Lori Stirland-Legret, Digital Archive Assistant, reflects on the last year of digital activities in Special Collections and Theatre Collection for this year’s World Digital Preservation Day.
Today is the first Thursday of November, meaning it’s World Digital Preservation Day 2024! This is a day to celebrate all things relating to digital preservation, and this year’s theme is ‘Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities’. It has also been almost exactly a year since I started working as Digital Archive Assistant for Special Collections and Theatre Collection, so it seemed like a good time to reflect on the work I’ve been doing, as well as the importance of digitally preserving our collections.
One of the main tasks that I’ve undertaken is creating a Digital Asset Register to keep information about all of our digital collections in one place. It contains high level information such as how much storage space each collection takes up, and the types of digital files they contain. With a Digital Asset Register, we can get a better idea of which collections to prioritise to make accessible for users.
Making a Digital Asset Register sounds easy until you consider that Special Collections has over 40 terabytes and Theatre Collection has over 50 terabytes of digital content. To put it into perspective, the average laptop usually has a capacity of around 500 gigabytes of storage – meaning it would take almost 200 normal laptops to hold all of our digital materials! Luckily, we have access to a large amount of network storage as well as Preservica, our digital asset management system.
I’ve also been able to do a lot of work on creating online exhibitions for Special Collections and Theatre Collection. Most recently, in October the Cultural Collections Black History Month online exhibition went live. Working on these has given me a lot of perspective on the amount of work from everyone that goes into making collections accessible: from selecting suitable materials, digitising copies, and doing all the technical coding. However, it feels very satisfying to finally create a finished product which anyone can access from their mobile phone in the palm of their hand! It’s currently still online, so be sure to check it out if you haven’t already.
Looking forward, over the next year one of our main goals is to get more content into Preservica and accessible to users, ensuring our digital collections are as protected and accessible as possible. In the same way that you can put a book at the back of a pile and then forget about it, digital files can be hidden away in folders on old computers only to be lost. Physical archives are vulnerable to a number of real-life disasters, and whilst digital archives have their own vulnerabilities, taking a multifaceted approach gives our records the best chance of surviving for as long as possible.