The 2nd UK AtoM user group meeting

I was pleased to be able to host the second meeting of the UK AtoM user group here in York at the end of last week. AtoM (or Access to Memory) is the Archival Management System that we use here at the Borthwick Institute and it seems to be increasing in popularity across the UK.

We had 18 attendees from across England, Scotland and Wales representing both archives and service providers. It was great to see several new faces and meet people at different stages of their AtoM implementation.

We started off with introductions and everyone had the chance to mention one recent AtoM triumph and one current problem or challenge. A good way to start the conversation and perhaps a way of considering future development opportunities and topics for future meetings.

Here is a selection of the successes that were mentioned:

• Establishing a search facility that searches across two AtoM instances
• Getting senior management to agree to establishing AtoM
• Getting AtoM up and running
• Finally having an online catalogue
• Working with authority records in AtoM
• Working with other contributors and getting their records displaying on AtoM
• Using the API to drive another website
• Upgrading to version 2.4
• Importing legacy EAD into AtoM
• Uploading finding aids into AtoM 2.4
• Adding 1000+ urls to digital resources into AtoM using a set of SQL update statements

...and here are some of the current challenges or problems users are trying to solve:

• How to bar code boxes - can this be linked to AtoM?
• Moving from CALM to AtoM
• Not being able to see the record you want to link to when trying to select related records
• Using the API to move things into an online showcase
• Advocacy for taking the open source approach
• Working out where to start and how best to use AtoM
• Sharing data with the Archives Hub
• How to record objects alongside archives
• Issues with harvesting EAD via OAI-PMH
• Building up the right level of expertise to be able to contribute code back to AtoM
• Working out what to do when AtoM stops working
• Discovering that AtoM doesn't enforce uniqueness in identifiers for archival descriptions

After some discussion about some of the issues that had been raised, Louise Hughes from the University of Gloucestershire showed us her catalogue and talked us through some of the decisions they had made as they set this up. 

The University of Gloucestershire's AtoM instance

She praised the digital object functionality and has been using this to add images and audio to the archival descriptions. She was also really happy with the authority records, in particular, being able to view a person and easily see which archives relate to them. She discussed ongoing work to enable records from AtoM to be picked up and displayed within the library catalogue. She hasn't yet started to use AtoM for accessioning but hopes to do so in the future. Adopting all the functionality available within AtoM needs time and thought and tackling it one step at a time (particularly if you are a lone archivist) makes a lot of sense.

Tracy Deakin from St John's College, Cambridge talked us through some recent work to establish a shared search page for their two institutional AtoM instances. One holds the catalogue of the college archives and the other is for the Special Collections Library. They had taken the decision to implement two separate instances of AtoM as they required separate front pages and the ability to manage the editing rights separately. However, as some researchers will find it helpful to search across both instances a search page has been developed that accesses the Elasticsearch index of each site in order to cross search.

The interface for a shared search across St John's College AtoM sites

Vicky Phillips from the National Library of Wales talked us through their processes for upgrading their AtoM instance to version 2.4 and discussed some of the benefits of moving to 2.4. They are really happy to have the full width treeview and the drag and drop functionality within it.

The upgrade has not been without it's challenges though. They have had to sort out some issues with invalid slugs, ongoing issues due to the size of some of their archives (they think the XML caching functionality will help with this) and sometimes find that MySQL gets overwhelmed with the number of queries and needs a restart. They still have some testing to do around bilingual finding aids and have also been working on testing out the new functionality around OAI PMH harvesting of EAD.

Following on from this I gave a presentation on upgrading AtoM to 2.4 at the Borthwick Institute. We are not quite there yet but I talked about the upgrade plan and process and some decisions we have made along the way. I won't say any more for the time being as I think this will be the subject of a future blog post.

Before lunch my colleague Charles Fonge introduced VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) to the group. This initiative will enable Authority Records created by different organisations across the world to be linked together more effectively. Several institutions may create an authority record about the same individual and currently it is difficult to allow these to be linked together when data is aggregated by services such as The Archives Hub. It is worth thinking about how we might use VIAF in an AtoM context. At the moment there is no place to store a VIAF ID in AtoM and it was agreed this would be a useful development for the future.

