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Showing posts from December, 2013

Updating my requirements

Last week I published my digital preservation Christmas wishlist . A bit tongue in cheek really but I saw it as my homework in advance of the latest Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) day on Friday which was specifically about articulating requirements for digital preservation systems . This turned out to be a very timely and incredibly useful event. Along with many other digital preservation practitioners I am currently thinking about what I really need a digital preservation system to do and which  systems and software might be able to help. Angela Dappert from the DPC started off the day with a very useful summary of requirements gathering methodology. I have since returned to my list and tidied it up a bit to get my requirements in line with her SMART framework – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. I also realised that by focusing on the framework of the OAIS model I have omitted some of the ‘non-functional’ requirements that are essential to having a worki

My digital preservation Christmas wish list

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All I want for Christmas is a digital archive. By  paparutzi on Flickr   CC BY 2.0 Since I started at the Borthwick Institute for Archives I have been keen to adopt a digital preservation solution. Up until this point, exploratory work on the digital archive has been overtaken by other priorities, perhaps the most important of these being an audit of digital data held at the Borthwick and an audit of research data management practices across the University. The outcome is clear to me – we hold a lot of data and if we are to manage this data effectively over time, a digital archiving system is required. In a talk at the SPRUCE end of project workshop a couple of weeks ago both Ed Fay and Chris Fryer spoke about the importance of the language that we use when we talk about digital archiving. This is a known problem for the digital preservation community and one I have myself come up against on a number of different levels. In an institution relatively new to digital preservation the term