We were very excited to be visiting the lovely city of York for the Digital Preservation’s event “From Planning to Deployment: Digital Preservation and Organizational Change”. The day promised a mixture of case studies from organisations who have or are in the process of implementing a digital preservation programme and also a chance for Jisc to showcase some of the work they have been sponsoring as part of the Research Data Shared Services project (which we are a pilot institution for).
It was a varied programme and the audience was very mixed – one of the big benefits of attending events like these is the opportunity to speak to colleagues from other institutions in related but different roles. I spoke to some Records Managers and was interested in their perspective as active managers of current data. I’m a big believer in promoting digital preservation through involvement at all stages of the data lifecycle (or records continuum if you prefer) so it is important that as many people as possible – whatever their role in the creation or management of data – are encouraged into good data management practices. This might be by encouraging scientists to adopt the FAIR principles or by Records Managers advising on file formats, file naming and structures and so on.
The first half of the day was a series of case studies presented by various institutions, large and small, who had a whole range of experiences to share. It was introduced by a presentation from the Polonsky Digital Preservation Project based at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Lee Pretlove and Sarah Mason jointly led the conversation talking us through the challenges of developing and delivering a digital preservation project which has to continue beyond the life of the project. Both Universities represented in this project are very large organisations but this can make the issues faced by the team extremely complex and challenging. They have been recording their experiences of trying to embed practices from the project so that digital preservation can become part of a sustainable programme.
The first case study came from Jen Mitcham from York University talking about the digital preservation work they have undertaken their. Jen has documented her activities very helpfully and consistently on her blog and she talked specifically about the amount of planning which needs to go into work and then the very real difficulties in implementation. She has most recently been looking at digital preservation for research data – something we are working on here at Lancaster University.
Next up was Louisa Matthews from the Archaeological Data Service who have been spearheading approaches to Digital Preservation for a very long time. The act of excavating a site is by its nature destructive so it is vital to be able to capture a data about it accurately and be able to return to and reuse the data for the foreseeable future. This captures digital preservation in a nutshell! Louisa described how engaging with their contributors ensures high quality re-usable data – something we are all aiming for.
The final case study for the morning was Rebecca Short from the University of Westminster talking about digital preservation and records management. The university have already had success implementing a digital preservation workflow and are now seeking to embed it further in the whole records creation and management process. Rebecca described the very complex information environment at her university – relatively small in comparison to the earlier presentations but no less challenging for all that
The afternoon was a useful opportunity to hear from Jisc about their Research Data Shared Services project which we are a pilot for. We heard presentations from Arkivum, Preservica and Artefactual Systems who are all vendors taking part in the project and gave interesting and useful perspectives on their approaches to digital preservation issues. The overwhelming message however has to be – you can’t buy a product which will do digital preservation. Different products and services can help you with it, but as William Kilbride, Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition has so neatly put it “digital preservation is a human project” and we should be focussing on getting people to engage with the issues and for all of us to be doing digital preservation.
Rachel MacGregor
