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There are two months until our very first International Digital Preservation Day (IDPD17), and already there’s a fantastic buzz about it. People have been tweeting and emailing me since we first announced it, asking for ideas for things they could do to join in the celebrations, the fun, the party!

My favourite suggestion yet has been someone contemplating dressing up as a floppy disk at work for the day – please don’t let me stop you.

What’s great is, even aside from the dressing up, there are LOADS of ways to get involved. Whether you’re a tweeter, facebooker, instagrammer, blogger, vlogger, filmmaker extraordinaire…or you just like a good old-fashioned face to face chat with a bunch of likeminded folk, you can do any or all of those things.

The Twitter coverage of the 2017 PASIG Conference, held at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, 11th-13th September, was enthusiastic and comprehensive. Here Simon Whibley gathers together his own tweets, along with those of other conference participants, to provide an overview of the key issues raised during those 3 days in Oxford. Simon attended PASIG 2017 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by our Commericial Supporters.

Guest blogger Anna Perricci at Rhizome introduces us to the Webrecorder

In her recent post, Sara Day Thomson described how digital preservation can be a conversation stopper at parties and at passport control. I empathize though for me the puzzlement she describes is a real paradox: as our lives turn increasingly online so it seems obvious that some evidence of our collective neuroses, passions and creativities should be preserved.  Perhaps the web’s most astonishing feature is the speed at which it has become indispensable.  Yet as it becomes more crucial, so it grows in size; and as it grows so it becomes more complex: and so the tools necessary to manage and preserve those essential traces of our memory face a three-fold challenge of scale, complexity and expectation.

Enter Webrecorder: ‘web archiving for all!’  

For the past few years I’ve been working as Digital Archivist in Special Collections at the University of Leeds Library, and it’s been a slow and often frustrating shuffle toward a digital preservation ‘solution’ here while we try to balance that good old three legged stool of technology, organisation and resources mentioned by Sarah Mason in a previous post. I deal with literary archives and collections which are either entirely born-digital or hybrids of paper and digital, and our digital preservation workflow includes the use of both BitCurator and Archivematica.

One of the really nice things about working in digital preservation is the community’s friendly, open attitude. Practitioners regularly come together in formal and informal contexts – both invaluable – to share ideas, reflect on challenges, and learn from one another. It’s a testament to our collective benevolence that these gettogethers, often attended by colleagues from highly varied backgrounds and organisations, are consistently provide confidence and inspiration in what we do.

Such exchanges can work locally, too, and Edinburgh Preserves is one example of this; a local group that brings together a merry band of practitioners from across the greater Edinburgh area (and beyond!) who work in digital preservation, for informal discussion and networking.

It’s time to come clean: I no longer know what data is. I am looking pretty hard but I just can’t see it any more. It’s a troubling realisation for someone who has spent twenty years or so trying to preserve the stuff. But the most unsettling part is this: I don’t think it’s me who is lost. Don’t get me wrong, this is not some delayed attack of post-modern angst. I am just trying to get to the end of the day. Is it possible that, just as it was reaching a crescendo of profile, polemic and promise, data has vanished, like Bilbo Baggins on his eleventy-first birthday?

At a conference earlier this year, the topic of preserving artworks involving digital media had been a recurring topic of discussion during and after talks. One artist, who works extensively with software as a medium, was clearly a little baffled by this preoccupation. Having a background in software engineering, they were quick to point out that this domain has been dealing with these kinds of problem for decades! An interesting provocation - but how much truth is there to it? Can software engineering principles really help solve of our digital preservation woes? In this blog post I will consider what we might learn from the discipline and how such a meeting of practices might be navigated.

It’s entirely wrong, and it’s the road back to the cave. The way we got out of the caves and into modern civilisation is through the process of understanding and thinking. Those things were not done by gut instinct. -Professor Brian Cox

Chapter 1: Fluent in Eyebrow

In keeping with the last few blog posts by William Kilbride and Sarah Higgins, I am going to share my version of the proverbial experience of explaining information profession jobs to outsiders. In my case, a mildly awkward social interaction slightly intensified by my immigration status. For a year or so I waffled on how to describe my work to UK Border Control without arousing suspicion. Was that quizzical eyebrow code for: What kind of criminal can’t even explain her own job in fewer than 20 words?  

William Kilbride asked us earlier this week (Born in a Storm 18 July 2017) what digital preservation professionals say when people ask us what we do. Like him I usually try to go under the radar and say I teach at a University. If pushed I say I teach digital information management – it seems a little more understandable than digital curation. Mostly this is met by a polite silence and a change of subject. Sometimes it leads to a lively discussion – especially if I personalise the message – using their own digital photographs or online bank statements as an example of the types of digital information that needs managing. Sometimes people probe further and ask who wants to study digital information management.

In my last blog I briefly discussed how digital preservation came of age in turbulent times.  There was a lot going on in that post as I tried to make a link between economics and digital preservation, proposing a vital, necessary intervention that the digital preservation community should be making in some thorny but important matters of public policy. But it wasn’t an easy read.  Jenny Mitcham washed down an entire bowl of soup as I mangled three decades of economic history.  With all that going on I didn’t dare add a further digression about our values and how these have been affected by the way the digital preservation community has developed.  But I promised to return to the theme while the topic was still in my mind.