IRMS ARAI Event 19 November 2015
Last week I was in Dublin where I gave a presentation for the IRMS Ireland Group at their joint meeting with ARA Ireland. It was great for me personally to address a roomful of fellow Archivists and Records Managers, and learn more about how they’re dealing with digital concerns in Ireland. I heard a lot of success stories and met some great people.
Sarah Hayes, the Chair of IRMS Ireland, heard me speak earlier this year at the Celtic Manor Hotel (the IRMS Conference) and invited me to talk at her event. Matter of fact I got a similar invite from IRMS Wales this year, but Sarah wanted new content from me, specifically on the subject of Building a Digital Preservation Strategy.
How to develop a digital preservation strategy
My talk on developing a digital preservation strategy made the following points:
- Start small, and grow the service
- You already have knowledge of your collections and users – so build on that
- Ask yourself why you are doing digital preservation, and who will benefit
- Build use cases
- Determine your own organisational capacity for the task
- Increase your metadata power
- Determine your digital preservation strategy (or strategies) in advance of talking to IT, or a vendor
I also presented some imaginary scenarios that would address digital preservation needs incrementally and meet requirements for different audiences:
- Bit-level preservation (access deferred)
- Emphasis on access and users
- Emphasis on archival care of digital objects
- Emphasis on legal compliance
- Emphasis on income generation
Event Highlights
In fact the whole day was themed on Digital Preservation issues. John McDonough, the Director of the National Archives of Ireland, gave encouraging reports of how they are managing electronics records by “striding up the slope of enlightenment”. There’s an expectation that public services in Ireland must be “digital by default”, with an emphasis on continual online access to archival content in digital form. John is clear that archives in Ireland “underpin citizen’s rights” and are crucial to the “development of Nation and statehood”, which fits the picture I have of Dublin’s culture – it’s a city with a very clear sense of its own identity, and history.
In terms of change management and advocacy for working digitally, Joanne Rothwell has single-handedly transformed the records management of Waterford City and County Council, using SharePoint. Her resourceful use of an alphanumeric File Index allows machine-readable links between paper records and born-digital content, thus preserving continuity of materials. She also uses SharePoint’s site-creation facility to build a virtual space for holding “non-current” records, which replicate existing file structures. It’s splendid to see sound records management practice carry across into the digital realm so successfully.
DPTP alumnus from the class of November 2011, Hugh Campbell of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, has developed a robust and effective workflow for the transfer, characterisation and preservation of digital content. It’s not only a model of good practice, but he’s done it all in-house with his own team, using open source tools and developer skills.
During the breaks I managed to mingle and met many other professionals in Ireland who have responded well to digital challenges. I was especially impressed by Liz Robinson, the Records Officer for the Health and Safety Authority in Ireland. We agreed that any system implementation should only proceed after a thorough planning period, where the organisation establishes its own workflows and procedures, and does proper requirements gathering. This ought to be a firm foundation in advance of purchasing and implementing a system. Sadly, we’ve both seen projects where the system drove the practice, rather than the other way around.
Great day training with @IRMSIre and @TrainingARA. @EdwardPinsent a particular highlight! #IRMSIRE #ARAIreland
— Jenny L (@JennyL_RM) November 19, 2015
Plan, plan and plan again before you speak to a vendor; this was the underlying message to my ‘How to develop a digital preservation strategy’ talk, so it was nice to be singled out in one Tweet as a “particular highlight” of the day.