News

The DPC has released a Member Preview of the next in its new series of Technology Watch Guidance Note on Preserving Software: Motivations, Challenges and Approaches  by Sheila Morrissey today.

Preserving Software: Motivations, Challenges and Approaches identifies good reasons for preserving software, as well as a range of different challenges which may be encountered in doing so, from technical and curatorial to legal, before setting out practical approaches and case study evidence for tackling each.

More and more diverse digital material is pouring into the archives of heritage institutions, often also in large amounts. This makes automatic processing necessary. Which preservation tools are used by the digital heritage institutions? Ania Molenda, project leader of the Preservation Tools project at the Dutch Digital Heritage Network, asks this and other questions to the heritage field. She incorporated the results of her research in a report The Use of Preservation Tools among Dutch Heritage Organizations.

A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph, published on Friday 24th July 2020

Dear Editor,

In the House of Commons on Wednesday 15 July, the Prime Minister committed the UK government to an independent inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic.  As he stated, this will require “huge amounts of official time” as we seek to learn the lessons of the pandemic.  

Both this inquiry, and any future research into the pandemic, will require significant amounts of evidence.  This evidence will not be captured on paper but almost entirely as digital records: email, text messages, recordings, data sets and documents sitting on thousands of servers, with long chains of dependence upon platforms, interfaces, and applications.  These records will have been created by politicians and their staff, by government officials, advisors, and by a host of individuals outside of government, including private contractors.

The DPC is deepening its commitment to help members in a time of crisis.

From 1^st August 2020, the DPC is launching a new support program in anticipation of the economic pressures that members are likely to face from the global COVID-19 pandemic.

As we have moved through the phases of COVID-19 pandemic, the DPC has responded swiftly and thoughtfully at each step: closing our offices before the lockdown began, moving all our operations online, launching a wealth of new resources, and opening up a new series of activities for members and partners around the Globe.  We have delivered – and in many ways exceeded - the commitment that we made that our members would leave the lockdown better connected and better skilled.  The DPC community is much greater than the sum of its parts, and members contribute much more than money to the cause.

Almost all heritage institutions have them: CDs, DVDs and floppy discs bearing digital heritage. Unfortunately, at about 40% of the Dutch heritage institutions this material is in danger of being lost, according to a recently published study by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (DDHN). That is … if no action is taken now.

"The information on these CDs and other so-called physical carriers belongs to collections and should therefore be permanently accessible," says Niels Komen, project leader of the DDHN project Endangered Digital Heritage on Portable Media. This spring, his project group conducted research among 150 Dutch heritage institutions.

Niels: "We saw that many heritage institutions don’t really know what to do with floppy disks, CD-ROMs or a hard disk. Sometimes because there is no equipment available to read them, sometimes because the carrier has been damaged over the years. But if action is not taken in time, in many cases the content of the carrier will be lost forever."