After lunch Justine Taylor from the Honourable Artillery Company introduced us to the topic of back up and disaster recovery of AtoM. She gave the group some useful food for thought, covering techniques and the types of data that would need to be included (hint: it's not solely about the database). This was particularly useful for those working in small institutions who don't have an IT department that just does all this for them as a matter of course. Some useful and relevant information on this subject can be found in the AtoM documentation.

Max Communications are a company who provide services around AtoM. They talked through some of their work with institutions and what services they can offer.  As well as being able to provide hosting and support for AtoM in the UK, they can also help with data migration from other archival management systems (such as CALM). They demonstrated their crosswalker tool that allows archivists to map structured data to ISAD(G) before import to AtoM.

They showed us an AtoM theme they had developed to allow Vimeo videos to be embedded and accessible to users. Although AtoM does have support for video, the files can be very large in size and there are large overheads involved in running a video server if substantial quantities are involved. Keeping the video outside of AtoM and managing the permissions through Vimeo provided a good solution for one of their clients.

They also demonstrated an AtoM plugin they had developed for Wordpress. Though they are big fans of AtoM, they pointed out that it is not the best platform for creating interesting narratives around archives. They were keen to be able to create stories about archives by pulling in data from AtoM where appropriate.

At the end of the meeting Dan Gillean from Artefactual Systems updated us (via Skype) about the latest AtoM developments. It was really interesting to hear about the new features that will be in version 2.5. Note, that none of this is ever a secret - Artefactual make their road map and release notes publicly available on their wiki - however it is still helpful to hear it enthusiastically described.

The group was really pleased to hear about the forthcoming audit logging feature, the clever new functionality around calculating creation dates, and the ability for users to save their clipboard across sessions (and share them with the searchroom when they want to access the items). Thanks to those organisations that are funding this exciting new functionality. Also worth a mention is the slightly less sexy, but very valuable work that Artefactual is doing behind the scenes to upgrade Elasticsearch.

Another very useful meeting and my thanks go to all who contributed. It is certainly encouraging to see the thriving and collaborative AtoM community we have here in the UK.

Our next meeting will be in London in the autumn.

Back to the classroom - the Domesday project

Yesterday I was invited to speak to a local primary school about my job. The purpose of the event was to inspire kids to work in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) and I was faced with an audience of 10 and 11 year old girls.

One member of the audience (my daughter) informed me that many of the girls were only there because they had been bribed with cake.

This could be a tough gig!

On a serious note, there is a huge gender imbalance in STEM careers with women only making up 23% of the workforce in core STEM occupations. In talking to the STEM ambassador who was at this event, it was apparent that recruitment in engineering is quite hard, with not enough boys OR girls choosing to work in this area. This is also true in my area of work and is one of the reasons we are involved in the "Bridging the Digital Gap" project led by The National Archives. They note in a blog post about the project that:

"Digital skills are vital to the future of the archives sector ...... if archives are going to keep up with the pace of change, they need to attract members of the workforce who are confident in using digital technology, who not only can use digital tools, but who are also excited and curious about the opportunities and challenges it affords."

So why not try and catch them really young and get kids interested in our profession?

There were a few professionals speaking at the event and subjects were varied and interesting. We heard from someone who designed software for cars (who knew how many different computers are in a modern car?), someone who had to calculate exact mixes of seed to plant in Sites of Special Scientific Interest in order to encourage the right wild birds to nest there, a scientist who tested gelatin in sweets to find out what animal it was made from, an engineer who uses poo to heat houses....I had some pretty serious competition!

I only had a few minutes to speak so my challenge was to try and make digital preservation accessible, interesting and relevant in a short space of time. You could say that this was a bit of an elevator pitch to school kids.

Once I got thinking about this I had several ideas of different angles I could take.

I started off looking at the Mount School Archive that is held at the Borthwick. This is not a digital archive but was a good introduction to what archives are all about and why they are interesting and important. Up until 1948 the girls at this school created their own school magazine that is beautifully illustrated and gives a fascinating insight into what life was like at the school. I wanted to compare this with how schools communicate and disseminate information today and discuss some of the issues with preserving this more modern media (websites, twitter feeds, newsletters sent to parents via email).

