What I Wish I Knew Before I Started!

I’ve been working as a trainee archivist for 3 and a half months as part of the Bridging the Digital Gap programme.  In that time, I’ve been introduced to traditional archives work, including record retrieval, depositing records, accessions and cataloguing. I’m now progressing into the digital world of archives work, including ingest and cataloguing, though I’m still new to the sector. When I started, I didn’t know about the wider aspects of operating within an archive, or some of the long term issues been worked on nationally and internationally.

I attended the recent DPC event “What I Wish I Knew Before I Started” down in London, hosted by Sharon McMeekin, Adrian Brown, Edith Halvarsson, Matthew Addis, and Glenn Cumiskey. It was aimed at students and recent graduates, but myself and a fellow trainee attended. It was the first proper conference I’ve attended, but the presentations and atmosphere were very easy going, and the speakers were really informative. They touched on subjects I hadn’t yet come across; such as the three legged stool model, problems with intangible assets, ethical implications of what archives hold, and many other ideas and concepts I hadn’t thought about before.

This event gave me an opportunity to see archives on a national scale. Until attending the event, my only experience of archives was through my work place and from limited visits to other repositories. The event gave me a sense of the inter-connectivity, the network behind individual archives. The end of the conference was rounded out by an open table, giving students a chance to ask the speakers questions. Loads of points were brought up, from short term career goals (how to get into archives and move around the sector) to developmental challenges overseas (how do you start and maintain an archive in an impoverished country). In the short amount of time I’ve spent at Hull History Centre, I’ve come to realise the positive impact archives can have to local communities and educational institutions. I’m only now considering the international community that surrounds the archival sector.

And that was my main take away from the event. The amount of communication advocating for digital preservation was fascinating to see; it was brought up several times throughout the event but really came to ahead with the open questions. On an international scale people are talking and progressing the idea of digital preservation. “What can we do for the future?” was asked several times by the speakers, and this was the first time I had thought about the long term implications of my career.

What is obvious is that I’ve entered the sector at a very interesting time. Things are changing, the digital side of archiving is becoming more prevalent, and my skillset is becoming more useful as the idea of digital preservation continues. I am excited for the future, and looking forward to continuing my development.

Jack Quinlan, Bridging the Digital Gap Trainee

World Digital Preservation Day - some reflections

I am currently working on a reflective report capturing the experiences and lessons learnt in creating an archive of Hull City ofCulture 2017. By its very nature this has involved looking back at things we said and did along the way, so to mark World Digital Preservation Day 2018 I thought I would reflect on Hull university archives digital preservation journey over the last eight years. 

2010-2012 AIMS Project

Our first forensic workstation in 2011

It is fair to say that in 2010 as far as digital preservation was concerned it was something that other archives did but we did not. The opportunity to collaborate with colleagues at the Universities of Stanford, Yale and Virginia was not something we hesitated over. The project allowed me to be seconded as Digital Archivist and to immerse myself into all things digital preservation. There was a steep learning curve with a lot of activity to keep abreast with. 

Things really began to make sense when we started to practice what we were learning – capturing our learning in the AIMS White Paper. It gave us the confidence to initiate discussions with depositors, admittedly with mixed and sometimes unexpected results (no because of Wikileaks being one that springs to mind) but learning is an important part of the process. At the end of the secondment I returned to my substantive role and tried to maintain the interest and momentum the project had created.

2012-2016

During this period we continued to talk to other archivists and more depositors and our holdings increased gradually, but we were very aware that we had no technical infrastructure inplace and the files were stored on our non-networked forensic workstations. 

Between March 2015 and September 2016 colleagues at the Universities of Hull and York collaborated on a JISC funded Filling the Digital Preservation Gap project to look at Archivematica and its appropriateness for research data management. I took the opportunity to join the conversations to consider how different the scenarios and situations were compared to born-digital archives and while there were some differences there were far more aspects we had in common.

