A typical week as a digital archivist?

Sometimes (admittedly not very often) I'm asked what I actually do all day. So at the end of a busy week being a digital archivist I've decided to blog about what I've been up to.

Monday

Today I had a couple of meetings. One specifically to talk about digital preservation of electronic theses submissions. I've also had a work experience placement in this week so have set up a metadata creation task which he has been busy working on.

When I had a spare moment I did a little more testing work on the EAD harvesting feature the University of York is jointly sponsoring Artefactual Systems to develop in AtoM. Testing this feature from my perspective involves logging into the test site that Artefactual has created for us and tweaking some of the archival descriptions. Once those descriptions are saved, I can take a peek at the job scheduler and make sure that new EAD files are being created behind the scenes for the Archives Hub to attempt to harvest at a later date.

This piece of development work has been going on for a few months now and communications have been technically quite complex so I'm also trying to ensure all the organisations involved are happy with what has been achieved and will be arranging a virtual meeting so we can all get together and talk through any remaining issues.

I was slightly surprised today to have a couple of requests to talk to the media. This has sprung from the news that the Queen's Speech will be delayed. One of the reasons for the delay relates to the fact that the speech has to be written on goat's skin parchment, which takes a few days to dry. I had previously been interviewed for a article entitled Why is the UK still printing its laws on vellum? and am now mistaken for someone who knows about vellum. I explained to potential interviewers that this is not my specialist subject!

Tuesday

In the morning I went to visit a researcher at the University of York. I wanted to talk to him about how he uses Google Drive in relation to his research. This is a really interesting topic to me right now as I consider how best we might be able to preserve current research datasets. Seeing how exactly Google Drive is used and what features the researcher considers to be significant (and necessary for reuse) is really helpful when thinking about a suitable approach to this problem. I sometimes think I work a little bit too much in my own echo chamber, so getting out and hearing different perspectives is incredibly valuable.

Later that afternoon I had an unexpected meeting with one of our depositors (well, there were two of them actually). I've not met them before but have been working with their data for a little while. In our brief meeting it was really interesting to chat and see the data from a fresh perspective. I was able to reunite them with some digital files that they had created in the mid 1980's, had saved on to floppy disk and had not been able to access for a long time.

Digital preservation can be quite a behind the scenes sort of job - we always give a nod to the reason why we do what we do (ie: we preserve for future reuse), but actually seeing the results of that work unfold in front of your eyes is genuinely rewarding. I had rescued something from the jaws of digital obsolescence so it could now be reused and revitalised!

At the end of the day I presented a joint webinar for the Open Preservation Foundation called 'PRONOM in practice'. Alongside David Clipsham (The National Archives) and Justin Simpson (Artefactual Systems), I talked about my own experiences with PRONOM, particularly relating to file signature creation, and ending with a call to arms "Do try this at home!". It would be great if more of the community could get involved!

I was really pleased that the webinar platform worked OK for me this time round (always a bit stressful when it doesn't) and that I got to use the yellow highlighter pen on my slides.

In my spare moments (which were few and far between), I put together a powerpoint presentation for the following day...

Wednesday

I spent the day at the British Library in Boston Spa. I'd been invited to speak at a training event they regularly hold for members of staff who want to find out a bit more about digital preservation and the work of the team.

I was asked specifically to talk through some of the challenges and issues that I face in my work. I found this pretty easy - there are lots of challenges - and I eventually realised I had too many slides so had to cut it short! I suppose that is better than not having enough to say!

Visiting Boston Spa meant that I could also chat to the team over lunch and visit their lab. They had a very impressive range of old computers and were able to give me a demonstration of Kryoflux (which I've never seen in action before) and talk a little about emulation. This was a good warm up for the DPC event about emulation I'm attending next week: Halcyon On and On: Emulating to Preserve.

Still left on my to do list from my trip is to download Teracopy. I currently use Foldermatch for checking that files I have copied have remained unchanged. From the quick demo I saw at the British Library I think that Teracopy would be a more simple one step solution. I need to have a play with this and then think about incorporating it into the digital ingest workflow.

Sharing information and collaborating with others working in the digital preservation field really is directly beneficial to the day to day work that we do!

Thursday

Back in the office today and a much quieter day.

I extracted some reports from our AtoM catalogue for a colleague and did a bit of work with our test version of Research Data York. I also met with another colleague to talk about storing and providing access to digitised images.

In the afternoon I wrote another powerpoint presentation, this time for a forthcoming DPC event: From Planning to Deployment: Digital Preservation and Organizational Change.

I'm going to be talking about our experiences of moving our Research Data York application from proof of concept to production. We are not yet in production and some of the reasons why will be explored in the presentation! Again I was asked to talk about barriers and challenges and again, this brief is fairly easy to fit! The event itself is over a week away so this is unprecedentedly well organised. Long may it continue!

Friday

On Fridays I try to catch up on the week just gone and plan for the week ahead as well as reading the relevant blogs that have appeared over the week. It is also a good chance to catch up with some admin tasks and emails.

Lunch time reading today was provided by William Kilbride's latest blog post. Some of it went over my head but the final messages around value and reuse and the need to "do more with less" rang very true.

Sometimes I even blog myself - as I am today!




Was this a typical week - perhaps not, but in this job there is probably no such thing! Every week brings new ideas, challenges and surprises!

I would say the only real constant is that I've always got lots of things to keep me busy.

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist