Planning

The industrial structure of European economies and the types of occupation that they support are changing. This change takes many forms in different national contexts, but there are some common themes. There has been an increase in service-sector employment, both in low-skilled customer service work and in high-skilled ‘knowledge’ occupations, and a corresponding drop in manufacturing employment. This has contributed to a ‘polarisation’ of the workforce in many countries, with more high-skill and low-skill jobs but fewer requiring mid-level skills.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a blending of software and hardware, introducing intelligence and connectedness to objects and adding physical endpoints to software. Radical changes in the hardware development process have made the IoT—and its vast possibility—accessible to anyone.

“The internet is forever.” So goes a saying regarding the impossibility of removing material – such as stolen photographs – permanently from the web. Yet paradoxically the vast and growing digital sphere faces enormous losses. Google has been criticised for failing to ensure access to its archive of Usenet newsgroup postings that stretch back to the early 1980s. And now internet pioneer Vint Cerf has warned of a “digital dark age” that would result if decades of data – emails, photographs, website postings – becoming lost or un-readable.

Libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations collect, create, and steward a rapidly increasing volume of digital content. Both research conclusions and professionals’ real-life experiences expose the inherent fragility of this content. The cultural heritage and information science communities have developed guidelines, best practices, policies, procedures, and processes that can enable an organization to achieve high levels of digital preservation.

A couple of weeks ago I joined UCL’s free – and excellent – 8 week online Digital Curation course. It has several hundred participants from all over the world – many of them professionals and students in the Archiving and Curation field. The course covers what digital curation is, how it is performed, and its major activities and communities worldwide, as well as leading participants through some practical digital curation work on their own files. This latter activity is a perfect fit with the trial I am currently performing of an approach to creating and planning a Preservation Plan.

Raising awareness for digital preservation was a frequently used phrase when I started in this field ten years ago (never regretted it, hurray!). We preservationists have made progress. But the story is still not explaining itself. So I like reading how others persuade and convince people. Recently I found a book that really does the job. In crystal clear language, without beating about the bush and based on extensive up to date (until 2014) literature, digital preservation is explained and almost every aspect of it is touched upon. Edward M.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M52k0dbFKXc
Kari Smith at CurateGear 2015. Slides for this talk are at http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/curategear2015-talks/smith.pdf

In the flow of information all around us – in businesses, governments, personal spaces, in the physical and online world, there is information that we want to fix at a point in time and give it an identifier that we know we can use to find it again. That is, be kept in a way so that it remains not only identifiable with a meaningful name, but also so it is inviolate and trustworthy over time. The information might be born digital (emails, datasets, web pages, tweets, PDF documents), digitised copies of physical formats (books, paper documents) or still in physical form only.

Digital curation is a complex of actors, policies, practices, and technologies that enables meaningful consumer engagement with authentic content of interest across space and time. To ensure that it is using its curation resources in the most productive manner, the University of California Curation Center (UC3) has modeled the curation domain to provide a consistent, comprehensive, yet parsimonious conceptual foundation for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of its manifold activities.

When most people, even book publishers and ebook readers, think of libraries they often still bring up the image of the shushing librarian among her stacks of dusty tomes, stacking and sorting.