2016-2018 City of Culture archive project 

Hull was announced as UK City of Culture 2017 on 20 November 2013 and ideas about “archiving the City of Culture” emerged shortly after. We had no real idea of what to expect - which turned out to be both a hindrance and an opportunity.

Ideas were developed and crucially funding secured to appoint a Digital Archivist (Laura Giles) to collect records (primarily digital in format) and Laura has been sharing her experiences in this - speaking at the British Museum conference and DCDC18 to name just two. 

We have collected c150,000 files so far and a parallel piece of activity working with CoSector has been to join-up the dots including Box (digital storage); Archivematica (digital preservation activities); CALM (collections management software); Samvera (digital repository) and Blacklight (discovery layer) to ensure we have a robust solution for storing, preserving and sharing digital records. We will be talking about and demonstrating this joined-up solution in 2019...

Reflections

NDSA levels in Feb 2017 - to be revisited Feb 2019

In reflective mode this journey appears to be a natural progression but the reality is far from that - more akin to a series of steps than a straight line. There have been many other aspects along the way including NDSA levels of digital preservation, Archives Accreditation, hosting Transforming Archives and now Bridgingthe Digital Gap trainees. These personal reflections are mine but the achievements and progress has only been possible because of other people's time and support along the way - for which I continue to be grateful.  

If you are just starting your own journey my biggest tip - is do something practical - whether identifying what born-digital materials you have, setting-up a forensic workstation or playing with DROID on some sample files. It may seem a daunting journey but you are not alone and help is out there.  

Simon Wilson

University Archivist

Basecamp at The National Archives

We are delighted to announce a new member of staff, Jack Quinlan has joined the university team as part of The National Archives’ new Bridging the Digital Gap traineeship. Jack’s first blog for us delves into his experiences of travelling down to the National Archives for a three day intensive introduction to the world of archives:

Before I started working at Hull History Centre, I had no real idea how an archive operated. I knew they kept records, an odd photo or two, or maybe a map, but that was it. But now I have a much firmer grasp on the scope of archives and some of the challenges they face. Bridging the Digital Gap, an incentive to broaden the pool of talent available to the sector, has just started training their eight new trainees last week in a course held at The National Archives. The three day training event was an introduction to the traineeship and digital archiving as a whole.

Basecamp, as we called the training event, was a brilliant experience. I’ve never been to The National Archives before - an all too unassuming building nestled away among quiet houses, no tall buildings to mark its location over the city landscape, it just appears.

Entrance to TNA

I got to know my fellow trainees over a coffee icebreaker. We were encouraged to introduce ourselves, which host organization we were representing, and a little known fact about it. What became apparent over the day was just how diverse our individual skill sets are, though all following a similar line of “aptitude for technology”. Each trainee has worked with computers, data sets, or data processing in some official capacity - for myself I have a background in media production, video editing, and some experience in scientific data handling. Suffice to say we all had a lot to talk about.

The rest of the day included a contextual overview of the course, including module breakdown and what is expected of us on a bi-monthly rotation, speakers from different archive and digital departments on how the digital landscape is changing their position, and then an actual breakdown of what a digital archivist is expected to be able to do, and the roles they can fill. The first day can be best summarised as “Digital Archiving, what is it?”. For the second and third day we were a lot more active; we were given tours of the archive and repositories, delving into the history of The National Archives, how far back the archives go and just how the building came to be. We secured reading passes and had our first instance of requesting a specific piece of archived information, and had a look at the more hands on side of archives: the conservator.

Fabric patent book

“Restoring the past” is how conservation was first described to me, and was something we explored first hand at TNA; converging over a large open book, this was my first experience with something so old. A several centuries old patent record, filled to the seams with blackened fabric, faded sketches and diagrams. The cover, once tightly strapped in leather and metal stripes, was now slack, and falling apart, the leather flayed and metal rusted, the processes of preserving it would certainly be very long.

In another room, an experiment with light and parchment was underway, showing the degradation of different inks within certain conditions, and using a very high intensity light to speed up the process. In the same room, we got a demonstration of 3D printing, the uses of which became apparent, as while the demonstration was going on, a replica of certain rat was produced. Both of interest of digital archiving in some respects, and learning about them now will allow for an easier introductory period further down the road.

