Digital preservation is the practice which will determine if and how we access electronically-held data in the future. Sam Johnston, the County Archivist, was recently lucky enough to attend the Digital Preservation Coalition’s awards ceremony in Amsterdam. A real hardship, you might say! Sam was very pleased to be asked – foreign travel rarely features in the working lives of Dorset History Centre staff, but there was a serious purpose to this.
The award that DHC, along with its partners, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre and West Sussex Record Office had been nominated for was ‘Safeguarding the Digital Legacy’. By combining, the three services have made savings through economies of scale in the required infrastructure and have been sharing skills and knowledge in what is a relatively new discipline, albeit one with huge importance to our ability to preserve and access information in digital form – from vital records with statutory protection (e.g. adoption files) to cultural heritage such as documents, photographs, film and sound.
Unfortunately, we didn’t win the award, although the judges were very complimentary about our work, with one commenting:
this is a great exemplar for other similar organisations struggling with tight budgets / resources. It provides a practical way forward and will inspire others.
More importantly, recognition for the consortium and our work on digital preservation has meant that it is now easier to promote what we do, and at a time when resources are scarce, to make the case for continued funding. Our consortium now seems likely to more than double in size with archive services from both the south of England and the Midlands interested in joining.
Our hope is that digital preservation will become as normal a practice as that of safeguarding physical records, although there is still some way to go on that front. This award and the recognition we have received can only help in that process.