Good afternoon Digital Preservation colleagues,
In these COVID times we are faced with the reality of doing digital preservation from a distance. With many working from home, the only way we can access our digital collections is from home on laptops or workstations that may or may not have been provided by our parent institutions.
Our archive colleagues may all have completely different set ups at home using hardware that might not be up to the task of performing digital preservation actions. Colleagues have to rely on their own internet connections and security applications for viruses/malware and encryption methods. At best these set ups may mean we have to come up with different workflows for colleagues who have different operating systems, applications and computing power. At worst, these set ups can prevent us from doing any digital preservation actions at all if the risk to collections is deemed too great.
At Sussex, the speed at which we can carry out digital preservation actions has been greatly reduced, as has the number of people able to carry out those digital preservation actions. This is due to inadequate computing power at home and the reduced ability to install necessary software on colleagues machines due to practical issues or security concerns.
I'd be interested to know how these issues have affected your institutions' ability to carry out digital preservation actions such as creating/validating checksums, identifying file formats and file normalisation. Did you carry out risk assessments to determine if it was safe to do digital preservation at home? It would also be great to know if there are any resources out there that might help practitioners find solutions to these issues.
Happy Friday,
Adam Harwood
Research Data & Digital Preservation Technologist
University of Sussex Library
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