Blog

Last week was an exciting one for us, and action packed, I’ve only really had time to pause and reflect on our achievements now.

For those of you who missed it, the DPC was presented with the IRMS Innovation of the Year Award for the fantastic Digital Preservation Handbook!

Turning up for the awards, I was secretly hoping we’d win one of the three – yes three – awards we’d been nominated for, but didn’t expect it at all. Over our pre-dinner glass of fizz I even asked William in jest whether he had prepared ‘a few words’ – ha ha ha! But, having settled in for a fancy dinner and an evening’s entertainment, we were in fact back on our feet straight away to accept the first award!

Chris Loftus, Laura Peaurt, Jez Cope 

The University Library at the University of Sheffield is taking the leading role in supporting the active management and curation of research data within the institution. We have recently implemented a research data catalogue and repository, ORDA (Online Research Data, powered by Figshare for institutions). We have also begun safeguarding library collections and key administrative assets of the University using ArchiveUs, the Sheffield brand of Rosetta, a digital preservation platform from Ex Libris. We are now working with figshare and Ex Libris to integrate both services to provide seamless preservation of published research data across the research lifecycle.

In case you missed the excitement on Twitter, the Information and Records Management Society (IRMS) held their annual conference this week in Glasgow (very thoughtful of them to bring this powerhouse international conference right to DPC’s doorstep)!

Guest bloggers Dorothy Waugh (Emory University) and Shira Peltzman (UCLA) introduce us to the KryoFlux 

For those of us acquiring (or discovering) piles of floppy disks among our collections, the KryoFlux might just be a solution to our problems. Unlike modern USB floppy disk drives, this little floppy disk controller card can read and capture raw disk images of data stored using numerous disk encoding formats, including some that are especially early or unusual. What’s more, it handles media suffering from degradation or bitrot more effectively than most alternatives. Given these advantages, it’s not surprising that the KryoFlux is increasingly finding their way into archives and cultural heritage institutions.

And so the National Archives has been asked to blog about digital preservation. 

I guess this will be aspirational at best as I think of how we would like to be and where we are.  The National Archives has for the last while been endeavouring to develop a Public Service Records Management plan (PSRM) across the Irish civil service.  The plan is intended to progress the drafting and distribution of guidelines and information notes on how best to manage administrative records and to begin to address the myriad questions we receive on a weekly basis about email management, digital archiving, file naming, version control etc.

Over the last 18 months I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to reflect, research, and synthesise with colleagues, what we have learnt about costs and benefits from digital curation and preservation. The results are now published in a cost-benefit advocacy toolkit released by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA).

It was a small project focussed on the needs of social science data archives but much of what it has done will be of interest to anyone involved in digital preservation and repositories.

So what have we learnt over recent years, and to borrow from the title of this blog, are we there yet?

At first glance, the terms ‘social media’ and ‘long-term preservation’ do not seem to belong in the same sentence. The two terms are perhaps even incompatible, mutually exclusive, and contradictory.

On Sale at All Good Pharmacies: Eternal Life

There’s a paradox that links digital preservation with medicine. Digital preservation systems are subject to the same obsolescence that they exist to guard against: and even great doctors catch colds. I believe my doctor is mortal but that doesn’t mean I reject her advice. Her advice is not intrinsically dependent on her own experience but is situated within a global, dynamic community of research and practice. The medical profession deals with the problem of its own mortality by shifting the locus of their competence from the specific to the general. So, if mortality is to medicine what obsolescence is to digital preservation, and if really great doctors don’t have to prove themselves by living forever, what about digital preservation tools? What should we do about the problem of obsolescence? Should truly great digital preservation systems demonstrate their worth by living forever? What is the locus of their competence?

Last month I emailed William Kilbride at DPC with a query about file formats for quantitative data for long term preservation and, as a result of that email and the ensuing conversation, I appear to have agreed to write a blog post about the topic. Here is that blog post.

In his most recent blog post, William Kilbride reminded us that we in the digital preservation community “cannot make the case [for preservation] on our own terms. We need to make the case in terms that our audience understand” so that “preservation becomes an intrinsically achievable goal from the outset, not something we need to tack on at the end.”