Father Najeeb Michaeel examines a manuscript

Father Najeeb Michaeel is an Iraqi Christian priest who speaks Arabic, English, French, Aramaic and Syriac, not to mention being able to read Latin and Greek. In the garden of Zaytun library, Erbil I hear this gentle man tell me how his community of friars used to live in Mosul, a traditional centre for Christianity in Iraq, having the highest proportion of Assyrian Christians of all the Iraqi cities. Father Najeeb’s community has  had to leave Mosul due to persecution.  Later on during The House of Books workshop he gives us a presentation of the magnificent early Christian manuscripts they are digitising.  Over coffee he gives us a moving rendition of the ‘Our Father’ sung in Aramaic.  I wasn’t expecting to feel so moved by a  religion I have become increasingly frustrated by, and in Iraq.

Early Christian manuscript, Centre Numerique des Manuscrits Orientaux, Mosul, Iraq.

Iraq has often compared to a mosaic in terms of the diversity of its religious diversity.  Iraq is a Shia majority country and contains the sacred Shia cities of Najaf and Karbala. Most sources estimate that around 65% of Iraqis follow Shia Islam, and around 35% follow Sunni Islam. What is not so well known is that Christians have inhabited what is modern day Iraq for about 2,000 years. The person who is supposed to be respnsible for the transmission of Christianity in Iraq is St Thomas the Apostle. Assyrians (also called Syriacs and Chaldeans) most of whom are adherents of the Chaldean Catholic Church, Syriac Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East account for most of Iraq’s Christian population, along with Armenians.  Tariq Aziz was born to an Assyrian family and is a member of the Chaldean Catholic church. There are also small populations of Mandaeans, Shabaks, Yarsan and Yezidis. The Iraqi Jewish community, numbering around 150,000 in 1941, almost entirely left the country. There are also Gnostics in the form of Mandeans and sub sects thereof, Yazidis who believe in a god but have a blue peacock angel in their pantheon, and of course the Zoroastrians which the ancient Babylonians followed.

Early Christian manuscript, Centre Numerique des Manuscrits Orientaux, Mosul, Iraq.

Despite this diversity they share some things, one being religious persecution within Iraq.  Estimates for the numbers of Christians suggest a decline from 8–10% in the mid-20th century to 5% at the turn of the century, to 3% in 2008.  About 600,000 Iraqi Christians have fled to Syria, Jordan or other countries or relocated to Iraqi Kurdistan.which is also the traditional homeland of the Assyrian people. Those who remain are very aware of their minority status and the threat to their lives. Another shared thing they have in common is a respect for their heritage, both in terms of artefacts and records.  In the aftermath of the war in Iraq where countless manuscripts where destroyed, these communities are well aware of the importance of their documentary heritage. Each group have their own manuscript collection. In addition, an attempt by Saddam Hussein to centralise private collections of archives has also made them wary of any notion of centralisation/government control. This has resulted in many collections being hidden away and lost.

 It was in this context that I met Father Najeeb in Erbil. He was there to speak about his work at the Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux (CNMO) Mosul  and their work involving the digitisation of their  Iraqi Christian manuscripts. This is a small scale project conducted by the Dominican community in Kurdistan. Their move to Iraqi Kurdistan was due to their persecution in Mosul and the government in Kurdistan ensures as much they can the community’s safety.  Father Najeeb and his community are being helped by Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk in St John’s monastery in Minnesota. Based at the the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, the library began in the cold war, hoping to retain a record of Europe’s heritage in case the Soviets came.  Father Stewart’s  goal since 2003 has been to  digitise as many Eastern Christian manuscripts in the Middle East as possible, because  these manuscripts are endangered from a variety of causes. The main danger is the ethnic genocide which has afflicted Iraq but also neglect.

CD of a collection for donor

Father Najeeb’s aim is clear, to preserve and generate awareness and interest in these ancient Iraqi Christian manuscripts and protect their heritage from disaster and cultural genocide. The Centre actively collects and digitises collections from private donors, who in turn get a copy of their manuscripts on CD (see above). I met other members of the Christian community in Iraq who had found a safe haven in Ankawa a district of Erbil which we visited. They all speak several languages including Arabic and Syriac, an ancient language closely related to Aramaic.  While Erbil is known as a safe haven withing Iraq, driving around in Father Najeeb’s car  one realises that hanging a rosary bead from a rear view mirror is not a casual gesture a brave declaration of faith as is wearing the traditional clothes of a Catholic priest.

The manuscripts which Father Najeeb is digitising are extarordinarily beautiful, and all the more so considering their provenance, age and the number of destructive forces they have endured. They have of some similarity to other e arly Christian manuscripts of the age, as the religion spread as far east as Iraq and also to the wilds of western Ireland where scribes worked on  similar texts.  In some way digitisation and the digital age has brought people together again  to protect these texts and hopefully raise awareness of this and other vulnerable communities.

Young Iraqi Christian at Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux

Flying into Erbil at night

“What you destroy, we will rebuild, only better” – Slogan of Kurdish Peshmerga.

