerpt, the Director's Introduction highlights the major trends and offers a call to action.  The full list can be found here: http://doi.org/10.7207/dpcbitlist-22 

The BitList 2022 is the third interim review of the list since its initial publication in 2017. It builds on the work of previous BitList juries, and in particular the comprehensive review in 2021.

The BitList 2022 offers a brief update and reflection on the state of the art since the last year. The list was assessed by a Taskforce on behalf of the DPC’s Advocacy and Community Engagement Sub-Committee which guides DPC’s advocacy work on behalf of the DPC’s global membership.  The Taskforce were briefed to identify and comment on trends towards increased or reduced risk against every entry on the list as published in 2021. There are no new entries to the list nor has the Taskforce substantially changed, rescoped or restructured entries in the 2021 BitList.

Johanna Gallego Gutiérrez is responsible for digital deposit for the Collection Development Group at Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

[la versión en español sigue]

The National Library of Colombia joins in the celebration of Digital Preservation around the world. This year one of the reflections is about what an image tells us about the story. An image can mean a lot or really nothing without a context, in a different year, country or culture.

Sally McInnes is Head of Unique and Contemporary Content Department at the National Library of Wales

Today is World Digital Preservation Day and an opportunity to highlight the work undertaken by the National Library of Wales to ensure that digital content is preserved for the future.  In order to raise general awareness of issues relating to enabling on-going access to  digital content, which affect personal as well as organisational data, I would like to introduce you to Wilf.

This blogpost has been written by St George’s, University of London (SGUL) Archivist Juulia Ahvensalmi, Research Data Support Manager Michelle Harricharan, and Records Manager Kirsten Hylan.

‘Data for All, For Good, Forever’ is the theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, demonstrating how digital preservation allows ‘digits to flourish’.  What an apt theme for a university that has been transforming health and medical care since 1733! Whether it is developing the earlier practices of variolation into vaccination (introduced by Edward Jenner in 1798) that eventually eradicated smallpox or transforming health practice though our pioneering work in infection and immunity, population health and molecular and clinical research, for St George’s data has always been for good, for all and, with proper care, forever. This post will consider how by preserving records and data regardless of format that are held in the archives and currently being developed by our staff, we are not only ensuring we maintain our history, but that St George’s continues to contribute to ground-breaking medical research by allowing digits to flourish.

Karin Haveman is Acting Manager Government Archives and Preservation at the Tasmanian Archives and Digitisation Services Coordinator

In February 2021, Libraries Tasmania launched the Preservation Digitisation Project – a major collaborative project that brings together Digitisation Services, System Support and Delivery, Government Archives, and the Community Archives teams. The aim of this project is to digitise our Tasmanian film, sound, and video collections for long-term preservation and to provide greater access to our collections for the public. Our priority is our magnetic tape collection which is at great risk of being lost forever if not digitised before 2025 (NFSA paper: Deadline 2025 | National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (nfsa.gov.au))