Several powerpoint slides down the line I realised that this was not going to be short and snappy enough.

I decided to change my plans completely and talk about something that they may already know about, the Domesday Book.

I began by asking them if they had heard of the Domesday Book. Many of them had. I asked what they knew about it. They thought it was from 1066 (not far off!), someone knew that it had something to do with William the Conqueror, they guessed it was made of parchment (and they knew that parchment was made of animal skin). They were less certain of what it was actually for. I filled in the gaps for them.

I asked them whether they thought this book (that was over 900 years old) could still be accessed today and they weren't so sure about this. I was able to tell them that it is being well looked after by The National Archives and can still be accessed in a variety of ways. The main barrier to understanding the information is that it is written in Latin.

I talked about what the Domesday Book tells us about our local area. A search on Open Domesday tells us that Clifton only had 12 households in 1086. Quite different from today!

We then moved forward in time, to a period of history known as 'The 1980's' (a period that the children had recently been studying at school - now that makes me feel old!). I introduced them to the BBC Domesday Project of 1986. Without a doubt one of digital preservation's favourite case studies!

I explained how school children and communities were encouraged to submit information about their local areas. They were asked to include details of everyday life and anything they thought might be of interest to people 1000 years from then. People took photographs and wrote information about their lives and their local area. The data was saved on to floppy disks (what are they?) and posted to the BBC (this was before email became widely available). The BBC collated all the information on to laser disc (something that looks a bit like a CD but with a diameter of about 30cm).

I asked the children to consider the fact that the 900 year old Domesday Book is still accessible and  think about whether the 30 year old BBC Domesday Project discs were equally accessible. In discussion this gave me the opportunity to finally mention what digital archivists do and why it is such a necessary and interesting job. I didn't go into much technical detail but all credit to the folks who actually rescued the Domesday Project data. There is lots more information here.

Using the Domesday Reloaded website I was then able to show them what information is recorded about their local area from 1986. There was a picture of houses being built, and narratives about how a nearby lake was created. There were pieces written by a local school child and a teacher describing their typical day. I showed them a piece that was written about 'Children's Crazes' which concluded with:

" Another new activity is break-dancing
 There is a place in York where you can
 learn how to break-dance. Break     
 dancing means moving and spinning on 
 the floor using hands and body. Body-
 popping is another dance craze where 
 the dancer moves like a robot."


Disappointingly the presentation didn't entirely go to plan - my powerpoint only partially worked and the majority of my carefully selected graphics didn't display.

A very broken powerpoint presentation

There was thus a certain amount of 'winging it'!

This did however allow me to make the point that working with technology can be challenging as well as perhaps frustrating and exciting in equal measure!

Digital preservation begins at home

A couple of things happened recently to remind me of the fact that I sometimes need to step out of my little bubble of digital preservation expertise.

It is a bubble in which I assume that everyone knows what language I'm speaking, in which everyone knows how important it is to back up your data, knows where their digital assets are stored, how big they might be and even what file formats they hold.

But in order to communicate with donors and depositors I need to move outside that bubble otherwise opportunities may be missed.

A disaster story

Firstly a relative of mine lost their laptop...along with all their digital photographs, documents etc.

I won't tell you who they are or how they lost it for fear of embarrassing them...

It wasn’t backed up...or at least not in a consistent way.

How can this have happened?

I am such a vocal advocate of digital preservation and do try and communicate outside my echo chamber (see for example my blog for International Digital Preservation Day "Save your digital stuff!") but perhaps I should take this message closer to home.

Lesson #1:

Digital preservation advocacy should definitely begin at home

When a back up is not a back up...

In a slightly delayed response to this sad event I resolved to help another family member ensure that their data was 'safe'. I was directed to their computer and a portable hard drive that is used as their back up. They confessed that they didn’t back up their digital photographs very often...and couldn’t remember the last time they had actually done so.

I asked where their files were stored on the computer and they didn’t know (well at least, they couldn’t explain it to me verbally).

They could however show me how they get to them, so from that point I could work it out. Essentially everything was in ‘My Documents’ or ‘My Pictures’.

Lesson #2:

Don’t assume anything. Just because someone uses a computer regularly it doesn’t mean they know where they put things.

