Last week I was
fortunate to be invited to a two day workshop hosted by the National Library of Wales (NLW)
at Aberystwyth. The workshop brought together archivists, academics, library
and ICT staff and students to discuss the “challenges” surrounding the Brith Gof and Clifford McLucas collections. The primary focus was on aspects of the
digital preservation – with a range of media and carriers including floppy
disks, zip drives, SyQuest cartridges (a new one to me) and Mac Book G4 amongst
these two collections.
Discussions touched a wide range of topics and issues including digital forensics, cataloguing hybrid collections,
digital curation, emulation and access. There was also a reminder of the complexity of
intellectual property rights for performance material where different rights
might be held for the set design, the score etc etc.
There was also a public
event where a number of items from the collections were used as prompts by Professor Mike Pearson,
co-founder of Brith Gof, to stimulate his recollections of Brith Gof. The range of items selected highlighted the
rich nature of the collections that includes photographs,
videos, set designs, huge banners (aswell as the more traditional paper archives). One aspect that is also being considered is how
to capture/record the impact that Brith Gof had on those watching the
performance.
I talked about the AIMS
project and highlighted a number of the questions and issues that had arisen
from our shared experiences that we have captured in our White Paper. I really enjoyed the discussions, the informal nature and the reminder about making a deliberate effort to engage and
attract a range of audiences.
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