Digital dark times: Salaries in digital preservation

The Serpentine is one of the world’s most renowned art galleries. Their exhibitions as varied as Gerhard Richter, Damien Hirst, and Marina Abramović. They don’t hold a permanent collection, instead, they provide a space for temporary collections and an annual pavilion, the pavilion designed by luminaries such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Ai Weiwei.

Given a recent job posting it looks like they are looking at maintaining their memory better and branching out into digital preservation.

Here’s the kicker — its salary band is GBP 35,000 to GBP 38,000. So it must be an entry level position, especially in London, right?

Well, let’s see what they want you to do for that price tag…

The job advert reads as follows. The most pertinent aspects of the narrative are included:

As part of this transformation, we are seeking a Digital Preservation Systems Technician to lead the technical implementation of a digital preservation/digital asset management system and embed sustainable, organisation-wide preservation workflows.

The Digital Preservation Systems Technician will play a pivotal role in deploying this new system, ensuring its successful roll out within the organisation whilst also supporting continued long-term accessibility to archival and organisational assets

This is a rare opportunity to shape the long-term stewardship of a major contemporary art cultural archive from the ground up.

The specific tasks (sic):

• Support requirements gathering and technical evaluation of digital preservation and digital asset management systems
• Configure, implement, test and administer the selected system
• Work with internal IT and external vendors to ensure secure, scalable deployment
• Lead user acceptance testing and organisation-wide rollout
• Establish workflows aligned with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS)
• Manage ingest, including file validation, fixity checking and quality assurance
• Oversee storage strategies, including redundancy and access provision
• Monitor preservation risks, storage capacity and system performance
• Implement and maintain metadata standards including descriptive, technical and administrativ
• Support metadata mapping, transformation and migration activities between systems
• Ensure metadata integrity across the asset lifestyle
• Manage integrations with existing systems and APIs
• Coordinate upgrades, patches, backups and system maintenance
• Produce clear technical documentation and workflows
• Deliver training and guidance to staff across the organisation
• Governance & Risk Management
• Support compliance with digital preservation standards and policies
• Contribute to audits, risk assessments and disaster recovery planning
• Ensure alignment with data governance, security and access controls
• Act as a champion for Arts Council England’s Inclusivity and Relevance Investment
• Principle to ensure best practice through a proactive approach to equality, diversity and inclusion.
• Follow and assist in the implementation of all Serpentine’s policies including Dignity at Work and Health and Safety policies.
• Any other activities deemed necessary for the operation of the Arts Technologies Team and its strategic objectives.

GBP 35,000 to GBP 38,000

I keep looking at this salary, you might as well, it can’t be real?

But no, seriously, my very real OCD aside, you will be responsible for tender, implementation, and maintenance of a system/s that on subscription, will cost more than you do, yearly.

And this doesn’t even begin to scratch at the work you will be required to do.

What burnout looks like

The role I see described here is a multi-person role. You need a team. You can’t implement a system, policies, methodologies, and the rest with just one person, without external validation, without help, and without support.

Take one of the last policy manuals I worked on, just the policy, not the overall strategy, and not the procedures and their implementation; it contained 14 specific policies covering aspects of security, integrity, access, and risk management. These were written by a team of at least two at a time, with a feedback loop to at least three or four other colleagues across the organization.

I could spend a year, if I am lucky, writing a good draft of a quarter of those policies.

The last procurement I did involved a six-month trial, on my own, developing testing scripts and scenarios, developing secure, non-proprietary, realistic test corpora, and writing human readable reports describing the progress of the trial for consumption by the vendor and my management.

Just read through the job spec again, you will simultaneously be:

• Strategy development,
• Technical lead,
• System’s arrchitect,
• Policy analyst,
• File format expert and researcher,
• Digital archivist,
• Risk manager,
• Outreach and awareness lead,
• Compliance principle…

And, doing “any other activities deemed necessary for the operation of the Arts Technologies Team and its strategic objectives.”

GBP 35,000 to GBP 38,000

You’ve spent years training to be a polymath archivist, system’s engineer, and policy bod, did they not extract enough from you already?

We need to stop devaluing the field

Last role I was offered was in a similar price range, and for a very similar job spec. I couldn’t afford the relocation, but more than that, I couldn’t (a) devalue the skills I have developed over the years, and (b) devalue the skills of the team I knew I would eventually need to hire alongside me — if you are working for GBP 35,000, what are you offering your future colleagues?

I wrote on Mastodon that the Serpentine’s job might look like one undervalued role in isolation, but it’s not the first, and it’s not going to be the last if we don’t have an organization in place to support outreach, bordering on activism, that makes it clear, these roles have been chronically undervalued for more than a decade (this is the same salary i went into The National Archives UK with) and the responsibilities of such a lead should be at least double what is offered.

