Maggie Jones explains why it was necessary to set up the Digital Preservation Coalition, and looks at what it has achieved and the key strategic partnerships it has formed.
The idea of the Digital Preservation Coalition was formulated at a workshop in 1999 and it was launched in February 2002. It now has 26 members.
Why is digital preservation such a pressing issue? There are several components of the challenge, which can be roughly divided into the following:
Technological issues. The media on which digital information is stored degrade and can become corrupted without any warning. More urgently, the hardware and software required to access the information become obsolete, so even if the particular medium the information is stored on survives it won’t necessarily be accessible.
A famous example of this is the BBC Domesday project, an ambitious initiative conducted in the 1980s intended to create a modern-day equivalent of the wealth of information available from the 11th-century Domesday Book. Twenty years later, it needed to be rescued because it had been recorded on to two videodiscs, and the equipment needed to access the data had long been obsolete.
This story captured the attention of the media not least because of the exquisite irony – the original Domesday book still survives after 900 years, whereas the modern equivalent would have been lost without the intervention of a highly skilled team. The short time required before action must be taken leads on to a related issue:
Lifecycle management. Digital resources are rarely completely lost. As in the BBC Domesday project, they can be recovered, but only at great cost, and the longer they are left the greater the cost is likely to be. To quote Paul Wheatley, Project Manager of the Camileon project, which managed to restore the BBC Domesday using emulation:
‘Most of the really difficult problems we faced were due to the long time gap between the creation of Domesday and its preservation. If we had conducted the rescue 10 years earlier it would have been far easier. The timeliness of preservation work is a crucial issue that Domesday readily underlines. Would we be able to rescue Domesday if we left it another 10 years? I’m sure we could, but it would be at far greater expense.1
The need to think about managing digital information from the earliest possible time, preferably at creation of the resource, is a particularly challenging message to convey.
The work the DPC is doing in creating examples of risk of loss – which I will return to later in this article – is one means of trying to illustrate how easy it is to lose access to digital materials and how much more cost-effective it is to manage them from the start. This is very different from the model we’re all familiar with in the traditional preservation world and one which needs to involve many more stakeholders, most notably owners and creators of digital resources.
Legal issues. The Domesday project is also a useful illustration of the intellectual property rights (IPR) issue, which can be extremely problematic to sort out retrospectively. Domesday was massive, involving many thousands of people, including BBC staff, schoolchildren and volunteers. We don’t always know who has the rights in a resource, even for those on a much less spectacular scale than Domesday.
Organisational issues. Given the relatively brief time period before action needs to be taken to maintain a digital resource, the increasing volume and complexity of resources and the ease with which they can be created outside the sphere of influence of collecting institutions with a mandate to preserve the cultural heritage, it becomes increasingly urgent that creators are persuaded to undertake a degree of responsibility for managing the resource, at least for a defined period of time. Digital preservation cannot be left to a small team of specialists within an organisation; it needs to be embedded within an organisation. Similarly it cannot be left solely to national libraries and archives. They have a major role to play, not least in providing leadership, but they can’t be the sole players.
Why was the DPC formed?
There were a number of reasons why delegates at the 1999 Warwick workshop recommended the establishment of the Digital Preservation Coalition. First, they realised there was a need to reach a larger audience. Digital preservation was the domain of a relatively small number of organisations and it made sense to combine forces in order to ensure that digital preservation was added to the agenda of a wider range of key decision makers and funders. Second, it was clear that there was increasing worldwide activity of relevance to digital preservation, and a mechanism to maintain a watching brief and monitor progress was seen as extremely valuable. Third, collaboration was needed across and between sectors and geographic boundaries before any significant progress could be made.
It was decided that, while there would undoubtedly be a need to maintain an international perspective, the DPC should have a UK focus if it was to make a significant impact on the digital preservation agenda.
It is useful to take a brief glance at some of the events which led to the formation of the DPC and some key milestones since its formation.
