DCDC22: Inclusive innovation – digital creativity and opportunity

It was great to be back at DCDC for another year – it’s always been a conference I enjoyed both in person and on line and a big thank you to RLUK, Jisc and the National Archives for hosting. For the first time in a while this year I have the prospect of an in person conference (iPres 2022 in Glasgow – can’t wait!). Reflecting on online versus in person I can see the massive benefits of online especially for those with any caring responsibilities or limited budgets (and it goes without saying that these inequities fall harder on women and people of colour). I am privileged in that I don’t have caring responsibilities which make it hard for me to get away and I work for an organisation which can afford to send me to conferences (hence getting to iPres – thank you University of Warwick!) so having the choice I do realise that the convenience of online is also (for me) its downfall in that it is too easy to schedule too many other things around it. It did mean I fitted it around work commitments and medical appointments which was both good and bad – I certainly will be using the watch again facility which DCDC has always offered – but this doesn’t allow for some of the great debate and discussion which are a highlight of any conference.

The conference got off to a great start for me with Leonie Watson on “Algorithmic Fairness and Inclusive Systems” talking about inclusive design which was thought provoking and packed with useful tips on inclusive practice including these great videos on inclusive design. One of my big take aways from Leonie’s talk was how she made the point about describing oneself at the start of a presentation (a verbal equivalent of alt-text) so I will now be beginning my presentation with a quick description of myself (including my age which was the thing people were most reluctant to say I noticed!). Since the conference Kamala Harris has created a bit of stir amongst some right wing commentators for doing this very thing (as if there weren’t enough other things going on in the world to get wound up about!).

It was also great to hear a session on digital exclusion and the flip side of how to use digital to enagage with marginalised communities. Claire Boardman from the University of York spoke about working with the communities who experience the highest levels of digital exclusion. It is a complex issue, often oversimplified as “generational lag” whereas in reality it is not only older people who are at risk of exclusion. So-called “digital natives” do not necessarily have the skills or opportunities they need – data poverty is a real issue.

In contrast in some ways Delia Keating from the National Library of Ireland talked about how having born digital material in collections as well as the act of collecting it can contribute hugely to engagement and inclusion. This really rang true from my experience as more contemporary collecting has put us in touch with people we otherwise would probably not have spoken to and has made us tackle challenges such as social media archiving which will hopefully lead to more engagement opportunities and more diverse and representative collections.

The final presentation in this session was from Graham Jevon who took a close look at crowd sourced transcription projects, in particular the British Library’s Agents of Enslavement project, part of their Endangered Archives Programme which digitised and transcribed two colonial newspapers from Barbados with the aim of foregrounding the voices of enslaved people from these sources. It was really good to hear about some of the ethical considerations of digitisation (and outreach) projects and this also featured in one of the “on demand” talks – The student voice, past and present – from the University of Salford talking about the digitisation of the records of the Student Union. It’s something we should all be giving a lot of thought to in general especially in the context of many services (our won included) working towards making their digital collections as accessible as possible; this shouldn’t be done to the detriment or disadvantage of anyone.

I had to miss a day of the conference (although I caught a little of the National Archives breakfast briefing with Rachael Minott talking about building equity into service delivery. I’m certainly going to schedule some time on catching up with the things I missed which are all available on YouTube.

I was really pleased to be able to rejoin for with the roundtable on developing computational skills for digital collections chaired by Peter Webster. This came at a good time for me having recently attended the Digital Preservation Coalition’s launch of their beginners guide to computational access which I think will be available to everyone later in the year (currently members only). Working (as I do) with digital archives I am always aware of how there are ways of using these records in ways which were unimaginable in the past; equally computational methods offer new opportunists for archivists and curators to manage and make collections available. It was really interesting to hear from researchers who were using computational methods in their research and also from people who developed modules for the awesome resource which is The Programming Historian. I was particularly struck by Chahan Vidal-Gorène’s work on non western scripts and automated transcription as well as Yann Ryan‘s work on creating an interactive mapping plugin for visualisations using R and Shiny.

Keynote for Day Four was Mark Martin (@urban_teacher) and Patrick Towell (Audience Agency) about digital literacy and engagement. I found Mark’s presentation really inspiring and thought provoking – he urged us to examine closely the ecosystem within which we are operating and beware of creating silos when we make assumptions about people and communities and then create or target digital spaces based on these assumptions. Getting this wrong can be very dangerous and lead to misinformation and disengagement. On a very practical level Mark shared some stock images designed by UK Black Tech to help create positive images especially foregrounded Black women in technology. Representation does matter! Patrick introduced the Digitally Democratising Archives project aimed at diversifying audiences. He also got top marks from me by saying “no one has the silver bullet for digital preservation” – amen Patrick!

