Tag: digital-preservation

Archiving in the age of Super Abundance

On the 13th February, the British Film Institute held an event titled ‘Archives in the Age of Super Abundance’. The event was hugely popular and boasted an interesting programme, with a range of speakers from outside the profession, inside the BFI and a few somewhere in between. It looked like the event would tackle some of the problems faced when archiving huge amounts of information, specifically from the online moving image sector. What the event actually did was leave delegates with a sense of impending doom, the feeling that the work ahead was too hard and there was little point in attempting the challenges ahead. Besides this, it also questioned the fundamental meaning of an archive and provided dangerous advice for those working on their own collections within their own communities.

The day began with a welcome with explained the event was held to promote a project the BFI were undertaking to archive 400 online moving image films and make them available as part of their collections. The final panel of the day talked about how this was being achieved and the challenges they were facing. The honesty used in describing these challenges was impressive, but the tone held an overall sense of defeat. That they had no idea how they would move on from this, as capturing the 400 is proving so difficult and that this did not bode well for the future.

George Oates from the Flickr foundation gave the Keynote presentation, which was arguably the most useful session of the day. George is a really engaging speaker who focused on the social and community aspects of archiving, explaining that Flickr split their metadata into technical and social, a novel approach. I struggle to see the different between this approach and the split we already have between technical and descriptive. The same data is captured, it is just labeled differently. George also mentioned the idea of ‘citizen led documentation’ as a specific Flickr approach. Archives don’t use this terminology, but we are trained to capture the social and cultural aspects of our collections. We are standards led because we have to be, but this doesn’t erase the social or the cultural from the work we do. I think Flickr are far more similar to the rest of the sector than they think and are perhaps not the catch all solution to the archives cataloguing and preservation issues that they seem to be suggesting. The admission that the data lifeboat service has been created as the site is now too big to be archived proves this point.

The next two panel sessions were very interesting but held no relevance to the archive. The topics discussed, although interesting were so far removed from the archive process that preservation of anything (super abundant or otherwise) was not discussed. Interesting, but pointless.

Next up was a panel on terminology which focused on how to define the video essay. Should it be a genre, should it be a form, should it be something else? This was a great example of how we set and use standards to tie ourselves up in knots. It really highlighted that our job is difficult, and this is not always expressed well by us.

Then, for me, it all went horribly wrong.

The community archives panel, a welcome inclusion to the event, was titled, ‘The internet is the archive’. This blatantly wrong, factually incorrectly titled panel started with the Chair explaining how her interaction with the community archives on the panel had made her rethink the definition and role of the archive. We heard from three very impressive community archives who were doing marvelous things with the collections they were curating online. I think that the community archive world is fantastic, the work they do and the passion they have for their topics is second to none and it is imperative that this work is preserved so it can be accessed and learned from for a long time to come.

This is why I think defining these collections as archives in harmful. These collections are fantastic. But they are stored online, in some cases uploaded to Instagram or YouTube. This is not preservation, in any sense of the world and for something to be archived, it needs to be preserved. I would argue that it doesn’t need to be catalogued or made available to be an archive, but it does need to be preserved. These are curated collections and to describe them as anything else is dangerous as it implies a false sense of security that having this important content online somehow saves it for posterity. We should be providing advice and guidance for these community group to be preserving their own collections in a way that means they will be safe well into the future. We don’t need to be taking these collection into our holdings (unless the group themselves wants this). We need to support the community archive sector as much as we can, a difficult ask in itself given our own resource and budget issues), but this cannot be at the expense of the collections. They are too important to ignore their preservation for access. There will be no collections to access if they are not preserved and we need to share the skills needed to do this.

With the final panel focusing on the BFI project and its challenges, the day ended on a pessimistic note, which was a shame as the BFI project sounds really interesting and deserved a more optimistic approach. It felt like the plan for the day was to take delegates through the journey of online film, from creation to end preservation, but much of this was largely irrelevant for those expecting discussion and perhaps guidance on how to preserve their own collections. Defining the internet as an archive is a dangerous statement and future events and output from the BFI needs to take the needs of the records into consideration. Changing the fundamentals of our sector cannot come at the expense of the collections we preserve.

World connections, business and multimedia infographic design.

These events are so important to our sector and I hope they continue to be held. But the focus needs to be on the collections, the work we do and how we can help other groups who want to work on their own collections do that. The rest, is really just background noise.

