Last week I went to a ‘mashup’ event for digital preservationists, organised as part of the SPRUCE project. The idea was to bring together digital collection owners and developers to discuss issues with digital preservation and to work on developing tools to solve these problems. Issues presented ranged from identifying scanned images which have black areas in them to running specialist software built for Windows 95, with many more in between.
While the developers worked on their solutions, the collection owners tried to develop a business case for digital preservation, looking at the benefits, stakeholders and skills gaps in our institutions, culminating in an ‘elevator pitch’ designed to be delivered to scary executives in lifts. By the time our 3 days were up the developers had been able to come up with tools that solved several of the problems we’d arrived with, resulting in some very happy collection owners.
The event was really helpful, and I came away with a much better sense of how to explain the value of digital preservation, as well as a tool which should speed up our capture process. I’ve done a longer write-up for the futureArch blog if you would like to find out more.
