Blog

Fran Horner is an Archivist at the University of Sheffield.

This World Digital Preservation Day, I would like to highlight and celebrate the digital preservation communities I am part of and find extremely valuable.

I am an Archivist at the University of Sheffield Library Special Collections, Heritage and Archives and digital preservation falls under my remit. The university is part of the White Rose Libraries (WRL) partnership which was established in 2004 and brings together the university libraries of Sheffield, Leeds and York in the UK to collaborate in various different ways.

Isobel Reed is SCRAN Digital Archive Officer for HES (Historic Environment Scotland) 

What is SCRAN?

The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network, or SCRAN, first went online on 25^th July 1997. It contains over 460,000 digital resources including images, audio-visual material, text documents, and even 3D scans. These resources are drawn together from collections held by museums, galleries, archives, the media, community projects, and individuals who represent Scotland’s shared culture and heritage.

During its first five years, SCRAN provided multiple grants that allowed cultural organisations to digitise parts of their collections to be made available for educational purposes, and it was one of the largest educational online services in the UK. It was used by thousands of schools, libraries, colleges, and universities as an educational resource, and allowed educators to create and share material such as lesson plans and presentations (here’s one fun example – ‘Nursery Rhymes Collection’).

Paul Stokes is Jisc - Subject Matter Expert (Digital Preservation), Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition; Chair of the DPC Advocacy and community engagement committee; Director of the Open Preservation Foundation; Director of OPF NL.

Keep reading .....

Gareth Cole is Open Research Development and Discovery Lead at Loughborough University

Last year, my colleague, Dr Miranda Barnes, wrote about the work we’ve been conducting as part of the Open Book Futures Project. This blog post aims to update on that work and highlight where we’ve made advances and to reinforce how it could not have been achieved without a community effort within, and outside, the team. As Miranda highlighted, Community is key to the project and, in fact, is the heartbeat of the project.

Our work package is looking at the archiving and preservation of open access books. As with all projects we have regular meetings! The broad community the project has brought together with experts and specialists across a number of organisations and disciplines means that we are able to consider a variety of perspectives when conducting our work. Work Package participants include colleagues from Jisc, the British Library, the DPC itself, metadata specialists, publishers, IT developers, researchers, and university open research librarians. This community reflects the wider project which actually has two PIs, one an academic and one a University Librarian.

Hervé L’Hours, Repository & Preservation, UK Data Service, UK Data Archive, University of Essex, in collaboration with the CoreTrustSeal Standards & Certification Board.

 This post is a collaboration between the UK Data Service^[1] and the CoreTrustSeal^[2] for World Digital Preservation Day^[3].

In 2024, a CoreTrustSeal board position paper defined a set of curation and preservation levels^[4] that organisations can use to document how they care for digital objects. The levels range from simple storage of objects that are distributed as they were deposited, to the long-term responsibility for reuse of the data and metadata, including making changes based on the needs of the repository’s user community. The levels help define whether a repository provides active long term preservation, necessary to be in scope for CoreTrustSeal certification. However, the levels have wider relevance to defining a range of data and metadata services and responsibilities.

Amy Baker is Digital Preservation Assistant at Historic England

This year World Digital Preservation Day coincides with another major project for Historic England: the release of the Heritage at Risk Register for 2024, coming late November. As a result, it has been a busy time for the digital preservation team here at Historic England, and so felt like a perfect time to not only celebrate #WDPD2024 but also bring attention to the importance of digital preservation within projects like Heritage at Risk.

Each year Historic England releases a Heritage at Risk Register. This is where vulnerable listed heritage sites are assembled into one register to draw attention to the most at need for safeguarding for the future. By communicating the condition of built heritage, it aims to connect communities to their local heritage to encourage positive development. The 2023 figures state that while there were 159 additions to the At Risk Register, there were also 203 removal for positive reasons. For more information on the Register please visit here.

Simon Wilson is Archives Consultant and DPC Supporter

Background

In August 2023 the City of Doncaster Archives was awarded funding under The National Archives Resilience grant programme. I was brought-in to deliver the project working closely with the Council’s archives and records management colleagues. The project has two distinct strands – to develop a business case for digital preservation to secure, preserve and manage the Council’s born-digital records and this work is still in-progress. The second strand, and the focus of this blog, sought to engage professional heritage communities to increase awareness and confidence with the practical side of digital preservation.

Justine Provino just completed a PhD in English at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Leontien Talboom is a technical analyst at Cambridge University Libraries

This blog post highlights the collaboration between the Cambridge University Library (CUL) Transfer Service and a PhD research project on Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992). The joint work of the writer William Gibson, the artist Dennis Ashbaugh and the publisher Kevin Begos Jr, Agrippa is an artist’s book made to self-destruct both in analogue – with disappearing images by Ashbaugh – and in digital – with a poem by Gibson located on a floppy disk only readable once. This post focuses on the access to the digital element of Agrippa, Gibson’s poem on a floppy disk, and it brings to the fore a case study of the multiple uses that can be made of disk images, in libraries.

One of my favourite parts of the Digital Preservation Workbench we launched at iPRES 2024 is the 'Format Diversity Estimation'. It's based on the realisation that we could apply approaches from the study of ecological species diversity to the digital format ecosystem, and use them to estimate how many formats are out there awaiting analysis. This matters because identifying the format of digital resources a crucial step towards understanding the information and software dependencies we need in order to make future access possible.

This game and blog has been created by: Susanne van den Eijkel, Anton van Es, Francesca Mackenzie, Sharon McMeekin, Elaine Murray, Ellie O’Leary, and Lotte Wijsman.

Proudly presenting the game FILE FORMAT FLING, a game quite unlike any other digital preservation game out there. Is it needed? Almost definitely not! Is it educational? A bit! Does it bring something new and different to the pantheon of games that you haven’t seen before? Almost definitely and it  is probably fun too!

In this blog post, you’ll unzip the story behind the game: why we created it, the challenges we encountered, and—most importantly—where you can play your heart out.