Having looked firstly at what was on the computer and then what was on the hard drive it became apparent that the hard drive was not actually a ‘back up’ of the PC at all, but contained copies of data from a previous PC.

Nothing on the current PC was backed up and nothing on the hard drive was backed up.

There were however multiple copies of the same thing on the portable hard drive. I guess some people might consider that a back up of sorts but certainly not a very robust one.

So I spent a bit of time ensuring that there were 2 copies of everything (one on the PC and one on the portable hard drive) and promised to come back and do it again in a few months time.

Lesson #3:

Just because someone says they have 'a back up' it does not mean it actually is a back up.

Talking to donors and depositors

All of this made me re-evaluate my communication with potential donors and depositors.

Not everyone is confident in communicating about digital archives. Not everyone speaks the same language or uses the same words to mean the same thing.

In a recent example of this, someone who was discussing the transfer of a digital archive to the Borthwick talked about a 'database'. I prepared myself to receive a set of related tables of structured data alongside accompanying documentation to describe field names and table relationships, however, as the conversation evolved it became apparent that there was actually no database at all. The term database had simply been used to describe a collection of unstructured documents and images.

I'm taking this as a timely reminder that I should try and leave my assumptions behind me when communicating about digital archives or digital housekeeping practices from this point forth.

Feel the love for digital archives!

Yesterday was Valentine's Day.

I spent most of the day at work thinking about advocacy for digital preservation. I've been pretty quiet this month, beavering away at a document that I hope might help persuade senior management that digital preservation matters. That digital archives are important. That despite their many flaws and problems, we should look after them as best we can.

Yesterday I also read an inspiring blog post by William Kilbride: A foot in the door is worth two on the desk. So many helpful messages around digital preservation advocacy in here but what really stuck with me was this:

"Digital preservation is not about data loss, it’s about coming good on the digital promise. It’s not about the digital dark age, it’s about a better digital future."

Perhaps we should stop focusing on how flawed and fragile and vulnerable digital archives are, but instead celebrate all that is good about them! Let's feel the love for digital archives!

So whilst cycling home (in the rain) I started thinking about Valentine's cards that celebrate digital archives. Then with a glass of bubbly in one hand and a pen in the other I sketched out some ideas.

Let's celebrate that obsolete media that is still in good working
order (against all odds)

Even file migration can be romantic..

A card to celebrate all that is great about Broadcast
WAV format

Everybody loves a well-formed XML file

I couldn't resist creating one for all you PREMIS fans out there

I was also inspired by a Library of Congress blog post by Abbie Grotke that I keep going back to: Dear Husband: I’m So Sorry for Your Data Loss. I've used these fabulous 'data loss' cards several times over the years to help illustrate the point that we need to look after our digital stuff.



I'm happy for you to use these images if you think they might help with your own digital preservation advocacy. An acknowledgement is always appreciated!

I don't think I'll give up my day job just yet though...

Best get back to the more serious advocacy work I have to do today.

New year, new tool - TeraCopy

For various reasons I'm not going to start 2018 with an ambitious to do list as I did in 2017 ...I've still got to do much of what I said I was going to do in 2017 and my desk needs another tidy!

In 2017 I struggled to make as much progress as I would have liked - that old problem of having too much to do and simply not enough hours in the day.

So it seems like a good idea to blog about a new tool I have just adopted this week to help me use the limited amount of time I've got more effectively!

The latest batch of material I've been given to ingest into the digital archive consists of 34 CD-ROMs and I've realised that my current ingest procedures were not as efficient as they could be. Virus checking, copying files over from 1 CD and then verifying the checksums is not very time consuming, but when you have to do this 34 times, you do start to wonder whether your processes could be improved!

In my previous ingest processes, copying files and then verifying checksums had been a two stage process. I would copy files over using Windows Explorer and then use FolderMatch to confirm (using checksums) that my copy was identical to the original.

But why use a two stage process when you can do it in one go?

The dialog that pops up when you copy

I'd seen TeraCopy last year whilst visiting The British Library (thanks Simon!) so decided to give it a go. It is a free file transfer utility with a focus on data integrity.