Money, Money, Money – not always sunny in the archive sector

Archives have always been an underfunded sector, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. A lot of the time this is out of our control. The cost of living is ever increasing and budgets at almost all organisations are being squeezed ever tighter. In a world where everyone needs more money, archivists have to learn the skills of financial planning and making their budgets stretch as far as possible while also being ready to take full advantage of any small funding pots which may become available. This blog looks at some of the issues the sector has with funding and perhaps look at some possible solutions, if there are any.

Happy rich banker celebrating income growth. Broker enjoying success in stock market trading. Flat vector illustration for money, finance, millionaire concept

One of the main issues facing the sector is project funding. This is of particular concern in the world of digital preservation and digitisation. Project funding used to focus on short terms contracts to catalogue collections or carry out a specific promotional activity. Although not ideal, this type of project provides additional resource for a set piece of work that would not otherwise happen due to resource constraints. However, more recently, project funding has focused on digitisation as a means of preserving vulnerable collections and making them more accessible. This work is important, but it is not project work. Once the items are digitised, the digital copies need to be preserved. This is ongoing work. And the platform hosting the images online needs to be financed, maintained and kept in working order. This is also ongoing work. Viewing digitisation as a short term funded is problematic, particularly when that funding is given to community groups with limited resources in the first place.

Funding for short term archivist contracts can also be problematic if the organisation does not already have an archivist in place. Contracting someone to create an archive catalogue and make items available without resource available to continue the work after the contract has ended is problematic and puts records at risk. Short term contracts should always be a supplementary provision,

The recent relaunch of the Archives Revealed funding programme by the UK National Archives is a great boost to the UK archive sector. Real thought has been put into the types of grants available and what work will be funded. It is however interesting that those applying for consortium or cataloguing grants much spend 20% of their award on promotional activity, which can include digitisation, but no mention is made of a requirement to correctly preserve this content once the funding runs out. If a well-established National Archive hasn’t produced guidelines on this, then how can the smaller organisations be expected to forward plan to this extent?

The money writes with white chalk is on hand, draw concept.

It’s also interesting that one of the funding partners in the Archives Revealed Programme is the National Lottery Heritage Fund, who are on of the main contributors to the short-term funded projects across the archive sector. I think that funders do need to start taking responsibility for the projects they are funding and think more about the sustainability of them. Perhaps funding less projects but giving more money for longer term preservation should be a consideration. Ensuring that a project has resource to continue in some way when funding runs out should also be a consideration when awarding money to organisations.

But there is also an onus on the organisations and archivists themselves to ensure that any funding application is thought through to the very end and the sustainability of any projects is kept at the forefront when deciding what to apply for. Our main focus in this situation as in any other, is the collections in our care and there is no point having collections digitised if we can’t them preserve those copies. Resource is a great thing, but it needs to be invested in the right places.

Lets Get Digital – Or Should We?

Let’s get Digital! – Or should we?

Previous blogs talked about the ever-changing archive sector and no change has had a more dramatic impact than the development of technology and the establishment of digital archive work. Digital Preservation very quickly became another millstone around the neck of archivists along with the acquisition, appraisal, cataloguing, conservation, access, promotion, advocacy, research and any tasks as appropriate work we were already doing. But should this be the case? Has it got to the point that digital preservation (and maybe other aspects of digital work) has become so large that specific roles should be created to carry out this work? Should digital preservation be its own sector completely? That’s the topic of the musings in this blog.

The unofficial start of the digital preservation sector can be traced to a conference on metadata in 2000. Even then, the scale of the problem was well known. Digital records are created at a far faster pace than physical records due to ease of use. But as archivists, our role is to preserve, so we turned ourselves to the challenge, only to find preserving digital records was not the same as physical records and a far higher degree of technical knowledge was needed than was taught. The context in which digital preservation takes place was also far more complex than in the physical world and knowledge was required of anti-virus, cyber security, software systems, file formats and a raft of other topics before digital preservation could even be thought about.

It is definitely true that many archivists have risen to this challenge. Many have moved into digital archivist roles and completed the training to specialise in preserving digital records. However, many have struggled with turning their hand to the digital world. In particular those in lone archivist roles with responsibility for both physical and digital records have struggled as it’s physical impossible to do all the work involved in preserving an organisations entire record estate on your own, and that’s before you factor in the training element involved in keeping your skillset up to date.

It becomes clear that the roles are quite different in scope when comparing the competency frameworks of the sector organisations. The Digital Preservation Coalition created a fully comprehensive framework of digital preservation skills linked to role definitions which helps track skill building and career progression in the digital field. The Archive and Records Association have included digital preservation in their framework but it is as an add on optional skill that archivists can choose to ignore or develop as they see fit.

It is this problem that makes me think that the roles should be separated, and digital preservation should be given a place as its own sector with it’s own roles, pay scales and tasks. This is not to say that digital archivists shouldn’t exist, but in my mind their role should be far more defined than is currently the case. Taking the example of larger, well-funded organisations with good staff resource, many of them employ digital preservation specialists, as well as digital archivists. In some cases, software engineers are also employed as the technical requirements are far outside the scope of an archivist role. This makes the role of the archivist easier as they can focus on the preservation aspect of the role that they were hired to do with confidence that the technical side of the role is being covered by a specialist.

Preservation is complex no matter what the medium, and in the physical record world we have conservators who carry out the specialist technical work to ensure records are repaired as needed and conserved in order to last for generations. Why should this be any different in the digital world? Archivists have a strong specific skillset, which, although not complicated, took time and effort to build, and while continued professional development is important, it shouldn’t mean having to learn an entirely new role that we weren’t prepared for and didn’t really want to do in the first place. There is a huge market for digital preservation skills across the heritage sector, but do they need to come from archivists, who already do so much with their day?

But, that’s not who we are?

I don’t think I’m sharing any huge secret when I say that archivists, and maybe by default archives, have a bit of an image problem outside of our sector. Since I joined the sector we have battled against the stereotypical cardigan wearing gatekeeper image of our profession with little success. But working within the sector, I know that archivists are a vibrant, passionate, friendly bunch of people who on the whole love the job that they do and want to help others explore the joys of archives. So where dos the disconnect come in? And what do we need to do to change it? That’s what I’m going to talk about in today’s blog.  

A closeup shot of a door with black and yellow stripes

The perception of archivists from outside the sector is something that’s always bothered me. When I decided to become an archivist, I was met with two main questions when I told people; one, ‘what’s that’? and two, ‘is that for people like us’? The latter was in reference to my working class background. I didn’t actually know what an archive was myself until much later in life and even when I found out, it did still seem like a sector that might be closed off to me. Perseverance paid off, but the fact that both these questions still plague the sector almost 20 years later is a problem. Worryingly, a problem that we don’t seem to be moving towards solving at any great pace.  

I think this may be something to do with a topic I mentioned in a previous blog. I think  perceptions of what an archivist is and isn’t are warped to the extent that people are so unsure of what we do and if it’s for them that they just don’t engage. The other side of the coin is that this is a truth universally acknowledged by archivists, but then also ignored. We don’t seem to care enough about this perception to do the work towards changing it. It is easier to continue to put pictures of our collections on social media and hope that the right person sees them and makes the leap to engage with the archive rather than putting our heads over the parapet and encouraging people to explore archives.  

This is not a blanket opinion of the sector. There are archives who post some content about the work they do, or fit information about archives into the latest Tik Tok trend, but I think sector wide input is needed for the perception to begin to change. And we also need to acknowledge that we want it to change. Explore Your Archive was designed as a mechanism to help the sector do this, but it has turned into a content sharing platform which floods the internet with images of archive content but does little to explain why people should engage with archives and what they can learn from them.  

As also mentioned in a previous blog, we need to acknowledge that the sector is changing and the work we do will be changing with it. Modern record collecting and community engagement is becoming the main focus of our role which is very different from the inward facing focus on catalogue creating and nothing else that archivists did when the profession established.  

So how do we fix it? I don’t really have an answer, but I do have some ideas. Using the tools we have already, and our skillset would be a great start. Using Explore Your Archive in a different way as a sector would help. It would provide a unified voice through which people literally all over the world could be encouraged to visit their archives and find things of interest. Open days are also a useful tool, as is engaging with local media and telling people about what we do and why rather than what we have. Increasing community engagement work will also increase our potential audience and may also increase our holdings as community groups realise what we can help with. To me, the benefits are many, but it would be remiss not to mention the main barriers to making this work. Archive budgets and resources are already stretched to their limits so an anonymous blog telling people to spend more money and time on yet another task is likely not overly welcome. Prioritisation of time and resource is always going to be a factor for our sector and I believe this is important enough to warrant prioritising and focus from the sector as a whole. Image is everything and we need to work on improving ours.