I joined the Hull History Centre team on October the 29th and only a week later I was hurtling my way down to London to visit the UK’s largest archive. Things were moving fast and even now each day I am presented with new challenges that I did not see myself undertaking a year ago. I don’t see this pace slowing down either, and I am thankful; looking forward to each week, learning new skills and even interesting subject matter, there are few positions which offer this.

Parchment estate plan

My expectations are high, there’s opportunity here and I want to make the most of it. I have taken an interest in digital archiving at a very interesting time, the landscape is changing and I am been trained at the forefront. By the end of my traineeship I imagine my perspective will have changed, but my determination will be just as strong as when I started.

Jack Quinlan, Bridging the Digital Gap Trainee

Museums and Digital Memory

On Monday 3rd September, Chris Awre and I travelled to the British Museum to contribute to a conference titled Museums and Digital Memory which was a jointly organised by the British Museum and the Digital Preservation Coalition. 

Over 300 people attended which shows the level of appetite within museums to start getting to grips with digital preservation. Julie Allinson (lead developer at CoSector) and I presented a keynote paper introducing the City of Culture digital archive and talking about our journey towards a digital archive system then Chris and Steph Taylor (senior consultant at CoSector) lead a packed workshop about identifying paths and options to choosing a digital solution. 

Despite there being obvious alignments of value between archives, libraries and museums I have to admit that I didn’t know a lot about the inner workings of the museums sector. I was surprised to learn then, that museums are generally quite far behind the curve when it comes to digital preservation. 

Surprised because I had assumed that the conversations my own profession is always engaged in around how we ensure that future generations are able to access what is being created today would be reflected in the museums world - which after all has similar aims in capturing the way we live.

Surprised also as it’s plain to see when you visit museums that many are doing sterling work in finding creative and intelligent ways to improve access to their existing collections through digital means. There are clearly a lot of incredibly digitally literate people working in the sector but it would seem their skills have not yet been turned to preservation.  

There was a lot of talk throughout the day about digitisation. Digitisation is the process of scanning or otherwise capturing an analogue object so that you end up with a surrogate digital object (e.g. scanning a photographic print so that you have a jpeg file, or converting a VHS into a digital format such as mp4). This is a good way to ensure that that analogue original is handled less (especially if it’s something you expect a lot of people to access) and is therefore liable to last longer; however, we have to make sure we are always asking the question: how do we make sure that digital surrogates have any kind of longevity?

It is a sad fact that in the last 20 or so years (essentially since digitisation technologies have become more affordable and accessible) museums and archives have invested a truly monumental amount of time and money into digitisation projects but often with little strategy when it comes to preserving their output. 

I had an illuminating conversation at lunchtime with someone who has just started working at an institution that has done a lot of digitisation projects over the years. Their job now is to track down what had become of the output of these projects and implement a digital preservation solution. They are finding that hard drives used in 10-15 year old digitisation projects are failing (as we would expect - hard drives do not last forever) and are having to commission costly data retrieval as the contents weren’t even backed up at the point of creation. You have to admit there is a certain irony in memory institutions being so short sighted!

Julie presenting about the City of Culture collaboration

The good news is that museums don’t have to start from nothing: libraries and archives have been developing the field of digital preservation for a significant amount of time now and so there is a wealth of research and experience to draw upon. Digital preservation systems, once only found in national institutions are becoming more affordable and user-friendly and there is an established community who are more than happy to share expertise and advice. 

We received some really good feedback from other attendees and the conference organisers who were especially pleased with how we managed to deliver a presentation that was interesting to digital preservation old hands and newbies alike. We’re really proud of the work that has gone into the City of Culture digital archive so it was a great opportunity to share our enthusiasm and talk to others about how they could potentially go about tackling their own digital collections.  

There was appetite on the day for this conference to be repeated next year and I think it would be really interesting to find out what steps in implementing digital preservation attendees have taken by then.

