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Faye Lemay is Digital Preservation Manager at Library and Archives Canada

This is part 4 of a 4-part series on Digital Preservation at Library and Archives Canada. Part 1 addressed “Building the Momentum for Change”, Part 2 talked about “Learning from our past”, Part 3 dealt with the “Current state of digital preservation at Library and Archives Canada.”

Given the challenges we faced with obtaining organizational alignment of digital preservation as a core business line, we had to ask ourselves some tough questions about what was not working and why we kept hitting the same brick wall.  Experience taught us that technology was not the panacea, but constituted only one of several building blocks.      

The key questions we faced: 

1. How could we get the organization to recognize digital preservation as an operational imperative?
2. How could we generate the conditions to foster the development of digital preservation as a core business function?

Francielle Carpenedo is a PhD student at the Institute of Modern Languages Research/School of Advanced Study; affiliated with the AHRC’s OWRI ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community’ project.

I am a PhD student with a thing for communication. One of the things I am often intrigued about is how people communicate in connection to the contextual cues that shape the different ways language is used to get things done in their everyday lives. That goes from sending letters, talking on the phone, sending emails, recording voice messages on WhatsApp to using social media. I often find it fascinating how humans adapt and make use of the different tools available to them to communicate with each other. On that note, it is interesting to think about the transformations that take place within social media communication. As a student of digital communication, social media presents a rich environment to make sense of these processes, and of how different communities are making use of these tools in our society.

Sonia Ranade and Alec Mulinder work for the UK National Archives

Thanks to your posts on this blog over the last two years, we have a really good understanding of what digital preservation is: we’re on a mission to send messages to the future. And we want those messages to be faithfully transmitted, to retain their meaning and to be useful for generations to come.

That’s a tall order, but fortunately, the digital preservation community is here to help. Our models give us a common frame of reference. The DPC handbook provides a knowledge base distilled from our collective experience. We have standards and certification schemes to help us benchmark our progress. So, we’re good to go, right?

Last year on International Digital Preservation Day (as it was then called) I asked the question “What shall I do for International Digital Preservation Day?” In that blog post I talked about the blogging and tweeting I’d been doing at the Borthwick Institute and ended with “...and of course I now have a whole year to plan for International Digital Preservation Day 2018 so perhaps I'll be able to do something bigger and better?!”

A year passes very quickly and any ideas I had for World Digital Preservation Day 2018 had to be shelved when I accepted an exciting new role of Head of Good Practice and Standards at the Digital Preservation Coalition.

After a hectic few months winding down, tidying up and handing over at the Borthwick Institute for Archives I finally arrived at the DPC on the 20th November.

What a time to start!

Charles Miller is a former BBC documentary producer, currently working for a tech startup in London and studying for a Masters in History. Anchoring will be his second book.

In all discussions about digital preservation, there’s an impossible question to answer: how much should I keep? While institutions are limited by budgets and staff time, for individuals, it’s more personal. Decisions about deleting, and the very process of organising and preserving, bring out complicated emotions about family, nostalgia and sometimes grief.

It’s one of the issues I’m looking at in a book I’m writing about how the digital world has changed ideas about what we want to hang on to and how we can best do it.

Afterclap (n) – the last person who claps after everyone else has stopped.

It’s Friday, so it must be Schiphol Airport Amsterdam. Here’s me at the departure gate for the flight home after a day that has lasted almost 48 hours and has crammed in a year’s worth of digital preservation news. 

An airport lounge seems an appropriate place to reflect on World Digital Preservation Day.  It’s practically home: my work involves so many airport lounges that, rather being an honorary lecturer at Glasgow University, I should really be an honorary air-traffic controller at Glasgow Airport.  Schipol offers so many connections: in every one of them an emergent digital preservation need is arising, and in many an incipient digital preservation community is forming.  There’s also a lot of time dependencies at airports too, a lot of verification of identities and checking of manifests: a lot of strong metaphors for our daily work.  These challenge us to connect but remind us that if we hang about too long then our digital preservation work is going to become a lot harder and a lot more expensive.  As with aeroplanes, if you want digital preservation to be difficult and costly just ignore the repeated calls to get on board.

Faye Lemay is Digital Preservation Manager at Library and Archives Canada

This is part 3 of a 4-part series on Digital Preservation at Library and Archives Canada. Part 1 addressed “Building the Momentum for Change” and Part 2 talked about “Learning from our past”.

Although our recent efforts have been focussed on program development, the DP team has also sought to stabilize and grow its digital preservation infrastructure: specifically the LAC Digital Archive, which serves as the repository of preservation masters.

Caylin Smith is the Legal Deposit Libraries Senior Project Manager for the British Library

Earlier this month, the British Library hosted a workshop for the Legal Deposit Libraries’ Emerging Formats project. The purpose of the workshop was to engage stakeholders and look at some new approaches to address challenges the project has identified.

In this post, Caylin Smith, project manager for the Legal Deposit Libraries and a researcher on the Emerging Formats project, outlines the importance of Non-Print Legal Deposit in the UK, provides background information on the Emerging Formats project and in-scope content, as well as introduces the workshop.

Sara Day Thomson of the DPC then describes her experience of the workshop and how the Emerging Formats project reflects broader trends in digital preservation.

Sheila Morrissey is Senior Researcher at Ithaka S+R, based in New York

If there’s one thing digital preservationists understand, it’s the importance of continual investment in infrastructure.  That includes our own technical infrastructure – the systems we rely on to collect and manage and deliver digital objects over the very long term.

On the first World Digital Preservation Day, we were just at the mid-point of a two-year project to rebuild Portico’s technical preservation infrastructure, pretty much from the ground up.  At the end of September of this year, we closed out our “NextGen” project as scheduled. 

As we noted in last year’s WDPD day of blogging, a big motivation for our “gut rehab” project was the need to grapple with issues of scale – with geometric growth across pretty nearly every measure of content streaming into the Portico archive:

Nancy McGovern is Director of Digital Preservation at MIT Libraries

I love what I do! My role combines research, instruction, and practice and has since I started at Cornell as the Digital Preservation Officer in 2006 - that means by design I never have to stop doing what I am doing to work on what I want to do, which is amazing.