March 1999 – 2nd Warwick workshop. Delegates reviewed progress in digital preservation since the first workshop (November 1995). A key recommendation of this second workshop was the establishment of a cross-sectoral co-ordinating organisation in the UK.
June 2000 – Jisc appoints Digital Preservation Focus. Another impetus from the second workshop was the need for Jisc to create a post to focus entirely on digital preservation activities for higher education in the UK. Neil Beagrie was appointed in June 2000; a priority for him was the establishment of the Digital Preservation Coalition.
January 2001 – summit meeting at the British Library. An invitation-only summit meeting brought together some key players in digital preservation, mainly from within the UK but also from overseas. It was recognised very early on that digital preservation is a global issue and one which will benefit from collaboration which is not confined by either sectoral or geographic boundaries.
February 2002 – formal launch of DPC. The DPC was formed in late 2001 and was formally launched at a reception at the House of Commons by Loyd Grossman in February 2002. At the time of the launch there were 19 DPC members. Membership was divided into two major categories: full members, who are eligible for a seat on the DPC Board; and associate members. (See panel, over, for a list of members.)
Membership reflects the cross-sectoral nature of the DPC, and the good regional representation, illustrated in the map of DPC members available from the DPC website.2 OCLC and RLG, while having offices in the UK, also have an international presence, which has been extremely helpful in maintaining an awareness of the wider digital preservation community.
July 2002 – DPC incorporated as a company limited by guarantee. It had already been decided that the DPC should be a separate legal entity from any of its members and that the most appropriate structure was a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee.
May 2003 – DPC Co-ordinator appointed. When I was appointed to this position, I was the DPC’s first full-time member of staff. Before that, it had used consultants and had relied very heavily on contributions from individual members, in particular from Jisc.
Given the rationale for the establishment of the DPC, it will come as no surprise that an early priority for the DPC work programme was advocacy. A PR consultant, Anna Arthur, was employed to help raise the level of awareness of digital preservation. A search of national newspaper coverage had shown one reference to digital preservation in the five years preceding the formation of the DPC – a finding which dramatically underlined the scale of the challenges in raising awareness and the need to move rapidly beyond the confines of ‘preaching to the converted’.
Media coverage
During the first year, there were some 50 instances of media coverage, including articles in national newspapers, radio interviews and some TV coverage. The story of the ‘rescue’ of the BBC Domesday disk was especially popular as it provided a number of elements with which a wide audience could easily identify.
Raising awareness continues, encompassing other activities such as conference presentations and articles by individual DPC members. Increased media coverage doesn’t necessarily lead directly to increased funding for digital preservation but it helps to oil the wheels. Given the modest resources of the DPC, which relies almost entirely on membership subscriptions, this was also regarded as a cost-effective strategy for rapidly increasing coverage of digital preservation issues.
As well as advocacy activities, there are other priorities, namely training and dissemination, and current awareness. Training workshops based on the Handbook of Preservation Management were organised for DPC members and held in Edinburgh, London and Belfast in 2003 and 2004. The increasingly urgent need for digital preservation training is frequently mentioned by DPC members, and the DPC is currently investigating the development of an intensive training programme, based on a model developed by Cornell in the US. The latter provides another example of the collaborative nature of digital preservation, and the value of exchanging thoughts and ideas with colleagues working in the digital preservation community throughout the world.
Training and dissemination are also achieved through the DPC forums. Eight of these have been held to date, each one focusing on a specific theme or themes. These are a popular means of keeping up to date on recent developments and of networking. The most recent forum, ‘Digital Preservation – the global context’, attracted more than 100 delegates, who listened to speakers from the US and Europe describing work being undertaken to address some of the major challenges. The theme also emphasised the international context within which digital preservation efforts take place.
Conservation awards
The last DPC forum was timed back-to-back with the first Digital Preservation Award, also held at the British Library. The Conservation Awards, organised by the UK Institute of Conservation, have encouraged and rewarded excellence in traditional conservation for a number of years and it was a wonderful opportunity to place digital preservation in this wider context, a very different context from usual, where it is often seen as a purely technical activity. There were four awards, including the Digital Preservation Award, which was won by the National Archives for its work on its Digital Archive (see illustration, over). Loyd Grossman, who helped to launch the DPC, and whose initial suggestion to include an award for digital preservation in the Conservation Awards encouraged the DPC to sponsor it, presented the award and also a highly-commended certificate, which went to the Camileon project.
Current awareness is also achieved through quarterly issues of What’s New in Digital Preservation? This is a joint effort – by Michael Day, on behalf of the DPC, and Gerard Clifton, from the National Library of Australia – which has proved enormously effective at monitoring the rapidly growing digital preservation developments.
The Digital Preservation Coalition work programme identified a UK needs survey as a major priority for 2003-04. This would build a picture of what digital preservation is going on within the UK and how much digital material is being produced, how much is at serious risk of loss and what the priorities for action are. This work is being undertaken in stages.
The first stage was a survey of DPC members in 2003. Thanks to an excellent response, the survey produced a detailed picture of digital preservation projects and working groups, the amount of digital material they are preserving and what members see as urgent priorities for future action.
Training, already mentioned above, and the needs of smaller, regional organisations, were cited most frequently as high priorities for further action. Individual DPC members, such as the National Archives, the British Library, and the Museums, Archives and Libraries Council (MLA), are already providing leadership in this area, and the DPC as an organisation can also undertake activities to support this work.
Survey of regional organisations
Preparation is under way for a survey of regional organisations, in conjunction with MLA. This will complement the information derived from the members’ survey. A Directory of Digital Repositories in the UK is being compiled by Duncan Simpson, on behalf of the DPC, which will be accompanied by a checklist of what organisations intending to outsource their digital preservation should consider.
Additional activities suggested by the DPC survey include compiling scenarios of risk of loss of digital resources, based on practical experiences of some DPC members. Real life examples often stop short of complete loss and material can often be recovered, but only thanks to the time and effort of specialists. It is clearly not a good idea to rely on a combination of serendipity and heroic rescue, so the examples are intended to serve as a graphic reminder of the importance of building in management of digital resources as early as possible, if the need for costly recovery at a later date is to be avoided.
Since its launch in February 2002, the Digital Preservation Coalition has grown from 19 to 26 members (10 full members and 16 associate members). Memoranda of Understanding have been established between the DPC and the UK National Preservation Office, the National Library of Australia and the Library of Congress. The establishment in February this year of the Digital Curation Centre, funded by two DPC members (Jisc and the e-Science Core Programme), promises further fruitful collaboration. The DCC is expected to become a member of the DPC in the near future, which will greatly enhance the opportunities for shared work programmes. With so many complex and varied challenges to be overcome, it makes sense to collaborate widely and to share information, experience and expertise as much as possible.
Digital Preservation Coalition
Board members
(at the time of the launch)
British Library
Curl
e-Science Core Programme
Jisc
National Archives of Scotland
OCLC
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
Public Record Office (now the National Archives)
Resource (now MLA)
University of London Computer Centre
Associate members (at launch)
Arts and Humanities Data Service
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
BBC Information & Archives
Central IT Unit of Northern Ireland
Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils
MOD
National Electronic Library for Health
National Libraries of Wales and Scotland
Natural History Museum
Open University
Publishers Association
Research Libraries Group
Trinity College Dublin
UK Data Archive
Wellcome Trust
References
1 ‘Techniques and challenges of emulating obsolete software’, Interview with Paul Wheatley. DigiCULT Info Newsletter Issue 4, August 2003, pp. 8-10 (www.digicult.info/pages/publications.php).
2 The map of DPC members, using data derived from the 2003 DPC members’ survey is available from the DPC website at: www.dpconline.org/graphics/join/mi-map.html
Maggie Jones is Executive Secretary of the Digital Preservation Coalition.
Further information on the work of the Digital Preservation Coalition can be found on its website (www.dpconline.org) or by emailing info@dpconline.org
Updated: 13 December 2004