Laura Giles
City of Culture Digital Archivist

Archivematica UK User Group Meeting

I recently travelled across the snow-covered country to a very wet Aberystwyth to attend the December meeting of the UK Archivematica User Group kindly hosted by The National Library of Wales.

The day started with an interesting update from Rachel McGregor from the University of Lancaster, about their joint project with St Andrews University and the University of Cambridge to compare Archivematica and Preservica. They are both digital preservation software packages; Archivematica open-source and Preservica commercial. 

Rachel identified the need to think about the wider environment when weighing up which to use - as on a paper, the two systems could be said to do the same things. In practice this is not necessarily the case. She encouraged us to consider what kind of data or records you have, what you are trying to get out of a system and what your institutional context is. 

The University of Lancaster is quite ambitious about the amount of input they want into a digital preservation system – they are not looking for a “hands-off” approach of feeding material in and expecting the system to do all the work. From that perspective, Archivematica is Rachel’s preferred option. Her testing had also found that though the two systems are largely on a level-footing when it comes to file format identification, Archivematica narrowly has the edge when it comes to research data, especially with compressed files. She has found Preservica to be better for reporting as this functionality is built into the system whereas you would need to plug another application in to Archivematica yourself to produce meaningful reports. 

It was highlighted that Preservica creates much shorter METS files than Archivematica – this lead to some debate in the room as to whether Archivematica’s METS files are too long. Do we need all the information they include? And do they take up too much space? Rachel concluded that for her institution (with its primary focus being the long term preservation of research data), her preference was for Archivematica but that for other people working in different contexts she would be equally glad to recommend Preservica.

It’s thought-provoking to hear about peoples’ opinions about the two systems having moved from using Preservica in my last job to Archivematica here at the History Centre. 

An update from Jen Mitcham at the Borthwick Institute at the University of York emphasised the need, when using Archivematica, to have a really robust and clearly defined IT support network in place. It brought to light the fact that open source ≠ free when you take into consideration the staffing and intense IT support required. 

There was a group session to discuss what changes people have made to their Format Policy Registry (FPR) on Archivematica. This is a database that allows users to define policies for processing particular file formats e.g. what preservation and access formats to normalise to and what tools to use for that normalisation. There was shared agreement in the room that it would be useful to know what tweaks other institutions have made, how those institutions are similar/different to yours and why they have made those tweaks. Some people questioned the practice of normalising JPEG to TIFF, especially given that TIFFs take up so much space and asked the question, “what are we gaining?”. Are we guilty of following such practice because “it’s just the done thing”? 

There was acknowledgement that several institutions don’t feel they have the time, resources or expertise to be modifying the FPR - especially on an ongoing basis - and would like to be able to look to Artefactual to provide best-practice “default” settings for the FPR. Interestingly, later on during his update, Matthew Addis from Arkivum announced that Archivematica and Preservica are collaborating to investigate FPR and possibly produce an interoperable registry shared between the two systems.

All in all it was a very useful and informative day. Thank you to our hosts at the National Library of Wales for being so accommodating and providing a slap-up Christmas lunch! 

(see also Jen's blog reflecting on the meeting and the Format Policy Registry in particular)

Laura Giles
City of Culture Digital Archivist

My year as a Transforming Archives Trainee

It has been a while since I finished my Transforming Archives Trainee with The National Archives at Hull History Centre and I just wanted to reflect and write about my experience.

Francisco (left) with Tom the other Trainee we hosted this year

When I look back, I can’t be more grateful to both the Hull History Centre and The National Archives for this unique opportunity. I’d also like to give special thanks to my managers Simon Wilson and Emma Stagg for their patience and effort to make this an exceptional experience.

The final outcome of my training was a successful job application. I am now working as a Digital Imaging Officer at the London Metropolitan Archives! 

My traineeship also inspired me to launch a job board for digitisation jobs, which aims to help other trainees and professionals find a job in the sector.
 

