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!




Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist

What shall I do for International Digital Preservation Day?

I have been thinking about this question for a few months now and have only recently come up with a solution.

I wanted to do something big on International Digital Preservation Day. Unfortunately other priorities have limited the amount of time available and I am doing something a bit more low key. To take a positive from a negative I would like to suggest that as with digital preservation more generally, it is better to just do something rather than wait for the perfect solution to come along!

I am sometimes aware that I spend a lot of time in my own echo chamber - for example talking on Twitter and through this blog to other folks who also work in digital preservation. Though this is undoubtedly a useful two-way conversation, for International Digital Preservation Day I wanted to target some new audiences.

So instead of blogging here (yes I know I am blogging here too) I have blogged on the Borthwick Institute for Archives blog.

The audience for the Borthwick blog is a bit different to my usual readership. It is more likely to be read by users of our services at the Borthwick Institute and those who donate or deposit with us, perhaps also by staff working in other archives in the UK and beyond. Perfect for what I had planned.

In response to the tagline of International Digital Preservation Day ‘Bits Decay: Do Something Today’ I wanted to encourage as many people as possible to ‘Do Something’. This shouldn’t be just limited to us digital preservation folks, but to anyone anywhere who uses a computer to create or manage data.

This is why I decided to focus on Personal Digital Archiving. The blog post is called “Save your digital stuff!” (credit to the DPC Technology Watch Report on Personal Digital Archiving for this inspiring title - it was noted that at a briefing day hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) in April 2015, one of the speakers suggested that the term ‘personal digital archiving’ be replaced by the more urgent exhortation, ‘Save your digital stuff!’).

The blog post aimed to highlight the fragility of digital resources and then give a few tips on how to protect them. Nothing too complicated or technical, but hopefully just enough to raise awareness and perhaps encourage engagement. Not wishing to replicate all the great work that has already been done on Personal Digital Archiving, by the Library of Congress, the Paradigm project and others I decided to focus on just a few simple pieces of advice and then link out to other resources.

At the end of the post I encourage people to share information about any actions they have taken to protect their own digital legacies (of course using the #IDPD17 hashtag). If I inspire just one person to take action I'll consider it a win!

I'm also doing a 'Digital Preservation Takeover' of the Borthwick twitter account @UoYBorthwick. I lined up a series of 'fascinating facts' about the digital archives we hold here at the Borthwick and tweeted them over the course of the day.

• There are 28 archives at the Borthwick for which we hold at least some digital material - this may be some of the most fragile and vulnerable material that we hold
• The first digital archive received at the Borthwick arrived in 2004 as part of the York Peptic Ulcer Trust archive
• We hold 135GB of deposited digital archive material here at the Borthwick (10896 individual files to preserve) - not a huge amount but we do expect this to grow!
• The largest digital archive we hold at the Borthwick is the Historic Masters Archive which consists of 997 files and is 82 GB in size - it came in yesterday and I’m processing it right now!
• We believe that the oldest files in the digital archive go back to 1984 - these are in the Marks and Gran archive
• Approximately a quarter of the digital archives that we hold contain file formats that are not automatically identified by DROID
• The average number of files received in a digital archive deposit at the Borthwick is 300 (though in reality it can range from 1 to 2400)
• The average number of different file formats (at least those that can be identified)  in a new digital accession received at the Borthwick is 6, though our Richard Orton archive contains 48 different identified file formats and many more that are not identified
• The file format that gets deposited with us the most is the Microsoft Word Document 97-2003 (we have over 1700 of these)

OK - admittedly they won't be fascinating to everyone, but if nothing else it helps us to move further away from the notion that an archive is where you go to look at very old documents!

...and of course I now have a whole year to plan for International Digital Preservation Day 2018 so perhaps I'll be able to do something bigger and better?! I'm certainly feeling inspired by the range of activities going on across the globe today.



Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist