DigCCurr Professional Institute 2010

During the week of May 16th – 21st, I attended the DigCCurr Professional Institute: Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The week-long course was entirely focused on best practices for digital preservation and curation with a balance of theory and hands-on labs using some of the common tools for the assessment of files and for the creation of curation workflows. The participants were a wide-array of librarians and archivists from all parts of the United States. The faculty (listed below) are, for the most part, well known in digital curation circles. I found this week of study to be entirely relevant to my work for the AIMS project and I would make the recommendation that this course would be highly useful to those engaged in archival processing, preservation and/or data curation.

The DigCCurr faculty are as follows:

UNC Chapel-Hill: Dr. Helen Tibbo, Dr. Cal Lee, Dr. Richard Marciano, & Carolyn Hank University of Michigan: Dr. Nancy McGovern University of Toronto: Dr. Seamus Ross University of Cologne: Dr. Manfred Thaller

Highlights of the Institute, aside from meeting a bunch of energetic and forward thinking librarians and archivists, was the focus on the importance of creating policies for one's institution for digital preservation & curation and the opportunity to get an overview of some of the tools that have been developed to help stewards of digital content manage their collections responsibly.

For those of you keen on drafting policies in regard to digital preservation and digital curation, both ICPSR and OpenDOAR provide examples of policies that can be used as guidelines for your institution. Curious about the readiness of your institution's repository to manage digital curation activities? DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment) is a tool meant for assessing risk associated with an institutional repository in terms of its readiness to manage curation activities. TRAC (Trusted Repositories Audit & Certification) provides a suite of tools for the audit, assessment, and potential certification of digital repositories. It establishes documentation requirements for an audit, outlines a process for certification, and establishes a framework for determining the sustainability of digital repositories. Auditors come from the outside of your organization.

I could go on (but I won't) since the week was packed with great hand-on labs and lectures. If you're interested in getting more information you can certainly contact me. One last thing I'll add is this; although this wasn't part of the formal program, I did have the opportunity to learn about a new project underway in Vancouver called Archivematica. It's an open source set of tools knit together for the management and preservation of born digital collections and archives. The 0.6 alpha version was just make available for download a couple of weeks ago - Check it out! And if you want an assessment from January 2010, check out Chris Prom's blog.

Practical Approaches to Electronic Records

On Friday I attended the excellent Practical Approaches to Electronic Records event in  Dundee. The programme included thought provoking discussions from Dr Ian Anderson (HATII) and Malcolm Todd (TNA) who both stressed the importance of demonstrating ‘value’ and ‘relevance’ to our organisations, and the need to develop new partnerships with colleagues working in digital forensics, ICT departments and universities to tackle the challenge of digital preservation. WillIam Kilbride (Digital Preservation Coalition) offered some interesting personal reflections on digital preservation and the conclusion that it is not about ‘data’, ‘access’ or ‘risk’ but about people and outcomes.

The afternoon was especially timely as it featured two demonstrations of ingest tools -  something the AIMS project is currently working on. Viv Cothey showed us the work he has done at Gloucestershire Archives on the SCAT tool and this was followed by Peter Cliff demonstrating the BEAM Ingest tool being developed at the Bodleian. Both tools have adopted a modular approach to utilise many of the excellent and widely adopted 3^rd party tools such as PRONOM, Jhove and FITS and this is the obvious route to follow as we seek to create an ingest tool that is integrated with the Fedora digital repository.

The day ended with Chris Prom summarising his work to identify and compare many of the open source tools that are available. He encouraged everybody to get involved with a software project and listed the elements that he thought made an excellent Open Source project citing archivematica as a good example as it provided regular updates, clear documentation, availability of source code and support wiki.