Digital Preservation Guidelines

I had the opportunity to attend the course ‘An Introduction to Digitisation and Digital Preservation’. This was provided by The National Archives and The University of Dundee. The essays I wrote and conversations I had with my tutor Melinda Haunton gave me a clear understanding of the problems that institutions can experience with Digital Preservation.

For example because the concept of digital preservation is quite new, many institutions are still trying to understand what digital preservation strategy is best for them, how to carry out this process and how to raise or allocate funding and resources. There is not a widely accepted consensus, this can lead to poorly thought out execution and a lack of funding necessary to produce useful results.

Completed NDSA Levels self assessment grid 

I also understood the technical challenges of “software obsolescence” and how file formats that we use now may not be usable in 10 or 50 years. For example, most people are familiar with JPEG formats for images now, but in 50 years time, we may have moved onto other file formats.  It could be very hard for future generations to access these file formats. That is why any attempt to preserve documents/files in a digital format must consider this and ensure documents are stored in simple, secure, affordable, open source, popular and easy to access formats.
 

With assistance from University Archivist, Simon Wilson and fellow trainee, Tom Dealey, we completed a self-assessment exercise using the Levels of Digital Preservation developed by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, which aims to build awareness of current capacity and inspire organisations to develop their digital preservation activities. (see the full blog on this from March this year).

Digitisation

Digitising the Hotham pedigree roll

I really enjoyed digitising medieval parchment rolls from the 16th century. Our last exhibition '’The Hothams, Governors of Hull & the Civil War'’ required us to capture oversized scrolls that were 3 metres long, this was particularly challenging as our equipment could only capture small sections of the scrolls at a time, we then had to stitch these images together with Photoshop.

I was also involved with many other events relating to Hull City of Culture 2017 including the ‘’Hull Charters’’ exhibition which showed how the people of Hull were granted privileges, rights and responsibilities which now form the bedrock of how we live as citizens today. I assisted in retouching the digital images of some of these charters.

I helped with preparations for ‘’Larkin: New Eyes Each Year’’, an exhibition that explored connections between Larkin’s life and work in Hull. I helped digitise a wide range of materials including photographs, letters and documents from his collection. I enjoyed learning about Larkin’s life and understanding how exhibitions are put together from beginning to the end.

Spanish Civil War items

Conclusion

I believe this traineeship has been about much more than developing my skills. It is about empowering and inspiring people to develop their passion for the Archives and the Heritage world, being in a privileged position to unlock and reinterpret the past whilst understanding how future digital generations will be able to use, access and interact with our heritage records.

I was given so many opportunities to move forward in my professional career. I had a life coach who helped me to focus on my strengths and motivated me to find new ways to develop my confidence. I had the chance to attend a wide range of workshops and conferences around the country and I had hands on experience which honed my skills.

As a result of all this, I gained not only skills and a job at the London Metropolitan Archives, but developed new ideas, I launched a job board for digitisation jobs I am working on a new project related to ai jobs, which aims to empower the new workforce as digitisation, the fourth industrial revolution and AI enter the mainstream.

Francisco
(now former Transforming Archives trainee)

PASIG 17 conference - a few reflections

I am the recently appointed City of Culture Digital Archivist. This archive will seek to document Hull’s time as City of Culture in order for it to become a key part of the collective memory of the city and to inspire creativity and innovation for years to come. Largely digital in format, it will challenge us to develop new strategies, technologies and workflows for preserving and providing access to archival records. 

To assist with this, from 11th-13th September I attended the yearly meeting of the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG), hosted by the Bodleian Libraries & Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge (DPOC) at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. PASIG is dedicated to advancing the practice of digital preservation and archiving.

Over the course of three days we were treated to more than 50 talks, panel sessions and vendor demos – so of course I won’t be summarising every single one! But there were certainly a few sessions that struck a particular chord with me that I’d like to talk about.

