digital preservation | The National Archives blog

Posts tagged 'digital preservation'

Fri May

2012

Reconstructing a digital world: Look around you

Posted by Ross Spencer in Technology and innovation

As I sit and reflect in my home one evening, thinking back to the day’s events and looking around me, I can begin to see a rich digital tapestry woven into my life. This is prompted by thinking about a conversation I was having with a colleague who was trying to understand an export he had relating to horse racing results and wondered if the data could be extracted to be of any potential use.

Looking around, I see my digital piano in the middle of the room and wonder, beyond the MIDI output I can capture, what exists within its ‘mechanics’ to enable the various functions it performs; I receive an email on my iPhone which I know is downloaded from my Gmail account which potentially means two different storage formats for that email; and I flick through the channels on my digital TV which makes me realise the data which allows me to see a seven-day electronic programme guide must actually be stored as a digital format or data structure within the box to allow it to be displayed and searched through.

Other formats that surround me in my daily life include my mp3 collection, GPS fitness information from cycle trips, and even my computer games and the data video games use, such as save files. Look around you, what formats do you see?

Look around you: How is digital woven into your daily life?

Wed May

2012

Reconstructing a digital world: the ZX Spectrum

Posted by Ross Spencer in Technology and innovation

The theme of my next couple of blog posts will be about reconstructing the world we currently live in. Over the bank holiday weekend I attended an event that gave me new insight into a, for me, little-known digital world and gave me lots to think about in my work in digital preservation.

It has been 30 years since the release of the ZX Spectrum. To celebrate the impact this device has had on the UK in that time Imperica, the online magazine, held an event entitled Horizons. The theme, apart from reflecting on the ‘Spectrum at 30’, was very much binary, reflecting the past, and, exploring the future of computing.

The past. My first computer, still alive and kicking today.

Wed Apr

2012

Web Continuity success

Posted by Amanda Spencer in Technology and innovation

I have enjoyed reading the recent blogs of my colleagues on the subject of the UK Government Web Archive and its evolution since the early days of UK Government on the web. I’d like to continue to the theme of evolution and take a look back at how far we’ve come in recent years.

Thu Apr

2012

Survival of the Bits: Epilogue

Posted by Ross Spencer in Technology and innovation

Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be in Wellington, New Zealand as an invited representative of The National Archives at Future Perfect 2012. I was asked to give a presentation that focused on some of the technical work we do in Digital Preservation, with a nod to the strategy the department has adopted over the last few years and continues to pursue (energetically) in 2012 and through 2013 with the new work being completed on the Digital Records Infrastructure Project.

My presentation was entitled Survival of the Bits and focused loosely on what I perceive to have been an evolution in our work throughout the last few years. The presentation is online and can be viewed here. I received positive feedback about the talk over the course of the two day event, many of the comments praised the honesty of what was presented. The struggle we have in digital preservation is there is so much we have to do, or at least a lot we might want to consider doing to preserve digital records for future generations. We can either try and attack everything at the same time – ultimately this would result in spreading resource too thin and not achieving very much – or we can prioritise and achieve results with the most pressing of problems. Within the department we discussed the idea of an ‘unholy trinity’ of digital preservation: volume, ability to ingest, and knowing what we’ve got. With the aforementioned focus of 2012 and 2013 I suggested to the conference that we are really beginning to see an impact in addressing each of these challenges, but our work in format identification is the most advanced and a challenge it looks like we’re well on the way to beating.

Mon Mar

2012

A light bulb moment – and a lost government ‘first’ is found

Posted by Linda Stewart in Technology and innovation

The previous blog from the UK Government Web Archive, brought to you by my colleague Claire Newing, took you back to the nostalgic 1990s. I’ll be mostly continuing Claire’s story, but, apart from a slight digression to 1858, looking at a more recent era of government technology.

In the early days of websites some folk were never wholly convinced of the value of archiving publications that could be obtained from elsewhere. Archivists like to deal in stable, certain things called records; you know where you are with a nicely labelled and dated government file, or even a fragment of medieval parchment, unchanged for centuries. Hence a whole debate went on around whether or not a website was a record; maybe it was a medium for documents that were records – or maybe it wasn’t. Happily The National Archives didn’t wait for the outcome; we went ahead and captured government websites anyway. Meanwhile, as the record debate raged, a further complication appeared: the web became an interactive medium with technologies bundled together as Web 2.0: blogs, wikis, crowd sourcing – web users could interact with the content, adding their own thoughts to pristine web pages. In the event, Web 2.0 brought with it a demonstration of the long term value of archiving website material, although it didn’t seem like it at the time.

If a website was a government record, well, here were people, members of the public from anywhere on the planet, actually changing that record. And anyway, how could something as informal as a blog be a record?

Nonetheless, in a small way at first, government began to blog. It seems commonplace now, but it was only five or six years back that the first Ministerial blog was posted by David Miliband as Minister of Communities and Local Government at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

It was long thought that the ODPM blog was lost to posterity, as David Miliband was shortly afterwards posted to Defra, taking his blog with him. But researching in the UK Government Web Archive for today’s post, I found that a Defra crawl has picked up the links back to ODPM, and by clicking on the ‘posts by category ’ tabs it looks as if all, or nearly all, of the lost first ministerial blog is there.

Mon Feb

2012

Does PRONOM dream of electric DROIDs?

Posted by Ross Spencer in Managing information, Technology and innovation

Greetings from Digital Preservation!

One of the challenges we face in our department is coordinating our efforts to satisfy the requirements of The National Archives, other government departments and a wider preservation and archives sector community that make use of our tools DROID and PRONOM. With such a diverse audience we work hard to listen to colleagues who visit government departments or who actively take part in discussions about preservation and digital continuity. We also maintain mailing lists and have an email address which allows users to contact us directly. This has allowed us to develop strong relationships with organisations across the pond in the US and in the antipodes. We rely on these relationships to help develop our content and improve our services.