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.