Oxford Museum of Natural History

Eduardo del Valle of the University of the Balearic Islands gave a talk about catastrophic data loss which served as a cautionary tale. Having lost 248GB of digitised files during a data migration, which amounted to three months scanning work on fragile, rare, unique books his university has now implemented Libsafe. This means that all NDSA levels of preservation are reached, providing the expectation that such a loss should not occur again.  He warned against taking assurances from IT services at face value and that it’s not worth taking risks with data as anything that can go wrong will go wrong! This talk underlined the usefulness of such standards as the NDSA levels of preservation and how they can provide a framework that protects valuable information.

Patricia Sleeman of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) gave what was, in my (and I think many others’) opinion, the standout talk of the conference. Opening her talk with a compelling video of the poet and activist Emi Mahmoud performing her poem “Head over Heels”, Patricia went on to speak with power and urgency about the crucial work of the UNHCR. When compared to the need to provide nutrition and shelter to displaced people it can seem hard to justify spending money on recordkeeping and archives, but as Patricia explained, the protection of culture and information is vital to the protection of a sense of humanity. Not only can the availability of authoritative and verifiable information assist in the battle against dangerous fake news, the preservation of cultural identities that oppressors have sought to destroy can help rebuild people, their lives and their memories. It was a sobering reminder that what we do is about more than bytes and boxes on shelves and that to loosely quote Patricia, “we have a right to be forgotten but we also have the right to be remembered”.

Whilst the conference covered a hugely diverse array of subjects, from storage trends to advocacy to certification and beyond, four overarching themes emerged to me:

1. That in order to progress we must accept a degree of uncertainty. There is no way we can know the exact outcomes of new digital preservation activities before we try them – we mustn’t let that stop us though, as we can only learn by doing.
2. Collaboration is key. Sharing insights and findings, successes and failures with the digital preservation community benefits us all immeasurably.
3. It’s time to stop thinking about digital preservation and start doing digital preservation.
4. We should be receptive to new ways of doing things. The archives profession has been comfortable with the ways of Hilary Jenkinson for nigh on 100 years – perhaps now is the time to be truly disruptive and start embracing new technologies such as machine reading and artificial intelligence.

It was great to learn so much about what is being achieved in the field of digital preservation internationally and to make contacts that I can hopefully collaborate with as we make progress with the City of Culture digital archives.

Laura Giles

City of Culture Digital Archivist

Experimenting with Digital Collections with the British Library

Last Friday we travelled to Sheffield Hallam University’s Art & Design Research Centre, who are working in partnership with the British Library Labs. This workshop focused on how the British Library’s digital collections team is making their data accessible to researchers, and the opportunities and challenges involved.

So far in this traineeship our focus has been on how to preserve the data, but recently we have been thinking about what to do with the data once it’s been stored. Archive records aren’t much use if nobody can read them, so how do you allow researchers to access these digital records, and what tools will they need to use it? For the British Library, the solution was to make datasets on the collections freely available through BL Labs, and allow researchers, developers and artists to reinterpret the collections in new ways.

A mixture of archivists, librarians, designers and artists at the start of the workshop.

A lot of the research has been in finding ways to automate the process of identifying what is in each collection. One starting concept was to take an ordinary face-recognition algorithm and pass it over scanned pages from 19th Century books to find drawings of people. This simple concept has been developed and expanded into the Mechanical Curator, a program which automatically identifies illustrations within the text, identifies the content and posts a random selection of pictures online. Similar algorithms can perform similar functions, such as teaching an Optical Character Recognition program to spot long-forgotten Victorian poetry in digitised journals.

The biggest point that came from this was less the technical aspect, but the human aspect. It is important to ask questions about exactly what researchers want to find, and how to help them find it. Digital collections can easily contain thousands or millions of files, and good search tools are key to letting users filter through stacks of data to get to what they want.

After the coffee break, professors from Sheffield Hallam’s ADRC shared some projects they have worked on, using new technology in new ways to display data and curate exhibitions. We saw some work by the meSch project into new concepts for presenting information. It can be all too easy for the presentation to overtake the content - the meSch project aims to develop museums technology which doesn’t interfere with the visitor experience.

