Weekly at the Dorset History Centre we receive a range of collections from various bodies, from public institutions to private collectors. As an archive, most of the collections are paper or parchment format, and are stored in the thousands of boxes in the strong-rooms. To both assist online demand and to preserve the documents with digital surrogate backups; some of these is digitised and then stored within the digital preservation software Preservica, a safe, specialised cloud-based (online) archive. A considerable amount of our accessions however, are in formats which require efforts to convert them and make them more readily accessible.
Here’s one key example:
In August 2018 we received the oral history recordings of local artist and poet James Crowden following his Dorset Man/Dorset Women/Dorset Coast rural arts project. The project and the recordings which it produced provide a fascinating insight into the lives and experiences of dozens of Dorset individuals, telling tales of lives much different from our own. These tales recite Dorset trades, customs, and practices near lost, which are necessary to preserve for future generations. Indeed, this collection was designed for use in schools across the county so as to enhance the understanding and appreciation of the children’s Dorset roots and heritage.
The collection includes an edited 9 CD set which was produced by Crowden for use in schools and are accessible to users in the search room. The oral history recordings however provided us a minor problem.
Minidiscs!
The minidiscs (MD), though in perfect condition and totally usable, required some effort to preserve them within Preservica, the digital preservation software we primarily use. The problem with Minidiscs is that they are not easily convertible into accessible digital formats.
Some Googling indicated that we would have to record all the discs in real time into an audio editing programme called Audacity. Before we could do that though, we needed a minidisc player, which we had to purchase. We were then able to connect the player to a computer and into Audacity. Recording through Audacity using the MD Walkman is simple. A simple lead connecting the two is all we need. The screenshot of Audacity below shows how it picks up the audio from the MD in real time. Just play the disc, hit the record button in Audacity, and wait.
In fact, because you have to do this in real time, you have to wait for the entire length of any recording before you can proceed! Once the recording is complete, it can be saved onto the computer’s hard drive, then imported (or ‘ingested’) into Preservica, where it is stored securely, guarding against obsolescence and changing technologies.
This example highlights just some of the work digital preservation archivists undertake. It is all about ensuring that outdated media formats and the relentless advance of technology does not hinder access to the vital information they hold. This example uses minidiscs, but the same is true of all old media hardware and software, from floppy discs to VHS, to the internet, to the hard drives of old computers.
Digital preservation is still a fairly new development in the archival profession. Though professionals have been thinking about the issues surrounding digital records since the late 1980s, it is really only within the last decade or so, with the development of the internet and of digital in all our daily and working lives, that archivists have sought solutions to the issues of the preservation of the vast amount of information which exists either wholly digitally (called ‘born digital’ material), or digitised versions of original documents.