Digital Preservation Roadshow, Aberystwyth

Last Friday Jackie and I presented at the CyMAL / Society of Archivists Digital Preservation Roadshow held at the National Library of Wales (NLW) . The event was aimed at all practitioners who were involved with the management of digital records, with delegates coming from different organisations within the public sector including Welsh regional archive services, Universities and the NLW.

Our presentation looked jointly at the approaches taken to digital preservation within the repository community and how preservation is being put into action within our e-theses harvesting workpackage, being conducted with the NLW. The presentation that followed ours was delivered by our NLW partner, Glen Robson, who discussed what was going to happen to the harvested e-theses records once they had reached the NLW repository or DAMS (digital asset management system) as they call it.

Other interesting presentations during the day included:

• A forecast of the necessary skills needed by future practitioners to manage and preserve digital records, given by Kirsten Ferguson-Boucher, Records Management Lecturer at the Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University.

• An entertaining and engaging presentation on METS and other standards including PREMIS by Lyn Lewis Dafis, Head of Metadata and Digitisation Unit, NLW. Actually making these complicated metadata standards understandable for the non-techies like me!

• An overview of the digital preservation policy planning at Cardiff University by Sarah Phillips, Records Manager.

• Short description of a useful tool to assess file format suitability in terms of preservation developed by the National Library of the Netherlands and utilised by the NLW from Ioan Isaac-Richards.

The Society of Archivists hopes to have the presentations for the day available via the Digital Preservation Roadshows 2009- 10 webpage soon.

Now planning - Repositories and CRIS event

The WRN team are currently in the process of planning a repositories and CRIS event. This one day event will be one of the programme meetings for the JISC Inf11 programme and will explore the close relationship between CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) and institutional repositories. We hope to be able to co-host this meeting with representatives from ARMA the professional association for research managers and administrators in the UK.

The programme and details are at an early stage and we are inviting feedback from our community to help us shape the event. We currently have an online discussion page available at http://infteamjisc.slinkset.com/items/Repositories_and_CRIS_event

Please join in and let us know what you think!

Register to update your details on ROAR

It is now possible to register for your own account on ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) to enter and update details of your repository on the service. Through JISC funding the ROAR service has now been reworked into a repository itself so that ‘collecting, updating and editing information about repositories is now part of a familiar repository workflow.’

The stated aim of ROAR ‘is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world.’ The service provides:

- A catalogue of individual repositories and their attributes
- Repository listings by location, purpose and software platform
- Analyses of the growth over time of individual repositories or groups of repositories
- Searching for repositories by various properties
- Searching the contents of groups of repositories using a Google Customised Search
- The option to share new repository information with OpenDOAR
- Access to the OAI-PMH data obtained from the Celestial harvester

Visit the ROAR registration page now to create your new account and promote your repository!

Official launch of UWIC’s institutional repository

Last month marked the launch of UWIC’s institutional repository. The launch consisted of presentations, live demos of the repository, and opportunities for attending academics’ to deposit their own research. RSP advocacy material was used and disseminated at the launch. Three, separate sessions were held at each of the University’s campuses. Since the launch there has been an increase in user account registrations and an increase in deposit enquiries.

If you would like to find out more about UWIC’s institutional repository please contact Helen Thomas, Repository Administrator at dspace@uwic.ac.uk.

If you would like any help or ideas for what you could do to launch your repository or further raise its profile within your institution please contact the WRN team at wrnstaff@aber.ac.uk.

Preservation event planning

In conjunction with our sister projects RSP and ERIS, the WRN are planning some one-day events looking at digital preservation and repositories. The programme will specifically target repository practitioners and will be aimed at beginners. In order to ensure as many people as possible are able to attend we are tentatively planning to repeat the event in various locations around the UK. Provisional dates are under discussion for Cardiff, Birmingham and Edinburgh in May 2010.

We are very keen that these events are of real practical use to the repository community, so in order to help us plan theses events, we would appreciate it if you could take the time to complete this quick question.

If you would like to register your interest for one of these events, please visit http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/92F89A8D8D2C15BE.

Many thanks in advance for your help!

Digital Preservation Roadshow: NLW, Friday 22nd January

The Society of Archivists in association with CyMAL are bringing a Digital Preservation Roadshow event to the National Library of Wales (NLW) on Friday 22nd January. This roadshow is one of the last in a series that have been held at various locations around the UK and Ireland. The aims of the events have been 'to raise awareness of the issues surrounding digital preservation, to demonstrate that there are solutions that don't involve spending large amounts of money, and to show how to take the first, small, incremental steps in this field.'

Jackie and I will be giving a presentation at the event regarding repositories and preservation, the WRN project and the e-theses harvesting workpackage. There will also be presentations from NLW staff exploring the strategies they employ to preserve the digital items that the library holds, including a specific presentation from Glen Robson regarding 'Harvesting and DAMS' which is of particular interest in light of the e-theses harvesting workpackage.

Other speakers at the event inlude:

Tim Gollins, National Archives
William Kilbride, Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Executive
Sarah Phillips, University Records Manager, Cardiff University

An event programme is available to download from the Digital Preservation Roadshows 2009- 10 webpage.

Attendance at the roadshow is free but numbers are limited. To book a place, fill out the booking form available from the CyMAL event page and send it to cymal@wales.gsi.gov.uk