A prototype guide for Sheffield General Cemetery, resembling a memorial book.
Visitors use the bookmarks to play audio recordings on different themes.

Throughout the workshop, we saw how not just how new technology can be used to engage with the museums and archive sector, but the importance of working directly with users to provide the tools they want or need to use. We’ll be keeping these lessons in mind as we continue to develop the Hull History Centre’s digital collections.

Tom & Francisco, Transforming Archive Trainees

NDSA Levels of digital preservation

Here at the Hull History Centre, we have been reviewing the NDSA levels of digital preservation. This was something we had meant to do for a while. Last summer we volunteered to feed our experiences back to the Archives Accreditation team which is looking at using this element in the future.  

The levels are a framework created by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance as a guide for institutions that are managing digital material. The framework breaks up the many various and sometimes confusing aspects of digital preservation into five easily understood functional areas: Storage, Integrity, Security, Metadata and File Formats. These areas can be graded into four levels of increasing preservation security, creating a visual reference grid that can be used as a checklist. 

Two extra areas that have been proposed are Access (proposed by the Library of the University of California) and Physical Formats (by the United States Geological Survey). In creating a grid for the Hull University Archives we decided to include these two proposed areas.

This is our starting grid, with the two extra areas and a few minor tweaks around virus checking

Completing the self-assessment

To undertake the self-assessment we simply looked at each area, starting with level 1 and quickly determined whether we had met the requirement completely (green), partially (yellow) or not at all (red). We deliberately sought not to dwell on each element and erred on the side of caution.

This is our final grid, lots of red but some aspects/elements are already in-place

Using the framework

The framework is a self-assessment tool which can help you plan your digital preservation journey.  Don't worry - most of the Level 4 requirements in each area are intended to be hard to reach but is intended to serve as a long-term target to aspire to. At Hull our long-term target is to become a trusted digital repository.

Some elements will conflict with institutional policy - for example the storage area recommends having three separate copies of your data in different locations obviously has resource implications. 

The best way we found to approach the NDSA levels is to focus on meeting the basic requirements, understand the level of preservation that can achieve with the current resources and work up to levels 3 and 4 step-by-step. At the end of the day, every archive has different goals for their digital preservation plans and understanding how to achieve them is an ongoing learning process. Having conducted the exercise this year - we now need to make it an integrated element into our work-programme and review progress in 12 months time!

We decided to implement the two proposed areas but we did not a few issues. It can be argued that Physical Media is already featured under the Storage area albeit in not such an explicit way.  It can be argued (indeed was often argued) that the Access area of the framework fits outside of the main digital preservation strategy. One reason to include Access is that it ensures this element remains a visible and explicit part of the planning process - and of course is the reason why we are preserving the stuff in the first place. Whilst we didn't always agree - the discussions were very interesting in that it made us think about the detail and the big picture.

Conclusion

Whatever form the NDSA levels of digital preservation end up taking in the future, the ability to be able to see at-a-glance how an institution is faring in its digital preservation efforts, and what should be the next set of goals, is an incredibly useful tool. It breaks down the sometimes confusing terms and stages of digital preservation into smaller points that are more easily manageable, making it much easier for institutions to begin implementing their own digital archives.

Francisco & Tom

Transforming Archives trainees

What I Wish I Knew Before I Started...

Senate House Library, the venue for the day

Last month we attended What I Wish I Knew Before I Started: The DPC Student Conference in London. This event is held annually by the Digital Preservation Coalition to give archive students and new professionals advice about working in digital preservation, the art of storing computer files to the same quality as we would with paper documents in an archive. 

Digital preservation is a fairly new area of archival studies but an increasingly vital one, as more and more “born digital” content starts to be collected by archives around the world.

The day consisted of two sessions of talks by sector experts. The first session was advice on getting started with digital preservation projects from the perspective of the information managers and technologists responsible for delivering the schemes. The talks covered various subjects, such as how to set up preservation projects, the best places to look for advice, beginners courses and how to keep up to date with the latest developments in the field.

Technologists perspective - Matthew Addis

Matthew Addis - Arkivum told us about the importance to keep the content active and how essential is to managing data overtime and even more how software preservation can preserve an original experience.

The second session was given by practising digital archivists who discussed what their day-to-day job entails, what kinds of challenges they face on a regular basis and what are the most important lessons they could give to anyone starting out in the field.

Open data was another discussion topic touched by Adrian Brown, Director of the Parliamentary Archives. In his presentation, he spoke about the importance of having a simple metadata and filing system and how significant is preserving the accessibility of useful information in a record office, which holds several million historical records relating to Parliament.

But every archive or museum is different, Glenn Cumiskey - The British Museum left a question for the audience: What does digital mean in the context of your organisation? There is a unique meaning for every organisation. He also recommend us few titles to take a look: Practical Digital Preservation by Adrian Brown, Personal Digital Archiving by Gabriela Redwine.

The DCC Lifecycle model - this was
recommended by one of the speakers 

The last speaker of the afternoon was Dave Thompson - Digital Curator of the Wellcome Collection. He emphasised that preservation is about access and how understanding our users and can help us to preserve our archives and libraries.

The final session was a roundtable session with all the speakers answering questions from the audience. One important subject that was discussed here was the state of digital preservation in ten years’ time. Many of the experts felt that as more and more digital content begins to move into archives then the idea of digital preservation will become embedded into the concept of curation and records management.

At end of the conference we got the idea that the digital preservation community is open to help people working on similar projects. So, don’t be afraid to ask around for advice, because there’s probably someone out there who’s had exactly the same problem as you have!

Francisco Castanon and Tom Dealey, Transforming Archives trainees

3D4ever Conference

I had the chance to attend the 3D4ever Conference event last week, a joint event by the Digital Preservation Coalition and Wellcome Library to encourage cultural heritage professionals to understand and undertake 3D scanning and its challenges.

Photometry workshop

I didn’t have too much experience in photometry and 3D imaging but I highly recommend it. It was amazing to see the immense range of ideas and projects discussed by the speakers and this made me realise how 3D imaging technology advancements have opened up so many opportunities for museums and the heritage sector. As professionals, we must study and promote this evolving technology because it brings exciting opportunities to research and also to engage in new ways with our audiences.

William Kilbride, Executive Director

of the Digital Preservation Coalition

I was inspired by the workshops and talks, and during the day I was developing ideas in my mind which I could take back to my own workplace and utilise in future projects. I think the key message I took home, which all the speakers touched on, was the challenges of creating, sharing and preserving 3D data. I found the whole day very productive, and especially the workshop about photometry given by Sophie Dixon and Edward Silverton which showed us a brilliant approach of how to set up a studio with the minimum amount of equipment necessary to complete the full 3D imaging process.

For me, one of the most striking statements of the conference came from Stuart Jeffrey from Glasgow School of Art, who said, ‘we need to have open access to data and share those experiences but it is important to find a balance between full access and low access.’

Stuart Jeffrey Research Fellow in International Heritage Visualisation at 

the School of Simulation and Visualisation of the Glasgow School of Art

Another key speaker was Helen Hardy, Digital Collections Programme Manager at Natural History Museum. Helen spoke brilliantly about the importance of data preservation and brought to the audience the challenge of joining up natural history data from around the globe.

For example, it’s important for archaeologists to share their findings. Anthony Corns technology Manager at The Discovery Programme showed us his 3D models of Ireland's iconic sites and objects.

After this amazing presentation, I realised the importance of this new technology in the study of material remains and how difficult it was few years ago to share these objects, until the arrival of new visual platforms like Sketchfab which gives instant access of the 3D models, creating a new experience for the public and allows archaeologists to compare objects instantly.

I can summarise the day with a good remark from one presentation: ‘Be as liberal as possible with 3D data, as great things can be done with it. Otherwise it'll go stale.’

You can find more information related to the conference through the 3D4ever hashtag 

Francisco Castanon

Transforming Archives trainee