The Serpentine say the quiet part out loud (underline and bold added for effect):

This is a rare opportunity to shape the long-term stewardship of a major contemporary art cultural archive from the ground up.

This is weaponizing textbook vocational awe (Ettarh 2018).

It is a rare opportunity, and you might take this role and hold onto it for the next 20 years because of the reputation it brings. An annual conference or two in places like Denmark or Edinburgh. And a chance to say you work at such a prestigious institution,

But the field will continue to suffer in multiple ways… the ripple effect of roles like these affects your own progress, your own happiness (including reaching burnout), your own ability to influence research and development as you spend the first four years analyzing the collection you’re inheriting, defining requirements, and stabilizing policies and procedures.

Disaster planning and recovery; risk management; and development of strategies for emerging formats may come later? Or may come at the expense of the foundational efforts… it’s up to you, but you have finite energy and finite ways in which you can spend it.

And I can’t emphasize this enough, you can’t hire the two or three roles required to support yours. This looks like it just affects The Serpentine, but the net result is that the sector doesn’t expand; there are fewer new jobs and more people remaining in stagnant positions, or not employed at all.

The ripple effect: career mobility

Now you will arrive in a position. You get burnout. Your boss decides you’re not doing enough and piles the pressure on. Where do you go?

While competitive salaries fail to materialize competition for jobs grows yearly as more of us are trained through various archives, and MLIS programs.

Without activism in this area you have few options, but they largely look like this, (1) stay, or (2) move into a cookie cutter position somewhere else, similar salary, and hope for better dynamics.

You can’t progress, you can’t earn more, you can’t grow unless you move out of your discipline because the current job description describes the zenith of what you are supposed to be able to do in your career anyway.

GBP 35,000 to GBP 38,000

Bargain! (for them).

We need to stop devaluing our collections

Of course, it’s humane to focus on the people, but what about the collections?

I have seen roles ask to look after:

• Information and records management (in general);
• Preservation of digital records;
• Preservation of academic publishing;
• Research data management;
• Art and installations;

None of these things share the same shape or size and nor do I expect the material the Serpentine holds is homogeneous either.

But why are we preserving it?

What value do we place on it, if we value the cost of those maintaining it so little?

Digital dark times

Digital preservation is not “solved”. I don’t have the best rendition of this yet, but I often repeat something like digital is as varied as the imagination of those writing the software that creates it, or producing the records that we create with it.

Libraries have the concept of emerging formats for new publishing mechanisms but in reality, across glam there are always new and emerging challenges we have to deal with.

That means our solutions, from capture to metadata to repository and preservation are continuously in need of evolution and this is no small part what you will be responsible for in your career as a digital preservationist.

There’s a cliche about something called a digital dark age.

On the whole, we’re not really at risk of a digital dark age, (we can always capture something, including the shadows of records we don’t have all the technology for); but we are at risk of digital dark times the more we don’t pay respect to the aspects of our jobs that are part operational, and part innovation.

GBP 35,000 to GBP 38,000

Neither of those parts should be valued so little. And I despair that I am looking at job postings from leading galleries with a salary that looks like it came from 2009, 17 years after I first received the equivalent salary for a smaller role (albeit still not enough for the location).

Who is giving and taking counsel and setting these salaries? Where are the support groups, serving as the collective memory, and the collective pressure group, helping us to earn more as a discipline? Who are helping us to find fiscal, physiological, and mental security?

We have to do better.

One more thing…

The job is listed as 12 months fixed term.

How does that affect the person taking on this role? I can’t even imagine…

Acknowledgements

The buck stops somewhere, and for this job posting, and others I have referenced, I am sure it isn’t the line manager, or even the director of the line manager responsible for posting the job.

Jobs need filling, jobs need doing, and budgets, and strategic direction come down from on high and so I apologize if any of the above feels personal, it’s not.

I suspect your wages are suffering somewhere too, and I am sorry for that.

But there is a line, and whoever sits above that line, I hope reads this, and understands, the salary situation needs to improve for the organisation’s and the collective benefit.

Digital preservation is people

You can read more nuanced reflections on the state of support for individuals in the field in the Digital Preservation is People blog and mission statement (2024).

And mine and Andrea’s talk at No Time To Wait 8.

See also, Interviewing in Digital Preservation a Duty of Care and Community.

Links

• Serpentine job posting on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4392280546/
• The Serpentine’s original post: https://serpentinegallery.careers.hibob.com/jobs/3eed6f15-c615-4752-b0b0-7276f6b6c130
• Cover Image (Movement for Radical Empathy): https://bewegung-fuer-radikale-empathie.de/benni-erbsland/