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.

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