The final session of the day for me was Innovative practice in search and discovery with a great range of panel presentations including the team from McGill Library talking about handwritten text recognition, Jenny Bunn from the National Archives doing a grand job of demystifying AI in the cultural heritage sector and the one I must go back to which was a collaborative team from Bristol, Birmingham, Maryland and the UK National Archives presenting on EMCODIST a context based search tool for email archives:

The last day of the conference was one of the best for me – I attended a workshop on using ePADD for email preservation from the team at the John Rylands library. I’ve heard them speak about this before but it was great to have a more in depth dive into it and have the chance to have more discussion on the topic. They even mentioned my blog post on the subject which has prompted me to get back to blogging!

The conference for me was wrapped up with a Jisc-fronted session on Machine Learning, datasets and humanities research. Peter Findlay invited us to consider computers and algorithms as our new patrons which is an interesting perspective. Jane Stevenson talked about the work of Archives Hub in this are and her takeaway was: “this is hard”. Are institutions at the required level of maturity for this kind of work? I’m not sure we are…

This was a great conference with a great deal of variety and a lot of material which I still need to digest and plenty to catch up on online. I’m very grateful that the conference was made so accessible in terms of platform and also in terms of being able to catch up on sessions I couldn’t make. Whether or not I have time to do so is another matter…..

MidiPres celebrates WDPD 2021

Today is World Digital Preservation Day and all of us MidiPres ers are celebrating by sharing some of thoughts and experiences. The theme of this year’s day is “breaking down barriers” which is what the MidiPres network is all about, helping each other in our digital preservation journeys. As Oliver says “Digital Preservation starts with a single step” (and Sara adds that coffee is mandatory!).

Wolverhampton City Archives

Heidi writes:

“I am on a mission to make our oral history collections more accessible! Some are on minidisc, some are on cassette tapes, some are on floppy disks or CDs etc, but I am having a go at converting them all to digital and uploading them to SoundCloud, to sit behind a new website that is being developed. I have lots of bits of kit and gadgets to help me in this process.  

Preparing to work on oral history collections

The mini discs were beyond me – they are being converted to digital by the University of Wolverhampton, but I have a Tape Converter which enables me to convert cassette tapes to MP3 files. I have to use an external, stand-alone, non-corporate laptop as our corporate laptops don’t recognise the external floppy disk drive etc and other external media. It also means I can run virus checks on there before loading material onto the corporate network. 

I was all set to work on the CDs (which are already digital, so I thought it would be straightforward), but I fell at the first hurdle. The audio files on the CDs were .cda format rather than WAV or MP3. This meants that they would play whilst on the CD but would not once the files had been copied off it. So then my first job became converting them to a format in which they could be used via Windows Media Player (in this case lossless WAV).   

This is a work in progress and I am learning different methods as I go, as each oral history collection seems to use different formats and media etc. I am using them as guinea pigs to help me develop procedures for when I am dealing with similar material in the future, as well as to develop guidelines for future depositors, to make things easier. I still have to work out what metadata I need and which additional fields I might need to use in CALM, but that will be a puzzle for another day. I am having fun playing with all the different kit – so is this a digital preservation nightmare or digital preservation dream? You decide!!”

Shropshire Archives

Sara writes:

“Shropshire Archives currently working on digital preservation ingest workstation DPIA – coffee mandatory!”

Data Protection for digital preservation ingest workstation

Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service 

Oliver writes:

“Worcestershire Archive is currently ploughing on with reviewing its legacy digital holdings.  Tom Poole, our new Archive Trainee, who just a few short weeks ago was completely new to digital preservation, has enthusiastically got stuck into the tasks at hand and has also made a start at the excellent “Novice to Know-How” course.  Along the way he has been introduced to some unfamiliar types of digital carrier formats.  8” floppy discs, anyone!?  Digital Preservation, for anyone, starts with a single step!”

Tom Poole, Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service’s Archive Trainee, being introduced to 8″ Floppy Discs 

Derbyshire Record Office

Becky made a gif!

University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections

Laura writes:

“Gaining confidence to give python a go – how to automate some of those smaller but time consuming digital preservation tasks!”

 #experimenting #learningfromothers

Experimenting with Python scripts

Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick

Rachel writes:

“I’m focussing on examining the workflows we already have for capture, accessioning, appraisal and ingest and looking to see how we can improve them. At the moment everything is very manual which is time consuming and error prone. Sharing ideas and learning from others is really important which is why it’s great to be a part of the MidiPres Network!”

DROID report from a recent accession

#WDPD21

MidiPres May 2021: Cataloguing Born Digital

Image credit: Image by DreamQuest from Pixabay

It’s now over twelve months since Laura and I launched our “digital preservation support network” (at a real live event – imagine that!). It’s heartening to see how much we’ve developed during this time. For the Spring MidiPres meeting we had taken a bit of a poll on what topics people would like to focus on and “Cataloguing Born Digital Collections” was quite high up on the list.

We invited a few people to share their experiences of cataloguing born digital materials to get things started but in the spirit of the network this was as much to invite further debate and comment from others and get us all thinking. I know I find this useful as it gives me ideas to borrow and develop. It’s also helpful to be able to get a sense check from others – does my theory (or practice) make sense? Might there be better ways of doing it?

Our first presenter reflected on their considerable experience of cataloguing analogue collections and the challenges they were anticipating in tackling born digital collections. There were some technical challenges such as managing the integration between the CALM cataloguing software and the Preservica preservation system but these (as is so often the case) were smaller challenges than dealing with the size and complexity of the material coming in. Archivists spend their time making sense of the archive and presenting it to the outside world in a way that is intelligible and digestible, so there were inevitably going to be challenges with very large deposits which either had no structure or an extremely complex one – how is this best presented in a catalogue to facilitate discovery? Sometimes file names are user friendly, sometimes they are not and there are always the tensions of capturing the essence of what was created and facilitating users in their discovery of it. There was some discussion around managing personal data – identifying it in amongst a huge quantity of material and what resources there were for automated ways of doing this.

Our second presenter focussed more on the practicalities of cataloguing standards and software. Many MidiPres members use CALM as their cataloguing software but by no means all; we have a strong feeling that the network should aim to be vendor neutral as far as possible which helps us be more inclusive. Several members do not have specific cataloguing software at all – usually using a spreadsheet to catalogue and manage their collections information. The CALM cataloguing system (like others) is standards based and as is common in the UK most people adhere to ISAD(G) for their cataloguing with local variations in practice. Increasingly, as ISAD(G) was not developed for digital collections, practice forced to diversify and devlop and whilst alternatives are emerging (notably RiC) I’ve yet to get a feel for people embracing this. A lack of standardisation in the way we describe our collections is likely to have a negative effect on their discoverability – especially across different institutions – so the more we share experiences and practice the better.

There was some discussion of that perennial problem of dates – do we record the creation date, the last modified date, the presumed actual date of the document and if so where and how to record and then represent to the researcher. Which led us on to the capture and use of the metadata which we create around digital collections – it’s not something that any of us were aware of being made publicly available routinely but it is definitely a consideration. There was quite some discussion more broadly about how we represent born digital collections via our catalogues and the only consensus is that it depends on the collection! We also mooted how we managed digital content within our collections, especially hybrid ones, and there were various practices shared for indicating the presence of digital content to give the archivist an easy way of gaining an overview of what is in the system, such as assigning an accession specific code or creating a drop down or Y/N field in the collections management system. This allows for greater reporting functionality although probably doesn’t address the need for a more granular approach.

Our third presenter talked about the move from traditional paper oriented ways of cataloguing towards incorporating digital – I think this is something which many struggle with because standards and software are so deeply rooted in the paper world that even if you want to move on from that (both in terms of the types of collections you are working with but also in the way in which collections are made available online) it can be something of a struggle. There was some good discussion of no “one size fits all” approach working for born digital (as indeed is the case for analogue archives) and Trevor Owens’ excellent “Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation” book was referenced – an excellent read for anyone interested in getting into more depth with the subject.

Sharepoint feels like the Wild West to many of us…
(Image credit by Brigitte makes custom works from your photos, thanks a lot from Pixabay)

There was lots of discussion around what the records creators/depositors can do for us. Some archive offices asked for lists to accompany any deposits which inevitably varied in usefulness, but in some cases were seen as explicit statement of balancing the depositor/archivist relationship so the archives were not seen as a dumping ground for material which was no longer considered immediately useful! There was some discussion about how or even if it might be possible to acquire other sorts of creator generated metadata (checksums being the most obvious one) and despite the wealth of digital preservation literature recommending this as good practice, most if not all of us felt this was at present completely unachievable (and some had attempted it). It was even observed that in some situations putting demands for lists (for example) on depositors would just lead to nothing being deposited at all. The real world, it turns out, is quite a long way away from the text books.

There was loads more covered in the meetings including a SharePoint Anonymous discussion (“it’s like the Wild West) and some thoughts on licensing of digital materials, both of which felt like they could form the core of future meetings. We certainly aren’t going to run out of things to say any time soon and I really feel we are helping everyone to build confidence in the sector, which is what we set out to achieve.

MidiPres January 2021: a closer look at email

No, not emails (Image by Andrys Stienstra from Pixabay)

It doesn’t seem five minutes since the last meeting of Midipres (and I said that last time) but here we are in 2021 and time for another Midlands Preservation Network event which brings together practitioners from across the UK Midlands region to share and discuss their digital preservation stories. This meeting had a special theme – email preservation – which proved a popular topic with many and we had some lively discussion covering a range of topics from normalisation to appraisal and access.

We kicked off with a case study from a group member who had received some emails as part of a deposit of various digital records from a Parish Council (no not Handforth!) including emails saved onto a cd in an .eml format. The archives were having trouble opening the emails* and had concerns that converting them to another format as that created problems with the attachments… We had a useful discussion around how much of the available literature addresses the issue of migrating and dealing with entire mailboxes rather than having a handful of emails amongst other material (I’ve certainly come across the latter scenario more than once). We talked about the various formats that you were likely to come across – .pst, .mbox and so on and how much or little influence you might have about asking for a particular format.

A couple of others shared their work – one archivist had been collecting Covid update emails from the Chief Executive’s Office as part of their contemporary collecting strategy but had concerns (don’t we all) about embedded links to external content including videos. I don’t think anyone has the answer to these issues but there would be useful work mapping out what might be possible and the sorts of tools needed to achieve this kind of capture. Another group member shared a success story in that they had succeeded where I have failed (I am not bitter about this at all!) in getting a deposit of the inbox of one of the Chief Officers in their organisation. It required developing a new deposit agreement and some significant degree of negotiation but to me sounds like a huge success and I look forward to hearing on further updates on this, hoping we might be able to emulate their success. We discussed the attitudes people have towards their emails and how the mixing of personal and professional in email accounts made the management and capture of email particularly challenging. One of the group mentioned James Lappin’s recent blog post on this very topic and I shall be reading his article with great interest. Getting people to weed their emails in advance of depositing sounds like it could be challenging and we were pointed towards a recent IRMS podcast where Vincent Hoolt of the Netherlands National Archives discussed the pitfalls of exactly this, talking about how they had inadvertently received the divorce papers of a government official – not just embarrassing but a GDPR nightmare!

The thrill of a live demo of Emailchemy (photo author’s own)

I followed this up by giving as live demo (brave I know) of Emailchemy – a tool for converting email to different formats. I’ve had a go with this and with Aid4Mail in their demo versions and can definitely seeing them being useful for future work especially in conjunction with ePADD which I’ve also written about before. I am very enthusiastic about the potential use of things like ePADD for both appraisal and access to email collections. There was more discussion about cataloguing email collections and I’m sure we’ll be looking to talk more about cataloguing born digital in a future session.

In the meantime I think I’ll get back to sniffing around after those institutional email accounts!

*update: problem now solved: a file path issue 🙂

AURA Network Workshop: Open Data vs Privacy

National Library of Ireland (By YvonneM – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15120535)

The last non-virtual conference I attended was back in January in London at the Archives, Access and AI conference which I blogged about here and that work has been built upon to form the AURA Network (Archives in the UK and Republic of Ireland and AI) which focuses on trying to unlock digital assets held by cultural institutions. So I was very excited to have the opportunity to travel to virtual Dublin (for the second time this year!for this workshop which had a fabulous programme – and many thanks to Dr Lise Jaillant of the University of Loughborough and Dr Annalina Caputo of Dublin City University for putting together and co ordinating a great event. Day One focussed on Open Data, Privacy and AI and Day Two on issues of access to Born Digital archives – very much interlinked topics. You can see the full programme here and all I will do is cover a few of my highlights.

The conference opened with a virtual tour of the National Library of Ireland from an architectural perspective, led by Brid O’Sullivan which was wonderful and really made me determined to visit, not least because she mentioned that they have the “second* best toilets in Dublin” (according to one newspaper anyway!). I’m adding it to my to-visit list for my next Dublin trip!

The opening session began with Rob Brennan from DCU exploring the difficulties of dealing with GDPR and personal data in the age of the digital deluge. The volume of information being created and sloshing around the place means that traditional or even more recent methods of tracking data (using spreadsheets for example) just don’t scale up – “please feel sorry for the Data Protection Office” said Brennan! The answer to this problem might be in using machine learning to create computational methods of identifying personal data and Brennan highlighted the work of the Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls Community Group, part of WC3, who have been developing a taxonomy of privacy and data protection terms to assist with just this sort of issue. Hopefully this work will start to remove the headache for all DPOs and anyone else dealing with sensitive data – this will is potentially valuable for all archivists and records managers.

This was followed by a wide ranging and thoughtful presentation from Rachel Hosker from the University of Edinburgh with her wonderfully titled “Beautiful Messy Data: Archival Access and Data Protection” which explored the issues familiar to archivists everywhere: digitised and digital archives can be investigated using data science methods but they are unstructured and it can be very difficult to identify and manage issues relating to privacy when you don’t know what the records might contain. And whilst machine learning and natural language processing give hope that some of these difficulties may be overcome using automated processes there is still much to be learnt about biases in these processes. Hosker highlighted new work by Lucy Havens, Melissa Terras, Benjamin Bach and Beatrice Alex which aims to unpick some of this.

Finally Frederic Saunderson from the National Library of Scotland invited us to consider the differences between data protection and privacy, which overlap but are by no means the same. The issues over access can be further complicated when rights management is exercised and practitioners need to be very careful to apply the appropriate access framework to different collections.

The round table session which followed covered topics as varied as semantic web technologies and data models to manage access, the FAIR principles, how AI failures are human failures and more on text mining. I really enjoyed how the different aspects of “access” were explored by those working in very different disciplines but all with a common goal of ethical access for the greater good and not to the detriment of the individual. It is very heartening to be at events where these challenges can be explored so that both researchers who want access and information managers who want to protect privacy can understand the challenges on each side.

Day two opened with another round table with more semantic web research, automated sensitivity reviewing, recreating serendipity in digital searching and the problems of disambiguating in large scale digital searches. I was particularly taken with Lucy McKenna (Trinity College Dublin)’s work on authoritative interlinking for semantic web cataloguing which is shared here. The panel reflected on the need to share skills and improve communication between disciplines, something we probably are aware of on one level but don’t spend enough time on….

Dublin – can’t wait to get back there for real! (Image by Claire Tardy from Pixabay)

Eilidh MacGlone from the UK web archive then opened up the next session talking about the work of the UK’s official web archive who work hard to capture the UK’s legacy web content, in parallel to the way the network of copyright libraries capture other published outputs. However they are necessarily restricted by what they can collect – no access to material behind log ins and so forth. A parallel presentation came from Joanna Finnegan and Della Keating from the National Library of Ireland who have responsibilities for the Irish web archive. They talked about successful use of crowd sourcing (such as Flickr) to help identify people and places featured in some of their collections.

Next came Paul Gooding from the University of Glasgow discussing his work looking at how researchers actually use digital collections – it is not easy to collect data on this in an ethical way and there is much that is “hidden” in terms of the way user analytics are exposed. Ciaran Wallace of Trinity College Dublin then continued the theme of user approaches by talking about how the historian approaches digital sources, although primarily the focus was on digitised sources and how a “definitive” history is made using accessible and discoverable resources. This is obviously always the case with whatever kind of archival collection we consider and both archivist and researcher have to be as explicit and transparent about curatorial methods, decisions and dissemination. The final presentation in this session came from Gareth Jones from Dublin City University talking about search and access in broadcast media archives and was the reminder that I didn’t need that audio visual archives are extremely complex!

The afternoon concluded the workshop with another wide ranging round table discussing metadata and rights issues, interoperability and more on the semantic web, Covid collecting and social media archiving and the teaching of digital curation. Again lots of very current and interesting debate and byt the end my head was bursting with thoughts and questions and things to follow up.

It might have been the end of the workshop but there are two more planned in 2021 and there is also a call for papers for a special issue of AI and Society entitled Shedding Light into the Darkness of Digital Culture. Abstracts are due by 11th January so if you feel you have something to say on any of these wide ranging topics then take a look at the call. I can’t wait to see these outputs and in the meantime am going to be looking at data modelling and ontologies with renewed enthusiasm!

Many thanks to Andrew Janes (UK National Archives) whose tweets I relied upon heavily for this summary!

*the best toilets in Dublin are in Brown Thomas apparently

Archivematica UK User Group Online Autumn 2020

Generic image search for Scotland brought inevitable Highland kuh Image by Frank Winkler from Pixabay

It seems like a million years since we last met as a user group but astonishingly it was earlier this year when we gathered in person (can anyone remember that?) at the University of Westminster However we still want to meet and we are relying on one another even more now so it was fantastic to have the University of Glasgow host the event for us via Zoom so we could continue to meet and share ideas and experiences.

There was an appropriately Scottish feel to the meeting as we heard first of all from the George Macgregor from the University of Strathclyde about the work they have been doing on integrating Archivematica with their ePrints repository. You can read the detail of the work here but it’s the result of a fantastic international collaboration with Concordia University in Canada and has taken a lot of time and hard work to come to fruition. Strathclyde (in common with many other Universities) use ePrints as their repository where they keep (note not preserve) academic research outputs. George was very candid about the fact that preservation was not part of the data management process but they are now making great strides towards integrating preservation practices into their management workflow.

Our second speaker was Sean Rippington from the University of St Andrews (continuing the Scottish theme) talking about their recent work. For the first part of his talk Sean spoke on a parallel theme to George – integrating their repository (Pure – not a repository system but used as one by many) with a preservation system. Thanks to ongoing development work by Jisc as part of their Open Research Hub there are now Adapters to enable integration which helped St Andrews to connect Pure with Archivematica. It’s a really encouraging piece of work which is available on Github and hopefully will lead to future interoperability work. Sean also updated us on a separate but fascinating piece of work on preserving HyperCard (early Mac) files. When attempting an ingest into Archivematica normalization didn’t achieve much either for preservation (complex METs files) or for access. As a consequence they turned to emulation to support the file but would look to developing a preservation pathway going forward.

By Jeff Keyzer from Austin, TX, USA – Goodwill Computer Museum, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41058991

We had some time for discussion and talked about normalisation pathways for spreadsheets (answers on a postcard please). Convenient as online is for actually attending events (we had attendees from a really wide geographic spread which almost certainly would not have happened in real life) but the chance to have informal catch ups with people facing similar issues is less easy to replicate online although I am very interested in exploring ways of doing this…

Finally we were pleased to welcome Sarah Mason from Artefactual systems to give us all the latest Archivematica news.

Reflecting on the event we can see how every institution has their own individual setup and needs which means a lot of different approaches are required but by sharing work and ideas hopefully we can all tackle our won challenges. I’m really looking forward to more of events like this and will be looking for enhancing the networking opportunities online so that we can get the best out of our events.

Autumn MidiPres

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay

I can’t believe that time has moved round so quickly – what happened to the summer (don’t answer that)? and already we’ve had the second meeting of the Midlands Digital Preservation Network. After the last meeting we sent out a feedback form to try and get a sense of what people might want to discuss. It was important for us from the outset to get as much feedback and input as possible. There seemed to be an interest in “transfer” and by that we interpreted this as “getting the stuff into your archive” which I have always maintained is one of the hardest parts of digital preservation – it doesn’t matter how fancy your preservation system is if you can’t capture the “stuff” you want in the first place then you are not doing any kind of preservation.

I had been doing some work on using Sharepoint for depositing/collecting archives and I thought I would share my experiences with the group to get feedback, prompt others to have a go or just get people thinking a bit more about their record keeping and managing environment. A quick show of virtual hands suggested the majority of people at the meeting worked for organisations which used Sharepoint (even if they didn’t use it much themselves). On my part I have found myself using Sharepoint much more than I did during the last six months as a way of working collaboratively and remotely and our Records Manager reports that the number of Sharepoint Libraries and Teams Sites in the organisation has mushroomed in the last six months. This presents huge record keeping and compliance challenges as well as digital preservation issues but here is not the place to go into it (another blog perhaps…). However because of its ubiquity Sharepoint does seem to be a way of sharing and gathering collections. My experiments were purely in the context of internal transfers and I soon found it was beyond my skills to be able to set up the permissions to satisfy my data security requirements. Although my IT colleagues were able to help with this I still haven’t really been able to achieve what I want. I’d love to hear from anyone who has managed to set up something which they are happy with! We had some discussions about the kind of metadata you might or might not be able to capture plus that old chestnut last modified date.

Laura then bravely offered to some live tool demo-ing and she kicked off with showing the tools that they are using at the University of Nottingham to work with their audio visual collections. The thing about digital preservation work and trying to move forward with it is that it will depend on your specific situation and what your goals and priorities are. For Nottingham it was working with various A/V collections and in particular the collections of a local musician which itself has thrown up a number of digital preservation challenges. Laura first explained that she had found this guidance produced by New York University which I’m going to have a good look at myself. She then went on to walk us through two tools she had been using: Exact Audiocopy and IsoBuster for audio CDs and DVDs respectively. It gave us a chance not just to see the tools in action but also to discuss how some the tools are used and we spent a bit of time discussing the pros and cons of disk imaging.

And to round off by popular demand Laura also live demoed Teracopy and those of us who have had a go with it (and I include myself in this) discussed the fact that it was a very useful tool but not an easy one to use (I for one find it quite complicated). Its checksumming ability is clearly of great benefit but just getting the checksums is one thing – working out how and when to use and check them is quite another!

Finally we agreed we would – where we could – share some of our procedures (must go and do that now!) and I think that would be a really useful discussion point for future meetings.

All the tools we have talked about are free to download in some version of another and we are all keen to keep the network system agnostic.

I came away full of ideas and thoughts of things I need to be getting on with – it’s really valuable to connect with others and get inspiration at times like these. Here’s to the next meeting – and as ever do get in touch with me if you want to know more (or join in!) rachel dot macgregor at warwick dot ac dot uk or DM me via Twitter @An_Old_Hand

We Miss iPres

If you are working in digital preservation and you are not collaborating, then you are on a lonely road.

Picture of me collaborating in the social event at WeMissiPres

In one way it doesn’t seem that long since iPres 2019 when I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Amsterdam to attend this excellent international conference. This year the conference was scheduled for Beijing which I would not have been able to attend under normal circumstances. But of course these are not normal circumstances and iPres 2020 has been moved on to iPres 2021. To plug the gap left by the postponement of the conference I was delighted to learn that an informal non-conference We Miss iPres was to be held in the gap left by this postponement. I wasn’t feeling inspired enough to propose a topic to present on but I did volunteer to chair a couple of sessions (which was quite hard enough work as it was!). A huge thank you to all the Friends of iPres who collaborated to make this non conference happen!

An online international event has to take place across a multitude of timezones so I didn’t quite make it to all of it. What I did hear was inspiring and thought provoking and I have already been pencilling up the programme to catch the parts I missed. With so many presentations I couldn’t possibly talk about everything I heard but I’m just going to pick on a few favourites that struck me for one reason and another – have a look through the programme and see what I mean about the variety on offer.

When looking for inspiration in my work I need look no further than Professor Michelle Caswell, whose keynote was one of the highlights of iPres 2019. And she did not disappoint this year and invited us all to imagine what “liberatory digital preservation” might look like, by which she meant digital preservation practice in which we consider things like what the impact of collecting/making available might have on oppressed and marginalised communities and who we are excluding by the way we practice. What resonated particularly with me was that Caswell invited us all to take time to close our eyes and imagine what new ways of practice might look like and feel and how they might be accomplished. In all aspects of preservation work it’s too easy to be swept along on the treadmill of processing and day to day matters that we don’t make time to reimagine our structures and processes and this holds everyone back whether that is in dismantling oppressive structural practice, working towards new ways of working to support environmental sustainability or just trying to imagine how we might do more with less, we are always required to reevaluate and reassess our processes so that we can build fairer, more robust and more sustainable futures.

An example of how this might be put into practice was shared by Daniel Steinmeier (Dutch National Library) who discussed how inclusive practice could both help diversify collections and metadata and also involve and empower communities which would lead to more of the same. I’m really looking forward to reading more about this work in the future.

Barbara Sierman addresses WeMissiPres

Sometimes all this can seem very daunting, especially when stuck at home and faced with huge uncertainties on every front. So it was also heartening to hear a presentation from Somaya Langley (University of Sydney) talking about digitisation and digital preservation and focussing on examining workflow and infrastructure at the University of Sydney to reveal where work was needed.

If I don’t document this within 48 hours it’s gone from my head

Somaya Langley @criticalsenses

She also talked about celebrating small successes which is something I have repeated to myself on days when I feel like I haven’t achieved very much at all. Improving documentation is something which is permanently on my to do list and I will now add looking to see how digital preservation can be “baked in” to digitisation processes (and I think this means a longer and harder look at what those workflows and processes are).

I was really interested to hear about broader themes emerging in the digital preservation community and will spend some time looking at the US National Archives and Records Administration Digital Preservation Framework – a living working document which they are keen for people to use and get feedback from.

In digital preservation circles we often talk about “good enough” and try and consider what that looks like. We are all working with finite resources and need to optimise what we have for the best and most sustainable results. An interesting spin on the question of “what does good enough look like” came from Alex Garnett (Simon Fraser University) who considered the many and varied ways audio visual archives are made accessible – both amateur and professional (whatever that means!) – and what constituted “acceptable” levels of loss of quality in output. Something of a musing on the interplay between the technology and techniques available and the aesthetics and perceptions of “authenticity” there was much to think about and enjoy from his presentation (not least Big Buck Bunny)

There were other moments to savour from the conference including some wonderful films such as The Last Day of Bangkok Trams which Chalida Uabumrungjit from the National Film Archive of Thailand used to illustrate how they had promoted and advocated their work during lockdown (it was one of the most popular downloads and it is indeed charming).

And finally a personal favourite of mine was the film showcased by Andrew Davidson (Robert Gordon University) working on the Fraserburgh on Film project which connects community engagement, audio visual presentation and outreach in a truly magical way.

A wonderful unconference, so much to think about and good to know I am not alone on this road.

Introducing MidiPres*

Live demo at MidiPres (image courtesy of S Colbourne)

I’ve been a huge admirer of some of the digital preservation community networks which have emerged in recent years – I’m thinking here particularly of Aye Preserves and further afield Australasia Preserves and have thought how nice it would be to have something similar to go to. Circumstances conspired that I found myself at iPres in Amsterdam last year chatting to fellow UK Midlands preservationist Laura Peaurt (University of Nottingham) and we reflected on how ironic it was that we went all the way to Amsterdam to have the time and space to exchange ideas when we could be doing it nearer home. Fast forward a few months and Laura and I were preparing to launch an informal networking event maybe in Birmingham for Midlands colleagues to meet to share experiences and offer support, perhaps over a coffee or glass of beer… Fast forward a few more months and Laura and realised we would not be meeting anyone any time soon in real life so we set up the very first online meeting aimed at anyone in the region interested in or working on digital preservation challenges (we’re still hoping it can be a physical meeting at some point!).

We chose to use Microsoft Teams because both of our institutions already support it and several members mentioned that their institutions blocked the use of Zoom. Teams allows us to share screens, chat and record which ticked the boxes and no one had a problem joining it.

To keep it simple the two speakers were Laura and myself. Laura and her colleague Sarah Colbourne spoke about the work that the University of Nottingham are doing on Covid-19 collecting which builds on the work which was already underway at the University collecting contemporary stories relating to the student experience which can read more about here. Laura also did a live demo of Conifer (the tool formerly known as Webrecorder) and it was really interesting to see the tool in use and hear the discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of using Conifer and of web capture in general. I think we all agreed it was useful to have the ability to capture something and in a quite responsive way but it was no substitute for the very complex task of full scale web preservation.