So, I've installed it on my PC. Now, whenever I try and copy anything in Windows it pops up and asks me whether I want to use TeraCopy to make my copy.

One of the nice things about this is that this will also pop up when you accidentally click and drop a directory into another directory in Windows Explorer (who hasn't done that at least once?) and gives you the opportunity to cancel the operation.

When you copy with TeraCopy it doesn't just copy the files for you, but also creates checksums as it goes along and then at the end of the process verifies that the checksums are the same as they were originally. Nice! You need to tweak the settings a little to get this to work.

TeraCopy busy copying some files for me and creating checksums as it goes

When copying and verifying is complete it tells you how many files it has
verified and shows matching checksums for both copies - job done!

So, this has made the task of copying data from 34 CDs into the digital archive a little bit less painful and has made my digital ingest process a little bit more efficient.

...and that from my perspective is a pretty good start to 2018!

How would you change Archivematica's Format Policy Registry?

A train trip through snowy Shropshire to get to Aberystwyth

This week the UK Archivematica user group fought through the snow and braved the winds and driving rain to meet at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

This was the first time the group had visited Wales and we celebrated with a night out at a lovely restaurant on the evening before our meeting. Our visit also coincided with the National Library cafe’s Christmas menu so we were treated to a generous Christmas lunch (and crackers) at lunch time. Thanks NLW!

As usual the meeting covered an interesting range of projects and perspectives from Archivematica users in the UK and beyond. As usual there was too much to talk about and not nearly enough time. Fortunately this took my mind off the fact I had damp feet for most of the day.

This post focuses on a discussion we had about Archivematica's Format Policy Registry or FPR. The FPR in Archivematica is a fairly complex beast, but a crucial tool for the 'Preservation Planning' step in digital archiving. It is essentially a database which allows users to define policies for handling different file formats (including the actions, tools and settings to apply to specific file type for the purposes of preservation or access). The FPR comes ready populated with a set of rules based on agreed best practice in the sector, but institutions are free to change these and add new tools and rules to meet their own requirements.

Jake Henry from the National Library of Wales kicked off the discussion by telling us about some work they had done to make the thumbnail generation for pdf files more useful. Instead of supplying a generic thumbnail image for all pdfs they wanted the thumbnail to actually represent the file in question. They made changes to the FPR to change the pdf thumbnail generation to use GhostScript.

NLW liked the fact that Archivematica converted pdf files to pdf/a but also wanted that same normalisation pathway to apply to existing pdf/a files. Just because a pdf/a file is already in a preservation file format it doesn’t mean it is a valid file. By also putting pdf/a files through a normalisation step they had more confidence that they were creating and preserving pdf/a files with some consistency.

Sea view from our meeting room!

Some institutions had not had any time to look in any detail at the default FPR rules. It was mentioned that there was trust in how the rules had been set up by Artefactual and that people didn’t feel expert enough to override these rules. The interface to the FPR within Archivematica itself is also not totally intuative and requires quite a bit of time to understand. It was mentioned that adding a tool and a new rule for a specific file format in Archivematica is quite an complex task and not for the faint hearted...!

Discussion also touched on the subject of those files that are not identified. A file needs to be identified before a FPR rule can be set up for it. Ensuring files are identified in the first instance was seen to be a crucial step. Even once a format makes its way into PRONOM (TNA’s database of file formats) Artefactual Systems have to carry out extra work to get Archivematica to pick up that new PUID.

Unfortunately normalisation tools do not exist for all files and in many cases you may just have to accept that a file will stay in the format in which it was received. For example a Microsoft Word document (.doc) may not be an ideal preservation format but in the absence of open source command line migration tools we may just have to accept the level of risk associated with this format.

Moving on from this, we also discussed manual normalisations. This approach may be too resource intensive for many (particularly those of us who are implementing automated workflows) but others would see this as an essential part of the digital preservation process. I gave the example of the WordStar files I have been working with this year. These files are already obsolete and though there are other ways of viewing them, I plan to migrate them to a format more suitable for preservation and access. This would need to be carried out outside of Archivematica using the manual normalisation workflow. I haven’t tried this yet but would very much like to test it out in the future.

