Digital Preservation for the Masses: Creating Workflows for Institutions & Under-Resourced Organisations

<p>Digital preservation for the masses: Creating and publishing workflows and guidelines for institutions and smaller organisations interested in digital preservation, data management, and archiving</p> <p>Presentation given by Julia Colleen Miller at the Language Documentation and Archiving conference</p> <p>Creating public documentation is a crucial step in providing transparency of archiving processes, helping maintain consistent institutional knowledge, and making available resources for those wanting to know about digital preservation, archiving or data management. To this end, PARADISEC&#39;s pre-existing archiving workflows have been reworked and new technical workflows and archiving help-guides [1] have been developed and made available on GitHub.</p> <p>These resources can provide guidance for other archives, but perhaps more importantly, to empower smaller communities with fewer available resources wishing to preserve their own cultural materials. The archiving guides discuss topics such as data management and metadata. Technical workflows include digitising audio tapes, creating high-resolution photographs of manuscripts and notebooks, and processing born-digital audio and video files, closely following specifications [2] set out by the International Association for Sound and Audiovisual Archives and refined with input from holding institutions such as The National Library of Australia, The National Film and Sound Archive and The Language Archive based at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.</p> <p>Cultural institutions including the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the National Film and Sound Archive have discussed their concerns to get their magnetic tape holdings digitised by 2025- a deadline beyond which access to functioning digitising equipment will become increasingly difficult and costly [3], [4]. Collaboration and capacity building will bring us closer to preserving at-risk cultural material before it is too late.</p> <p>References: [1] Miller, JC (2021) PARADISEC archiving workflows. https://paradisec-archive.github.io/PARADISEC_workflows/. [2] Prentice, W. and Gaustad, L. (2017) The Safeguarding of the Audiovisual Heritage: Ethics, Principles and Preservation Strategy (web edition). IASA. https://www.iasa-web.org/iasa-publications. [3] Campbell, L. (16 November 2021) Deadline 2025, the need to preserve First Nations community collections. AIATSIS. https://aiatsis.gov.au/publication/117747. [4] National Film and Sound Archive (27 October 2015) Deadline 2025. NFSA. https://www.nfsa.gov.au/corporate-information/publications/deadline-2025</p>