‘Good old Internet: it's not just there for the serious things in life!’: a digital forensics workflow on-the-fly to preserve the history of technology in higher education through University of Edinburgh BITs newsletter (1994-2019)
Sara Day Thomson
How has technology transformed higher education? How has higher education transformed technology? The learning experience for University students today bears very little resemblance to the experience of a student who matriculated in, say, 1970. The methods for delivering teaching, submitting assessments, and interacting with peers have completely transformed institutions of higher learning as well as the type of skills and capabilities of their graduates. These changes have contributed to a widespread transformation of the UK’s economy – indeed the global economy – which touch almost every aspect of life.
This paper describes a student internship at the University of Edinburgh aimed at preserving legacy issues of the University’s Computing Services’ newsletter BITs (Bulletin of IT Services). The newsletter provides unique detail about how the implementation of new technologies – like the ‘Good old Internet’ – have supported and even driven seismic change to University education. These digital archives provide rich insights into how new technologies were perceived by staff, priorities for resourcing new platforms, and the day-to-day changes to working and studying brought on by new tools and services. However, until summer 2023, many of those archives were trapped on decaying CDs and DVDs stored by the Graphic Design team.
Through a close collaboration between Graphic Design and Digital Archives, a student internship was developed to help recover these historic glimpses of technological innovation at the University in the late 90s and early 00s. Without resourcing for a dedicated space for forensics processing, the team assembled an ‘on-the-fly’ forensics station. Though far from ideal, the on-the-fly workstation allowed the student intern to sit with the Graphic Design team to ask questions about past projects and ways of working. Facing numerous challenges (such as training a first-year undergraduate on digital preservation, forensics software, and how to open a jewel case), this project helped to demonstrate that without dedicated funding, many important resources from across the University will be lost. However, the project also enjoyed a few highly rewarding victories, including recovery of (almost) all the legacy editions of BITs and watching a Gen Z undergraduate explain Y2K to peer student interns.
approaches to preservation start 2 preserve