I shared some other examples that I'd gathered outside the meeting. Kirsty Chatwin-Lee from the University of Edinburgh had a proactive approach to handling the FPR on a collection by collection and PUID by PUID basis. She checks all of the FPR rules for the PUIDs she is working with as she transfers a collection of digital objects into Archivematica and ensures she is happy before proceding with the normalisation step.

Back in October I'd tweeted to the wider Archivematica community to find out what people do with the FPR and had a few additional examples to share. For example, using Unoconv to convert office documents and creating PDF access versions of Microsoft Word documents. We also looked at some more detailed preservation planning documentation that Robert Gillesse from the International Institute of Social History had shared with the group.

We had a discussion about the benefits (or not) of normalising a compressed file (such as a JPEG) to an uncompressed format (such as TIFF). I had already mentioned in my presentation earlier that this default migration rule was turning 5GB of JPEG images into 80GB of TIFFs - and this is without improving the quality or the amount of information contained within the image. The same situation would apply to compressed audio and video which would increase even more in size when converted to an uncompressed format.

If storage space is at a premium (or if you are running this as a service and charging for storage space used) this could be seen as a big problem. We discussed the reasons for and against leaving this rule in the FPR. It is true that we may have more confidence in the longevity of TIFFs and see them as more robust in the face of corruption, but if we are doing digital preservation properly (checking checksums, keeping multiple copies etc) shouldn't corruption be easily spotted and fixed?

Another reason we may migrate or normalise files is to restrict the file formats we are preserving to a limited set of known formats in the hope that this will lead to less headaches in the future. This would be a reason to keep on converting all those JPEGs to TIFFs.

The FPR is there to be changed and being that not all organisations have exactly the same requirements it is not surprising that we are starting to tweak it here and there – if we don’t understand it, don’t look at it and don’t consider changing it perhaps we aren’t really doing our jobs properly.

However there was also a strong feeling in the room that we shouldn’t all be re-inventing the wheel. It is incredibly useful to hear what others have done with the FPR and the rationale behind their decisions.

Hopefully it is helpful to capture this discussion in a blog post, but this isn’t a sustainable way to communicate FPR changes for the longer term. There was a strong feeling in the room that we need a better way of communicating with each other around our preservation planning - the decisions we have made and the reasons for those decisions. This feeling was echoed by Kari Smith (MIT Libraries) and Nick Krabbenhoeft (New York Public Library) who joined us remotely to talk about the OSSArcFlow project - so this is clearly an international problem! This is something that Jisc are considering as part of their Research Data Shared Service project so it will be interesting to see how this might develop in the future.

Thanks to the UK Archivematica group meeting attendees for contributing to the discussion and informing this blog post.

Cakes, quizzes, blogs and advocacy

Last Thursday was International Digital Preservation Day and I think I needed the weekend to recover.

It was pretty intense...

...but also pretty amazing!

Amazing to see what a fabulous international community there is out there working on the same sorts of problems as me!

Amazing to see quite what a lot of noise we can make if we all talk at once!

Amazing to see such a huge amount of advocacy and awareness raising going on in such a small space of time!

International Digital Preservation Day was crazy but now I have had a bit more time to reflect, catch up...and of course read a selection of the many blog posts and tweets that were posted.

So here are some of my selected highlights:

Cakes

Of course the highlights have to include the cakes and biscuits including those produced by Rachel MacGregor and Sharon McMeekin. Turning the problems that we face into something edible helps does seem to make our challenges easier to digest!

Quizzes and puzzles

A few quizzes and puzzles were posed on the day via social media - a great way to engage the wider world and have a bit of fun in the process.

There was a great quiz from the Parliamentary Archives (the answers are now available here) and a digital preservation pop quiz from Ed Pinsent of CoSector which started here. Also for those hexadecimal geeks out there, a puzzle from the DP0C Fellows at Oxford and Cambridge which came just at the point that I was firing up a hexadecimal viewer as it happens!

In a blog post called Name that item in...? Kirsty Chatwin-Lee at Edinburgh University encourages the digital preservation community to help her to identify a mysterious large metal disk found in their early computing collections. Follow the link to the blog to see a picture - I'm sure someone out there can help!

Announcements and releases

There were lots of big announcements on the day too. IDPD just kept on giving!

