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

IT's personal: some thoughts from the journey home

Today I went to London to attend a Digital Preservation Coalition event on Personal Digital Archives. I like going to London and I like going to these sorts of workshops. I also like the time for reflection sat in the quiet carriage of a Virgin train on the way home. There is something about being cut off from the internet and away from the everyday distractions of the office which helps focus the mind. 

Today was interesting because I expect like many of the attendees I was there with two hats on – being able to benefit from the day both as a digital archivist and as an individual with my own personal digital archive to maintain.

What follows is not so much a summing up of the day, but just a quick mention of some of the thoughts I’m taking away. There were some interesting presentations that I haven’t mentioned (apologies). 

Gabriella Redwine from the Beinecke Library at the University of Yale gave a great introduction to the topic of personal digital archives, and defining them as the things created by or about an individual, a rather formal term for the digital stuff we all create over the course of our lives. We all have them. They are fragile, regularly neglected and at risk of loss. People tend to manage them when faced with a crisis (eg: computer virus), problem (eg: running out of storage space) or life changing event (eg: moving house or job). We as digital archivists need to be able to advise individuals on how to manage their own digital archives in the hope that the material will survive long enough to be deposited within an archive in the future if appropriate.

Amber Cushing from University College Dublin gave a really interesting talk on how people assign value to their digital files. Both her and Gabriella made the point (that I had only been partially aware of) that people tend to place less value on digital than physical things, that the born-digital is seen as less important than something you can more easily see or hold. I appear to be guilty of this myself I realise. Every year I take hundreds of digital photographs which I store on my computer. These are of high value to me. They provide a record of my life and my family and I want to keep them so that I and subsequent generations can look back on them. Despite the high value I place on them I don’t back them up as often as I should and have even been known to lose some (see previous confession).

At the end of each year I create a photo book for that year. A printed, glossy, hard back album of selected photos from that year, with a title page and captions (documentation and metadata!). I love to receive the finished photo book through the post and place even more value on this physical object than I did of the original photos. This is clear by the fact that I hover around the kids as they look at it, checking that they don’t have grubby hands and worrying that they might inadvertently rip a page whilst turning it. 

Do I have the same level of worry when they access my digital originals? No, I happily let them click through them on the computer, never checking whether they had accidentally edited or deleted one or moved an image out of its context from one folder to another. These are eventualities which are probably just as likely (but harder to spot and thus rectify) than damage to the physical book*. 

Is this slightly skewed notion of value a result of the extra time and effort I have put into arranging the photographs into a physical book, the expense of having had to pay for it to be printed, or simply down to the fact that it is shiny and I can hold it?

Anyway, this is a slight tangent. It was really interesting to hear about Amber’s research on possession and self extension in relation to personal digital archives and how we as individuals may or may not assign value to the digital stuff that we create.

I was also really pleased to hear James Baxter from the British Library talk about a practical way they had set up workflows for dealing with personal digital archives that have been put in their care. Shutting himself and colleagues in a room for 3 days with some media, and some tools in order to brainstorm workflows and make progress with trying to access, identify and preserve some of this born digital material seemed like a great approach and there were some useful lessons learned from the process. I liked the ‘learning by doing’ approach that he advocated. I tend to agree that the best way to find out if something is going to work is to roll up your sleeves and have a go.

Another repeated message of the day was about language and how we can communicate and bring people along with us. Mike Ashenfelder from the Library of Congress mentioned that though libraries may run personal digital archiving courses for the public, it is hard to compete with other courses and learning opportunities with more appealing names. Amber mentioned that when interviewing people for her research, she avoided use of the term 'archiving' instead asking them about how they ‘maintained’ their digital files.

Having over the last week taught two sessions at the University of York on ‘Research Data Management’ I can relate to this problem. Getting people to come along and engage with a topic that has quite a dry title can certainly be a challenge. Perhaps as Mike suggested “looking after your digital stuff” would make it clearer what we were talking about and its immediate relevance to all of us!

My train journey is nearly over so I’ll leave it there, having over the course of this journey created yet another thing to add to my own digital legacy. 

I’m looking forward to reading the new DPC technology watch report on the subject of personal digital archiving in the near future.

* yes, I know I could do this with checksums but I do not create checksums for my personal digital files...my life is busy!

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist