Recap on Digital Preservation

It may seem quiet, but we’ve been very busy in digital preservation over in Library & University Collections!

A quick recap – L&UC looks after a wide range of digital resources, from University Committee papers to climate change data to open access journals to artworks. Digital preservation describes the work we undertake to ensure these valuable resources can be accessed and used into the future. Some digital resources, like websites, have a very short lifespan, so digital preservation often starts (or should start!) as soon as someone creates one. That doesn’t mean we keep everything. Digital preservation aims to ensure selected, unique resources are preserved and that the other stuff gets deleted as soon as it’s no longer needed.

Digital resources can be very fragile. Software licences expire, or entire applications disappear, making it impossible to open old files. Physical media like CDs and DVDs become old and degrade. Large database systems become unsupported or too costly to maintain. Digital preservation helps us to keep access to our important digital resources past the end of the normal technological lifespan. However, to preserve a digital resource in a useful way, L&UC needs to understand what it is and how it can be used. Therefore, every member of the University community has a role to play to ensure long-term access to our valuable digital resources!

What’s New?

Ruairi hard at work!

Since the start of 2023, the Digital Preservation Developer Ruairi O’Hare has been re-building our digital preservation system to support automation of many of our processes. L&UC’s first pilot system built in 2018 helped the team to scale up digital preservation for University Archives and improve compliance with international standards. You can read more about the 2018 pilot system in this paper from iPres 2022 about how we used the system to preserve the Regional Ethnology of Scotland Project Archive [1]. Testing that pilot system gave us a much clearer picture of the digital preservation requirements at the University and how we could improve our approach.

As a result, the new system will be more flexible and customisable, allowing managers of different collections to create a workflow that meets the needs of specific content types. The initial rebuild focuses on University Court records, but one day ‘pipelines’ (semi-automated workflows) can be built to support other University records, research data, digital heritage, art works, and many other content types looked after by L&UC.

In time, this flexible approach will help us to develop a digital preservation service that better supports the wider preservation needs of the University. Without active management and planning, many important digital resources are at risk. The University Archives hold valuable resources about the important work carried out at the University over the centuries from as far back as 1582. This new digital preservation system is an important step towards helping us ensure that important research, teaching, and learning taking place today is available in another 450 years.

Help With Preserving Digital Resources

If you think you have a digital resource that needs to be preserved, you can find updated guidance on the University Archives webpages: https://library.ed.ac.uk/heritage-collections/collections-and-search/archives/edinburgh-university-archives This guidance includes a form to request transfer of University records to the Archives and will alert an Archivist you may have some important digital resources that need to be looked after for the long-term.

University Records Management has further guidance on understanding what digital content might need to be kept for the long-term in the University Archives (or ‘retention schedules’): https://data-protection.ed.ac.uk/records-management/retention-schedules

In the meantime, if you’re looking for guidance on how to look after digital resources, check out the Digital Preservation Coalition website: https://www.dpconline.org/ These short ‘Topical Notes’ provide quick guidance for record and content creators.

Cited Sources

[1] ‘“A Tartan Rather Than a Plain Cloth”: Building a Shared Workflow to Preserve the Regional Ethnology of Scotland Project Archive’, 18th International Conference on Digital Preservation iPres 2022, Glasgow, Scotland. pp. 345-348. https://web.archive.org/web/20250220140719/https://www.dpconline.org/docs/miscellaneous/events/2022-events/2791-ipres-2022-proceedings/file