The first Thursday of every November is World Digital Preservation Day (#WDPD2023). This year, Harvard Library’s Digital Preservation Services (DPS) team reflect on a question every library colleague must learn to field: “What exactly do you do?”
**The following hypothetical schedule is based on snippets of the day from each DPS team member.**
Morning
Sipping on a piping hot cuppa, it’s time to log onto a check-in meeting with the DRS Futures project team. Digital Preservation Services act as the business owner for Harvard’s Digital Repository Service (DRS), and in partnership with Library Technology Services, we are conceptualizing a next-generation repository that will sustain Harvard’s rich digital collections for decades to come.
10am
The ol’ email inbox is flooded, and we need to catch up on questions and consultations with Harvard library units! As a central service, we support over fifty curatorial units across all of Harvard’s schools and departments, and we are always available to offer guidance and instruction on preservation needs. Got questions about file formats, fixity algorithms, technological obsolescence – or simply need to assuage your existential crisis about the longevity of your digital content? You know who to call!
Lunch
Digital preservationists subsist on a strict diet of SIPs, DIPs, and bytes.
Just kidding! But if you want to know what those mean - or learn about any other digipres jargon – check out the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Glossary.
1pm
It’s time for a rousing meeting of the NDSA’s Infrastructure Interest Group!
Although digital preservation has grown rapidly as a field over the last few decades, digital preservationists still tend to exist in small departments or alone at institutions. Advancement of our work is highly dependent on bridging organizations to engage in external collaborative work: a cornerstone of digital preservation labor.
The DPS team is active within organizations like the Digital Preservation Coalition, the Software Preservation Network, the Open Preservation Network, NDSA, and more. We’re always eager to have other Harvard colleagues take advantage of these partnerships.
Early afternoon
The DPS team keeps a close eye on the growth and status of digital collections preserved in the Digital Repository Service. It helps us plan for format migrations, make storage procurement decisions, and forecast trends with emerging content types. Typically this means we’re formulating SQL (structured query language) queries to do investigative work in the DRS database. An examples of queries might be: How many objects across which content owners contain Kodak PhotoCD files? (Answer: 3,930 objects across 12 repositories!)
- Read the Fiscal Year 2023 DRS Report, which breaks down and visualizes the DRS collections
4pm
A nice way to end the day is by looking towards tomorrow. Digital preservation is about communicating with the future, and accordingly, we are consistently engaged with researching innovative solutions. Some recent work our team has been engaged with includes: email archiving in PDF containers, exploring the Internet Archive’s new preservation storage solution, and using software preservation and emulation as an authentic information delivery service.
- Read more about some of our current Research and Development projects
- Check out our Fiscal Year 2024 objectives
Logging off
After a long day of both detail-oriented work and collaborative discussions, it’s time to power down and reboot for the next day.
Want more information on what we do or how we can help you with preserving your library or personal collections?
