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.

Searching the Clifton and Rawcliffe area on Domesday Reloaded

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!



Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist

Do sound engineers have more fun?

At the end of last week I was at the British Library on their excellent ‘Understanding and Preserving Audio Collections’ course.

British Library and Newton by Joanna Penn on Flickr

The concept of ‘Preserving audio’ is not a new one to me. Audio needs to be digitised for preservation and access and that pushes it firmly into my domain as digital archivist. I know the very basics such as the recommended file formats for long term preservation, but when faced with a real life physical audio collection on a variety of digital and analogue carriers it is hard to know what the priorities are and where exactly to start. This is where the ‘Understanding audio’ part of the course came to my rescue, filling in some of the gaps in my knowledge.

The course

The first day of the course was fascinating. We were given a run-down of the history of audio media and were introduced to (and in many cases, allowed to handle) many different physical carriers of audio. Hearing a wax cylinder being played on an original phonograph was a highlight for me. Digital archivists don’t normally get to play with the physical artefacts held within archives!  Perhaps most useful in this session was learning how to recognise different types of physical media and spot the signs of physical degradation.

In the following two days the emphasis moved on to digital carriers and digital files. Interestingly digital carriers were seen to be more vulnerable than analogue in many respects. Digitisation workflows were also discussed and we got the chance to see around the digitisation studios with a wide range of equipment demonstrated. This was the point at which I started to wish I was a sound engineer!

Not so different after all…

One of the things that struck me throughout the three days was that this really isn't an alien subject to me at all. Familiar concepts were repeated again and again about obsolescence of technology, lack of standards (particularly when a new type of media takes off), the importance of metadata, the idea that future technologies may be able to do a better job of this than us, and the vain hopes that an ‘everlasting’ media carrier may be made available to us and solve all of our problems. Standard topics in any introductory presentation concerning digital archiving!

What was new and interesting to me though was that for audio media a time limit has been internationally agreed for taking action. We need to plan to digitise our audio and preserve it within a digital archive within the next 15 years because there will come a point at which this strategy will not be possible any more. We have a limited window of opportunity to work in. Digitising obsolete analogue and digital carriers is becoming harder to do (as the media degrades in a variety of different ways) and more expensive (as the necessary hardware and parts becomes harder to source). In fact, whereas digitisation of documents is becoming cheaper over time as new technologies are introduced, the digitisation of audio is becoming more expensive over time as the necessary equipment becomes harder to get hold of.

Has such a time limit has ever been discussed for rescuing data from obsolete digital media such as floppies and zip disks? If so, it is not one that has hit my radar.

Putting the learning into context

The Borthwick Institute and the University of York curate some substantial music collections, but we have also been carrying out an audit of all the other bits and pieces of audio that are buried within some of our other collections. Currently we have a list with basic information about each item including the media type, the location in the strongroom and descriptive information taken from the label or packaging. The next step was to work out a digitisation strategy for these items.

This is all well and good, but work on this stalled as it quickly found its way into the ‘too difficult’ box. Following on from the information absorbed on this course, I now have the ability to start the process of prioritising the audio for digitisation based on variables such as vulnerability of the physical media and the condition of individual items. Also taking into account whether the content is unique or of particular interest.

Another benefit is that I now feel that I could now hold a conversation with a sound engineer! This is key to planning a digitisation project. Every discipline has its own particular language or jargon and happily I now have some understanding of waveforms, equalisation curves and sampling rates. At the very least I know what to ask for if writing a specification for an audio digitisation project and have a wealth of references, resources and contacts at my finger tips if I need to find out more.



Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist

CDs versus floppies

The digital rescue mission continues...

Here are a few words from James who is in the middle of his internship on this project and has been moving his focus away from floppy disks and on to CDs within the office:

Floppy disks - more robust than we expected!

"I am finding it very enjoyable rifling through collections of CDs and floppy disks
to try and discover what they contain, what is recoverable, what has duplicates saved elsewhere and what is important. Something that has been a big surprise to me, and I have found really interesting, was to discover that the floppy disks appear to have a greater lifespan than the CDs that superseded them. Out of the 97 floppy disks I’ve been through (most of these were from the 1990s) only one is completely corrupt. This is in contrast to the 62 CDs I have been working with (mostly from the 2000s) of which there were 4 entirely corrupt
disks. It just seems odd that the older technology outlasts the more modern."

So in our sample, the floppies have a 1% disk corruption rate whereas for the CDs it is somewhere around 6.5%. Is this typical? It will be interesting to see if this pattern continues as we move on to digital material in the strongrooms.

There is an interesting analogy from my colleagues who work on the conservation of analogue material within the archive. Apparently, the same is true of paper. Old paper is generally of better quality thus in a better state of physical preservation than more modern paper. I love it when my work on digital material finds parallels in the traditional archival experiences.

It just goes to show, they don't make things like they used to!

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist

Digital Rescue Mission: Operation Warm-up

Some of the floppy disks we have been looking at

My digital archiving intern has started work. His mission is to rescue digital media from the strongroom and prepare it for inclusion into the digital archive.

The first stage of this work has been to search our accessions database and catalogues for any mention of digital media. James has had the rather tedious job of running keyword searches over our finding aids in order to create a list of the archives that contain digital media. This list is pretty much complete now and next week we will start to pull material out of the strongrooms and see what we actually have.

However, in preparation for working with the real archives, we have also been doing a bit of a warm-up exercise on some old digital media found tucked away in people's offices. As well as being a means to hone our skills in this area, and test tools and workflows, this is also a very useful exercise in its own right. As a long-established organisation that has existed over a period of many technological changes, it is not surprising that we have a variety of different digital storage solutions for our administrative files. We are currently establishing a more cohesive strategy for storing all of our own digital material and part of this process is to ensure that any digital files that are important to us are stored in a logical location on a server and regularly backed up.

In the past floppy disks were regularly used to back up files and transfer files between computers. Some of these floppy disks still exist (and most are still readable) so James is currently working through them, virus checking them, running DROID to find out the file formats and opening the files to look at the content. He is creating a list from which we can highlight anything that is important and unique and in need of rescue. Many will be back-ups or earlier versions of things we already have on our shared filestore. Many of the unique files will be of limited value. However, we are expecting there will be other files that will be more interesting, and will be useful in showing the history and development of our organisation.

In terms of file formats, James is finding a lot of Microsoft Word 97-2003, WordPerfect 6.0 and PDF 1.4 files. No major problems with being able to read these at the moment so that is encouraging. A couple of old databases have emerged in Paradox and an early version of Microsoft Access which we are struggling to open. We expect to find earlier data going back to the 1990's as James works through the stratigraphy of the pile of disks on his desk. What better job for a recent archaeology graduate!

After the floppy disks have been tackled we may decide to move on to the CDs in the office. Far more numerous but it could be argued they are equally vulnerable.








Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist