In celebration of #WorldDigitalPreservationDay this year, Melissa Nolas, Director of the Children’s Photography Archive takes a moment to reflect on her journey in digital preservation and what she’s learnt over the last few months of thinking and doing digital preservation work for the CPA.
My first encounter with digital preservation – low key, personal – came with iPhoto when I switched to being a Mac user back in 2002. iPhoto Library before the days of the cloud tended on occasions to get corrupted especially across version updates or when upgrading devices. It was my PhD supervisor, a huge technophile, who had been the one to alert me to this ‘bug’. Not wanting to go through the grief of loosing photos (I had found the switch to digital photography painful enough), I started a ten year practice of manually backing up my photographs onto hard drives and creating my own separate photo filling system as well as putting them into iPhoto. That practice fell by the wayside when I had a kid (time, time, time…) and my fear of loosing digital photos has somewhat abated now that everything is backed up onto the cloud (yes, yes, I know that’s not entirely fool proof either but it will do for now).
Fast forward the years, to an event for a lovely little side project on ‘database activism‘ a few of us did (background here) and I am once again confronted with the issue of digital perishability. We had been considering extending ‘the archive project’ to include a collection of multimodal stories and the issue of storing them had been a key concern. I was sharing some of these ideas with a colleague who worked in film when he mentioned to me in passing that digitised films as objects are less durable than celluloid. I’m not sure if my jaw actually hit the ground but that’s how I felt. Probably like many, I had never considered the perishability of digital objects that are also public. I mean, I understood how I might loose my own digital photographs through a combination of bad luck, technical clumsiness of my part, and tech updates that were beyond my control but I hadn’t considered the entirely possible perishability of digital objects that were more public, that might have some infrastructure and money behind them. This revelation has haunted me since.
A few years later, a different project, this time a multimodal publishing project that had run its course, presented another encounter with digital preservation. As we took the difficult decision to wrap up ‘entanglements’, our conversations turned to how to archive this online journal that had created a small community and was valued by many. This time there was an expert in our group Bethany Logan who with her librarian and open access hat on went off to dig up various DP options for us. Most she found were too expensive (we weren’t funded and the journal was a voluntary initiative and despite best efforts over the years we had not managed to get a university library or publisher to take us on), and so in the end we decided that leaving the journal on a free WordPress site was a ‘good enough’ PD solution. I have been using WordPress since 2011 and as my long term collaborator/web designer said to me recently ‘Melissa, if WordPress goes down we’ll have bigger problems to deal with!’. We also encouraged authors to deposit their articles in their respective institutions research repositories (they are not just for REF… or shouldn’t just be for REF). It doesn’t look the same as before but it is all still there with the occasional broken link and this was the best we could do on a shoe string.
Then came the Children’s Photography Archive. Once I got that up and running, my thoughts started to turn to digital preservation. As I started to get my head around the role of CPA director and what that meant, one of the things that used to cause me a lot of anxiety was being responsible for all these photographs. Somewhat dramatically I found myself stressing continuously about ‘what if the internet goes down?!’ Back ups of the photographs exist, of course, but that didn’t feel sufficient, it felt a tad too amateurish. Around this time, a notification came through the digital preservation Jiscmail list of an event run by colleagues at Southampton University Digital Humanities Hub titled ‘Preserving our Digital Pasts: Stories, Methods, Futures’ organised by James Baker and Joash Johnson. I remember filling out the Microsoft Application Form to attend and my response to the question of ‘why do you want to attend this event’ was ‘because digital preservation is the thing that keeps me up at night!’
Part of the AHRC funded ‘Critical Cataloguing for Digital Preservation’ project led by James Baker, the one-day event was a brilliant introduction to many things digital preservation for people like myself leading a small, community GLAM organisation, who don’t necessarily have access to large scale infrastructure or funding and who end up doing digital preservation work by default and without archival training. As a result of the event and a follow on day spent with James who, as part of the same project audited the CPA for me from a DP perspective, I am now in the process of creating a ‘good enough’ digital preservation strategy for the CPA. This includes, for example, understanding the different dimensions of the DP work I/we need to do, thinking about audit and benchmark tools that can be used to stay on course, contacting the UK Web Archive to crawl our pages (a layer of the website is already on Wayback Machine), checking and testing that our server creates a back-up of the database (it does), creating regular back-ups on external drives and changing through drives every 3-4 years, creating an asset register and datasheets, and sorting out the file naming conventions.
Much of this, I imagine, is ‘bread and butter’ for those colleagues doing DP work on a daily basis – and there is much I have left out and much I’m still learning. It is not my intention to become a specialist in digital preservation but given my role in caring for the photographs of others, in this case children, I needed to get my head around what ‘caring’ and ‘looking after’ meant in digital, technical, and infrastructure terms.
Many of us outsource our DP needs to library staff, archivists & technologists (I’m thinking of the university context) or tech companies and departments. In outsourcing those needs we are also outsourcing the worry, or at least pushing it into the long grass. But I think it is important to consider the infrastructures, care and cost that goes into preserving the longevity of our various digital objects. Maintenance and care are not just socio-technical skills and practices, they are also political choices.
I’ve still got a way to go on all of this but so far I have found learning about DP really fascinating. Now, instead of getting anxious about DP I think of it as meditative, at least at the scale (small) and complexity (low) that I’m doing it: it is distinctly slow and largely quiet and invisible work that takes place amongst everything else going on, work which I personally find calming and enjoyable (the small messes we can order always are). It also makes me conscious of just how much we produce and I wonder whether that’s necessary. Mainly, I am grateful to all those colleagues everywhere who do this quiet, behind the scenes work on a daily basis, of looking after our digital lives.