Department of Internal Affairs

Legacy Digital: Digital Continuity and

Outreach @ArchivesNZ

Ross Spencer, Mick Crouch

Archives New Zealand

ARANZ Christchurch Wednesday October 1 2014

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Community Discussion

• DCAP, GDAP, Government ICT Strategy and Action Plan, New Zealand Data Futures Forum

• Australasian Digital Recordkeeping Initiative (ADRI)

• Twitter – @dp_pig @leninoc etc…

• Digital Preservation Practical Implementers Guild

• iPRES – http://ipres2014.org

• Rosetta Format Working Group

• Digital Preservation Q&A QANDA

• National Digital Forum / GOVIS / Future Perfect conferences

• GoogleGroups droid-list

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Blogging

• Open Planets Foundation

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Outreach

• “Providing services to a population who might not otherwise have access”

• GitHub of code for others to use

• Demystifying / sharing knowledge

• It doesn’t benefit us (the small ‘us’ – Digital Continuity / Archives New Zealand or the large ‘us’ – the international DP community) to put up a wall

• Feeds into community discussion but growing number of participants in discussion

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Teaching DoC how to fish

• Weirder than old! [Blog] http://tinyurl.com/o6hvk2m

• 32 5.25-inch floppy disks from Claire Ashcroft @ DoC

• KryoFlux!

• 30 disks successfully imaged

• Forensically discovered CP/M file system

• WordStar

• Conversion from WordStar to plain text

• A new ‘war story’ for the digital preservation community

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Agents of Change

• Extra-organisational

• Intra-organisational

• Victoria University

• International

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Benefits

• Influence for our benefit – DoC doing it right, doing it well.

• Influence for our benefit – TNA improving DROID

• Stronger Together – Agencies will have their own fleet of

fishing boats

• We get to learn as well – Our experience grows beyond our

own institution…

• Those issues might yet reach our door…

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Emphasis

• Open source

• Tools – Screwdrivers vs. Manuals

• Open source implies community

• Shared community

• Shared solution

• Can’t do job without tools, without community – shared problems

and shared solutions

• Contribute regardless, show the way for others to contribute too,

even if they don’t

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Notes

• Grounded in PRA

• Opening data

• Twitter a phenomenon? – Powerful forum? E.g. influence of

BitCurator

• We’re ALL understaffed / under resourced – this can only be

addressed by a community

• It’s a big problem, with lots of individuals

• The off-the-shelf solutions are not mature and they rely on the

same tools we do anyway!

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Why is it important now?

• Cavalry isn’t coming

• GDAP didn’t get to the finish line

• Have to figure it out on our own – and we are

• Digital isn’t coming – it’s already here (harks back to

abstract – digital at forefront)

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Conclusion

• Community!

• Share information, get involved…

• Face-to-face; word-of-mouth

• We can’t legislate for the possibilities

• But we can build knowledge bases

• Learn lessons once… apply many times

• Through community we share information;

• Through community we receive and reuse information!

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Quesadillas?

By cezzie901 (Flickr: Quesadillas) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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