I lead the second presentation which comprised a simple run through of using DROID, the National Archives’ tool for file format identification. As with Laura’s demo we weren’t claiming to show the “only” way of using the tool but just how we did in the context of the work we did. My main use cases are around capturing initial metadata, creating file lists to help with cataloguing, identifying duplicates for appraisal purposes and using the reporting functionality for planning with ongoing management of file formats. To me DROID is a great basis for “understand what you have” – surely the bedrock of collections management.

The meeting lasted two hours which went very quickly but I think a lot of people feel a bit screened out after longer than this. We asked for brief feedback on format and content and had some lovely comments:

Many thanks Rachel and Laura this DP group is just what we need to share experiences as well as theory.

Participant

I found it a very useful session, and feel that “Show and Tell” is a good way forward, complementing the more formal training available in other forums.

Participant

This is a very encouraging start to what we hope will be a community led resource. If you are in the UK Midlands Region and are interested in future events please do get in touch rachel dot macgregor at warwick dot ac dot uk or via @AnOldHand on Twitter.

*working title!

Archives Access and AI

I was really looking forward to this conference organised by Dr Lise Jaillant of the University of Loughborough and it did not disappoint. I took what I think must be a record fifteen pages of notes (yes I do use a real notebook) not to mention the countless tweet (see #AcArAi) so it will be impossible for me to do much more than summarise some of the highlights (for me at least) of this conference.

The conference brought together digital humanities scholars, archivists, digital preservation practitioners and others to discuss and share ideas about making archives accessible – either with or without the aid of machine learning/AI.

The conference was near Hackney Wick – an interesting part of London

Helen Mavin from the Imperial War Museum gave a fascinating insight into the very complex work being undertaken at the museum to manage and preserve over a million digital files deposited by the Ministry of Defence. This is material specifically covered by UK government legislation (the Public Records Act) so is not everything which the Museum collects or preserves (this was important when discussing their appraisal and retention strategies). Collections management and transfer procedures were out of date and key contacts were unknown or unclear. Mavin needed to establish robust criteria for retention and selection of digital materials to facilitate fast(er) and more efficient transfer. Once the material was transferred there needed to be standardised workflows which are media agnostic. Key challenges were around staff turnover and both a skills and resource gap – something which will be familiar to many.

I was really interested to hear from Jonathan Manton and Alice Prael from Yale University Libraries talked about their work on trying to centralise and standardise the workflows at their institution which comprises a number of libraries and a museum. They began by centralising the processing of imaging and file extraction from physical media which has helped standardise the process and assisted with tackling processing backlogs. They have also looked at email archiving, born digital catalogue description and network transfer. I was particularly keen to hear about the work they have been doing on describing born digital archives. This is something which really needs more discussion and action from practitioners – I’m finding it presents a very real headache for my own practice. Prael and Manton commented that the area which caused most difficulty was describing hybrid archives. I wasn’t surprised by this and given this is the landscape we are going to be working in for some time to come it’s one we should all be giving a lot of thought to.

The cataloguing of archives is closely linked to (but not coterminous with) access so I was also keen to hear from Anthea Seles talk about the use of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in archival processing and the extent to which archivists and information professionalism should (but are not necessarily) involved in the creation and use of algorithms and the ways in which data is explored, exposed and exploited. Seles’ talk gave a great deal of food for thought and my homework will be to read Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction.

I also very much enjoyed hearing from Leontien Talboom who is undertaking a PhD jointly with the UK National Archives and and University College London looking at the barriers and opportunities which exist in making digital archives available. So far she has uncovered what a huge amount of work still needs to be done in this area but I’m looking forward to work coming out in full so we are better informed to overcome the barriers and exploit the opportunities. In the same panel another PhD student Rebecca Oliva from the University of Glasgow is looking at sensitivity reviewing and the extent to which it can be automated. Manual sensitivity reviewing is on the whole an opaque process, therefore lending itself well to automation and machine processing. However sensitivity is also very context specific ie data can be sensitive in one context and not in another so there are many challenges to be met. Again I am really looking forward to the outputs of this work.

On the final day it was good to hear from Jenny Bunn who invited us to ask “What can archivists bring to the (AI) party?”. The answer is (hopefully) quite a lot. AI has been around for a while now and it is starting to grow up. more people are asking for accountability in AI and this is where the archivist comes in – we are really really good at documenting and organising things!

We had an entertaining presentation from Caylin Smith and Andy Irving from the British Library on their struggles with making non-published legal deposit material from the British Library available. They are extremely hampered by legislation which has not yet caught up with the technology (a point which Paul Gooding from the University of Glasgow also addressed in his presentation) but have made great strides to improve what they can, certainly in terms of the user experience of accessing material on site. We also had a heard a fantastic call to arms from William Kilbride of the Digital Preservation Coalition which he has helpfully published as a blog post so I don’t have to report on it!

Many of the conference presentations are available here and the abstracts here. I thought this was a fascinating and thought provoking conference and I am still thinking about many of the themes which came up in it and hope to draw on in my practice. many thanks to Dr Lise Jaillant for all her hard work in putting this together.

Conference cake which like everything else was excellent!