Blog

Delaney Sweep is Digital Preservation Technician at the University of Calgary. She attended the iPRES 2024 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

The iPRES 2024 session “Preserving Works of Art” highlighted the many challenges faced when preserving both physical and digital art. In this blog, I reflect on the papers presented.

Sean Macmillan is Digital Collections Manager at King's College London.

For anyone new to the world of digital preservation, or anyone not new to digital preservation but lives in a cave on Mars, iPRES is the world’s premier digital preservation conference.

From the 16^th to 20^th of September, people from all pockets of the globe arrived in the charming and poetic city of Ghent, with its winding canals, to attend this mammoth of a conference.

In many ways the canals of Ghent are a great analogy for Digital Preservation! The water is always flowing and changing, and yet the canals themselves are centuries old having endured for centuries. We have a similar challenge to ensure that the various streams of dynamic bits and tech remain for the future. 

Jesse Dyer is Digital Archivist at University of Melbourne Archives.

Monitoring the wide variety of formats in the University of Melbourne’s digital preservation repository, Preservica, is undertaken by the Digital Stewardship (Research) team. I recently had the opportunity to work with colleagues in this team on identifying file format signatures.

Identifying file formats by matching their signatures to those in the PRONOM registry is far more reliable than using the extension alone. Accurate identification not only facilitates preservation, it also informs our description of born-digital material at the University of Melbourne Archive.

By submitting any signatures we identify to the PRONOM registry, other collections and preservationists will likewise be able to benefit from our efforts and accurately identify the same types of files.

One file format in our collection that I found particularly interesting to investigate is ‘.oma’ which was used by Sony MiniDisc players.

Two examples of ‘.oma’ in our collection are from the born-digital audio recordings made by Germaine Greer. She made this field recording of bird song, and an interview recording about the Book of Psalms on MiniDisc.

Elizabeth Thompson-MacRae is Digital Archivist for the  University of St Andrews. She attended the NTTW8 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I'm writing this under a shaded tree in the grounds of the Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe (otherwise known as ZKM). It’s a beautiful, peaceful space, dispersed with planted green spaces, punctuated by outdoor sculpture. A world away from the site’s munition manufacturing past.

Walking around ZKM, I wonder if the munition workers could imagine the space in which it has become, an innovative centre for creativity, showcasing boundary pushing work to bring to life and preserve and provide access to audio visual (AV) media?

So here we are…the day after another amazing iPRES conference and I find myself running through my notes and trying to process the incredible amount of knowledge and experience that has been shared in such a short period.

iPRES was a virtual conference for me this year. I love this conference and most of all I love the face-to-face interactions with the digital preservation community, but it was hard to make the logistics work in order to attend in person this time around. Despite having a serious case of FOMO (especially when conference delegates headed off on a boat to the conference dinner) the virtual conference experience was a good one for me. I kind of got used to the 8:00am start (and the dog was very happy with the early pre-conference walks).

A second prototype service is now available from the Registries of Good Practice project, following on from the release of the Digital Preservation Publications Index in May. The Digital Preservation Workbench brings together a suite of different experimental interfaces and tools, aiming to help improve the practice of digital preservation and to understand what kinds of information systems we really need.

Rosie Dyson is the Digital Collections Officer at Leeds University Libraries and Galleries (Special Collections). She attended the ARA 2024 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I was delighted to receive a DPC Career Development Fund Grant to attend the ARA 2024 Conference in Birmingham, UK. As anticipated, it was an excellent opportunity for networking, knowledge-sharing and gaining fresh ideas and perspectives. In this blog, I reflect on my time at the conference and recount some of the top takeaways and practical solutions for reducing our digital carbon footprint.

Andy Jackson is a Preservation Registries Technical Architect at the Digital Preservation Coalition

The digital preservation community has known for many years that the volatile world of social media platforms represented a significant risk to digital history. It was added to the Bit List in 2019 and it hasn’t eased since. In truth, it’s worse now, because it’s no longer just about losing our content. It’s about losing our connections. Our communities.

The loss of the once-vibrant #DigiPres community on Twitter has been lamented loudly and widely. And as ‘X’ continues its indecent descent, the poor moderation and new barriers to access mean staying there seems increasingly untenable. Many digital preservation community members no longer feel welcome there, and a growing number of organisations are choosing to minimise their engagement on X or leave the platform altogether (like JISC).

Of course we’re on LinkedIn, Facebook & Instagram, which works fine for more official output. But it’s all a bit, you know, corporate. It doesn’t feel very #DigiPres. 

So where should we go?

Karyn Williamson is a Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition.

As some of you may already know, The National Archives UK has recently opened applications for a newly expanded Archives Revealed grant program. 

Although it has existed for a while, it has been significantly expanded with a new partnership between the National Archives, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Pilgrim Trust and the Wolfson Foundation. The program is dedicated to ‘unlocking archival collections’, making them accessible to researchers and the public. There are three distinct kinds of grants to meet different needs: Scoping Grants, Cataloguing Grants, and Consortium Grants.

Karyn Williamson is a Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition.

I was lucky enough to be asked to give the Keynote address at the Community Archives and Heritage Group (CAHG) Conference at University College London on the 10th of July 2024. I’ve been working on the Our Heritage Our Stories project since March and it’s given me the opportunity to work with a wide range of community archive groups and learn about what they need and the experiences they have had when contacting or working with established archives across our sector. This experience is what led to the thoughts and opinions in this blog, which are mine alone. I wanted to share this to encourage record keepers to think about their current practice when working with community groups and if this could be improved. This keynote has been slightly edited into this blog.