Digital Preservation for All – the Digital Preservation Toolkit for Community Archives : Long Paper - iPRES 2025 - Wellington, New Zealand / Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa
Abstract
The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Our Heritage, Our Stories project researched the community archives landscape in the UK in order to document the challenges, issues and barriers facing community groups working to preserve both born digital or digitized content. It suggests the post custodial framework as a potential solution. The post custodial framework encourages established archive and digital preservation services and qualified professionals to provide support and guidance to community groups which will enable them to preserve, manage and provide access to their collections in a way that best suits them. The Digital Preservation Toolkit for Community Archives was designed as a resource to help facilitate this support while also allowing community groups to work on their digital collections in line with available resources and budget. The creation of the toolkit was a collaborative effort between the Digital Preservation Coalition and a wide range of community archive representatives based across the UK. After a period of consultation, a toolkit matrix was produced comprising of a matrix framework with ten topics broken down over three levels. Working through the topic levels in order will lead to a functioning digital preservation workflow. Additional resources have also been created to provide additional support. Community groups are also actively encouraged to approach their local archive services for support and guidance to supplement the content of the toolkit. The toolkit was published on World Digital Preservation Day 2024 and is now freely available online. Anecdotal feedback has highlighted some issues with the toolkit, including the UK centric focus and the DIY user format. It is for this reason that further expansion and adaptation of the toolkit is planned to enable it to be a globally relevant resource which will be of use to a wide range of community groups across the world. A feedback process will be built into this process to make sure the toolkit remains relevant and useful to as many people as possible.Details
- Creators
- Karyn Williamson
- Institutions
- Date
- 2025-09-01 00:00:00 +0000
- Keywords
- digital humanities
- Publication Type
- paper
- License
- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
- Download
- 186303 bytes