Brith Gof

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.

Today is International Archives Day (twitter #archday12) to see what everybody has been saying.

Forensic workstation pt 1

A key part of dealing with born-digital archives is the ability to receive and process material without making changes to the underlying metadata including date created, date accessed etc – data that researchers will be looking to use and rely on. As archivists we place considerable emphasis on our roles as custodians and with digital material it is important that we treat the material carefully and appropriately. Fortunately there are tools that help us with the authenticity of born-digital files the most obvious of which is the checksum.

An important legacy of the AIMS project for us at Hull is working towards our ability to take born-digital material from depositors as a normal part of our work. A key component of this is a forensic workstation – by which I mean a PC (or two) through which material can be safely captured following a clear process, in-effect replicating the isolation room for receiving paper material. This will allow us to undertake a forensic examination – to check the material is what we expected or agreed to take, including the ability to generate a manifest of the material to send to the depositor, and that it does not include viruses etc.

There seem to be two main routes – to purchase FRED which stands for Forensic Recovery Evidence Device (other digital forensic workstation solutions are available). A second and more organic solution, and the one we intend to adopt at Hull, is to start with a new PC and to add appropriate hardware and software to this to provide the equivalent functionality. At the moment we are pondering a name for this with current suggestions including:
- Hal - Hull Archives Laboratory
- Harold – Hull Archives Recovery Of Legacy Data
- Hilary - Hull Investigator for Library and Archives RecoverY
- Dawn – Digital Archives WorkstatioN
but we are open to other suggestions until the machine is installed and formally named!

We don’t want to become a computer museum with an extensive range of hardware, software and operating systems environments for any possible eventuality. We do want a core ability to handle material we reasonable expect to receive – including material on 3.5” floppy disks, zip disks, hard drives etc. We intend to develop and extend our capacity as need dictates – if we get material in a format we will consider whether we need to support this ourselves or whether a suitable 3rd party is more appropriate.

Central to this is the need for write blockers which prevent you from writing or updating the files. Having read countless websites I felt I knew what they were supposed to do but had a nagging doubt that my knowledge was incomplete.

A tour of the British Library eMss Labs courtesy of Jeremy Leighton John (as featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Tales from the Digital Archives' broadcast in May but still available online) confirmed the simplicity of theory and the fragility of the media – just having the hardware isn’t enough – you also need some luck that you have the correct drivers to read the specific version of the media. In the next few weeks I hope to place our order for the various bits and pieces and will update you on this exciting journey!!

Photographing the digital: creating images of Hull University Archives’ digital media

A guest posting from Nicola Herbert, Digital Project Preservation Assistant at Hull University Archives

Over the last few months I have been working with the AIMS team at Hull University. My role entails getting stuck into some practical processing of the born-digital collections in the Hull University Archives as well as planning aspects of digital preservation. A lot of our work so far has been to discover and document the material that we already hold in what we thought were purely paper collections and I have written a workflow for the discovery of these items and their preparation for ingest into Fedora. As part of this workflow we decided to photograph all of the removable media we currently have and create a process for photography of new deposits when they arrive.

Why bother?
By retaining photographs of the original media alongside content we will be able to provide an image of the appearance of the original media to researchers if they request it. For the foreseeable future we are storing the image files on a shared drive, but they will eventually be stored as an element of metadata with the digital files in our Fedora Repository. We will be dealing with large numbers of media items so need to ensure consistency in the way the media is photographed and information recorded from those images.

Process
Having not previously numbered the discs, we decided on a simple running number within each accession. Despite our familiarity with labelling paper material, it seemed more complicated with digital. Our conservator advised against sticking labels (even conservation grade) onto the plastic casing of a floppy or Amstrad disc. Though a specialist CD marker can be used to label CDs, we were reluctant to permanently mark the items! After a worryingly long thought process we decided to stick to the old faithful method of writing in pencil on the existing label or case.

I then started planning the process. Despite trying to anticipate the different elements of information to include for each media type, it was only trial runs photographing actual media that gave the full picture - i.e. that Amstrad discs have three aspects to photograph (Side A, Side B and the edge). Lots of seemingly trivial questions arose - like whether to photograph the case or whether to photograph a label if blank. Getting the process right from the start will save time in the long run.

We decided to create a ‘clapperboard’ to photograph with the items for a failsafe way to ensure easy identification. I decided on a reusable form printed on a transparency which we can label with a drywipe marker. Putting theory into practice needed several trial runs; after each one I adapted the form and the procedure.

In addition I wrote up detailed notes describing the procedure for each type of media we anticipate encountering. We worked out a sensible image quality – so to ensure legibility of the labels without clogging up our servers with unnecessarily large images. Once the photographs have been taken they are renamed and filed. We also maintain an inventory of the items and record the media and label information alongside it. This ensures that if we send items (like our Amstrad discs) away to a third party we can match them to our records when they return.

This process has been satisfying to complete and enables us to tick at least one thing off our to-do list. Anyone can get this part of the process completed – even for material which is stored on a shared drive, photography of the original media is a useful process.