ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres :: blog
Digital preservation analyst, researcher, and software developer
This week (beginning 7 August 2017) marks my second solo published peer-reviewed paper. Binary trees? Automatically identifying the links between born-digital records. I invite everyone to have a read and let me know what you think.
The paper won the Sigrid McCausland Emerging Writers Award late in 2018.
Read the paper and additional thoughts below.
Digital preservation is massively multi-disciplinary and it can take time to be able to grasp the skills and concepts cross-discipline, wherever you began your own training.
How do we develop the skills of new folk entering the field today?
How do we re-skill those who have worked in GLAM a long time in disciplines other than digital preservation?
These are questions I think about a lot. I dig into some of those thoughts below and take a look at one approach I worked on for students and very early-career professionals with flashcards using Brainscape.
Digital preservation as-a-service (DPaaS) is a concept that could potentially allow many more users to satisfy the need to maintain ‘records’. Be those records in government, in another so-called GLAM institution, or one’s own personal memories and artefacts.
DPaaS makes sense on a number of levels as it enables the sharing of some very expensive infrastructure and individuals (storage, backup, delivery servers, software maintenance, engineers).
Those savings could be significant but I’m not aware of any single exemplar of the complete DPaaS infrastructure operating out there right now.
My instinct is that this is because one does not simply do digital preservation.
But that’s an overly dramatic simplification. I wrote up some rough notes off the back of a conversation. I take a look at these below.
Formatted 2025 for SEO and ActivityPub optimization. Original post: 28 April, 2017
Last week I blogged about the publication of a new linked data format registry based on the work I did previously at The National Archives, UK.
Where the work goes, we will have to see. Open sourcing it was an important goal of the short sprint. Partly because I hope it demonstrates an architecture that can be adopted for a similar registry, and it may also provide a code-base that can be adapted for similar, linked open data projects. This blog provides an overview of that architecture…