Of course the 'Bit List' (a list of digitally endangered species) was announced and I was able to watch this live. Kevin Ashley from the Digital Curation Coalition discusses this in a blog post. It was interesting to finally see what was on the list (and then think further about how we can use this for further advocacy and awareness raising).

I celebrated this fact with some Fake News but to be fair, William Kilbride had already been on the BBC World Service the previous evening talking about just this so it wasn't too far from the truth!

New versions of JHOVE and VeraPDF were released as well as a new PRONOM release.  A digital preservation policy for Wales was announced and a new course on file migration was launched by CoSector at the University of London. Two new members also joined the Digital Preservation Coalition - and what a great day to join!

Roadshows

Some institutions did a roadshow or a pop up museum in order to spread the message about digital preservation more widely. This included the revival of the 'fish screensaver' at Trinity College Dublin and a pop up computer museum at the British Geological Survey.

Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge blogged about their portable digital preservation roadshow kit. I for one found this a particularly helpful resource - perhaps I will manage to do something similar myself next IDPD!

A day in the life

Several institutions chose to mark the occasion by blogging or tweeting about the details of their day. This gives an insight into what we DP folks actually do all day and can be really useful being that the processes behind digital preservation work are often less tangible and understandable than those used for physical archives!

I particularly enjoyed the nostalgia of following ex colleagues at the Archaeology Data Service for the day (including references to those much loved checklists!) and hearing from  Artefactual Systems about the testing, breaking and fixing of Archivematica that was going on behind the scenes.

The Danish National Archives blogged about 'a day in the life' and I was particularly interested to hear about the life-cycle perspective they have as new software is introduced, assessed and approved.

Exploring specific problems and challenges

Plans are my reality from Yvonne Tunnat of the ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics was of particular interest to me as it demonstrates just how hard the preservation tasks can be. I like it when people are upfront and honest about the limitations of the tools or the imperfections of the processes they are using. We all need to share more of this!

In Sustaining the software that preserves access to web archives, Andy Jackson from the British Library tells the story of an attempt to maintain a community of practice around open source software over time and shares some of the lessons learned - essential reading for any of us that care about collaborating to sustain open source.

Kirsty Chatwin-Lee from Edinburgh University invites us to head back to 1985 with her as she describes their Kryoflux-athon challenge for the day. What a fabulous way to spend the day!

Disaster stories

Digital Preservation Day wouldn't be Digital Preservation Day without a few disaster stories too! Despite our desire to move away beyond the 'digital dark age' narrative, it is often helpful to refer to worse case scenarios when advocating for digital preservation.

Cees Hof from DANS in the Netherlands talks about the loss of digital data related to rare or threatened species in The threat of double extinction, Sarah Mason from Oxford University uses the recent example of the shutdown of DCist to discuss institutional risk, José Borbinha from Lisbon University, Portugal talks about his own experiences of digital preservation disaster and Neil Beagrie from Charles Beagrie Ltd highlights the costs of inaction.

The bigger picture

Other blogs looked at the bigger picture

Preservation as a present by Barbara Sierman from the National Library of the Netherlands is a forward thinking piece about how we could communicate and plan better in order to move forward.

Shira Peltzman from the University of California, Los Angeles tries to understand some of the results of the 2017 NDSA Staffing Survey in It's difficult to solve a problem if you don't know what's wrong.

David Minor from the University of San Diego Library, provides his thoughts on What we’ve done well, and some things we still need to figure out.

I enjoyed reading a post from Euan Cochrane from Yale University Library on The Emergence of “Digital Patinas”. A really interesting piece... and who doesn't like to be reminded of the friendly and helpful Word 97 paperclip?

In Towards a philosophy of digital preservation, Stacey Erdman from Beloit College, Wisconsin USA asks whether archivists are born or made and discusses her own 'archivist "gene"'.




So much going on and there were so many other excellent contributions that I missed.

I'll end with a tweet from Euan Cochrane which I thought nicely summed up what International Digital Preservation Day is all about and of course the day was also concluded by William Kilbride of the DPC with a suitably inspirational blog post.

Congratulations to the Digital Preservation Coalition for organising the day and to the whole digital preservation community for making such a lot of noise!