Digital Archiving at the University of York

A blog post from Jim Costin our Bridging the Digital Gap trainee - written for International Digital Preservation Day Last year, Jenny Mitcham, our former digital archivist, posted about saving your digital stuff from becoming files which are unable to be opened and how to manage a personal digital archive. What I’m going to be talking about is following on from that and a unique issue which we both came across recently when putting some new items into our digital archive. This phenomenon can be referred to as the folders within folders with folders...  I’ll forgive you if you’ve never heard that term before. To put it simply, the phrase refers to having multiple folders nested within each other. The picture below will give you an example of it which was created just for this post: Now, whilst the example above shows how to not name your folders, it does show how easily you can end up nesting folders. Whilst this might be a very good way of organising data and knowing e

So this is a topic pretty close to home for me. Oh the irony of spending much of the last couple of months fretting about the future preservation of my digital preservation blog...! I have invested a fair bit of time over the last 6 or so years writing posts for this blog. Not only has it been useful for me as a way of documenting what I've done or what I've learnt, but it has also been of interest to a much wider audience. The most viewed posts have been on the topic of preserving Google Drive formats and disseminating the outputs of the Filling the Digital Preservation Gap project. Access statistics show that the audience is truly international. When I decided to accept a job elsewhere I was of course concerned about what would happen to my blog. I hoped that all would be well, given that Blogger is a Google supported solution and part of the suite of Google tools that University of York staff and students use. But what would happen when my institutional Google accoun

This is my last day as Digital Archivist for the University of York. Next week I will be taking on a brand new post as Head of Standards and Good Practice at the Digital Preservation Coalition . This is an exciting move for me but it is with some sadness that I leave the Borthwick Institute and University of York behind. I have been working in digital preservation at the University of York for the last 15 years. Initially with the Archaeology Data Service as part of the team that preserves and disseminates digital data produced by archaeologists in the UK; and since 2012, branching out to work with many other types of digital material at the Borthwick Institute. This last six years has been both interesting and challenging and I have learnt a huge amount. Perhaps the biggest change for me was moving from being one of a team of digital archivists to being a lone digital archivist. I think this is one of the reasons I started this blog. I missed having other digital archivists ar

This week I traveled to Warwick University for the UK Archivematica meeting. As usual, it was a really interesting day. I’m not going to blog about all of it ( I’ll leave that to our host, Rachel MacGregor ) but I will blog about the work I presented there. Followers of my blog will be aware that I recently carried out some file migration work  on a batch of WordStar 4 files from screenwriting duo Marks and Gran. The final piece of work I wanted to carry out was to consider how we might move the original files along with the migrated versions of those files into Archivematica (if we were to adopt Archivematica in the future). I knew the migration I had carried out was a bit of an odd one so I was particularly interested to see how Archivematica would handle it. It was odd for a number of reasons. 1. Firstly, I ended up creating 3 different versions of each WordStar file – DOCX, PDF/A and ASCII TXT. After an assessment of the significant properties of the files (essentially,