The garden I am standing in is so beautiful that I find it difficult to imagine that it was a former detention centre  operated by Saddam Hussain’s Ba’ath party, a place  of imprisonment and torture.  It is now a garden full of  flowers  and trees and in its centre rises the impressive Zaytun Library of Erbil.  This is no accident, the Kurdish Peshmerga vowed that all these sites would be rebuilt this way once Saddam’s regime ended and the people would reclaim such poisoned land for purposes such as libraries and gardens. Erbil or or Hawler as it is called by locals like much of Iraq has seen a lot of history pass its way, Alexander the Great sorted out the Persian King Darius near here and the citadel of Erbil is the oldest inhabited city in the world and a soon to be UNESCO heritage site.

Erbil citadel

But let’s take a step back. What is a London based Corkonian doing in the middle of former detention centre/ garden in Iraqi Kurdistan? This  region in the north is the ancestral homelands of the Kurds – the oft persecuted minority in Iraq.  The Kurds constitute the largest minority without a homeland. I was at the library as part of the third House of Books workshop funded by the EU and UNESCO and run by a Humanitarian NGO called Un Ponte Per…. You can read more about their involvement here. It is the last in a series of workshops which has been looking at digitisation of texts and their preservation and its main partner is the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA). Many institutes from Iraq joined us including the National Museum of Iraq, Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux and other projects. From the Middle East the  National Library of Jordan and the  American University of Beirut also took part. My story with the INLA goes back to 2004 when I managed after some effort to persuade Dr Saad Eskander to write his  diary about his day to day life reconstructing the destroyed library in Baghdad.

Iraq National Library and Archives

The INLA was destroyed during and post war in 2003.  Of its 417,000 books, 2,618 periodicals dating from the late Ottoman era to modern times, and a collection of 4,412 rare books and manuscripts, an estimated 60 percent of its total archival materials, 25 percent of its books, newspapers, rare books, and most of its historical photographs and maps were destroyed in various ways. This was not just a loss for Iraq, it was a catastrophe for the world on many levels.

In 2011, Dr Eskander has built up a library few could ever have imagined possible. The INLA now leads the way in much best practise in librarianship for both traditional and digital material in Iraq.  There are also many digitisation projects being hatched in Iraq and around the Middle East, big and small and the drive to join up previously physically separated collections of journals, manuscripts, photographs is strong. The potential of the digital has long been recognised as a powerful means of disseminating information in the Middle East. The workshop  is trying to make projects understand that digitisation has a catch, and that is preservation or how to ensure that access is maintained over time. This idea was well introduced in Jordan during sessions such as ”Digitisation is not preservation’ and other catchy titles, and the event this time saw progression and developments since Jordan. In fact it seemed that projects had reassessed their approach to digitisation. Some would admit that where previously they were just scanning, (blogs passim) they revisited their projects in light of what they had learned in Jordan. Some  added technical metadata which they had not done at point of digitisation, others looked at having master copies as well as access copies of their digitised content and kept in different locations.  Policies were reconsidered. Storage solutions were considered. All steps in the right direction. The value of having 2 workshops in a year with a lot of the same people in both proved useful  as there seemed to be a lot of consolidation and desire to demonstrate improvements between one meeting and the next.

Workshop overview

The workshop was kicked off by UPP, and some short contributions by the EU’s representative in Kurdistan, Hala Al Sharifa , followed by the UNESCO programme officer for Kurdistan, Sami Al Khoji who is clearly dedicated to his role and the revitalisation and distribution by digital means of information about Iraq’s cultural assets. Kanan Mufti who is  director general for antiquities in the western Kurdish region in Erbil and who resided in the ancient citadel reflected on the importance of documentary heritage for Kurdistan and declared the protection of documents as a priority for them.  Presentations the INLA showed us they have been digitising and accessioning digital content since 2008 and we heard about their  plan to develop an Iraq digital library making its materials available to all Iraqis online.  The material will cover all aspects of Iraqi life and society and all forms of document. The INLA sees as vital its contribution to intellectual and scientific research in Iraq and also endeavours to support programmes which will end illiteracy in Iraq. The INLA has embarked on training programmes in many aspects of digital library management. They have even managed to send 2 people to attend the Digital Preservation Training Programme, thanks to the British Council and BISI.

The National Library of Jordan spoke about the need for standardisation in the region in relation to cataloguing and indexing. The  American University of Beirut ‘s presentation lead on nicely as Basma Chebani reflected  on Arabic ontologies and the need for authority files in the Arabic speaking world. My 2nd session on metadata fitted in well here and we did a nice hands on exercise, working with the group of 30 through Arabic and Kurdish, it seemed to hit the mark and the right level. The translator also did a great job helping me, he is now a metadata expert!

Father Najeeb of the Dominican Order in Iraq who spoke movingly about their ancient texts and manuscripts and their ongoing digitisation. A small project with great ambitions from a community constantly under threat. I plan to write more about this in another blog.

Early Christian manuscript, Centre Numerique des Manuscrits Orientaux, Mosul, Iraq.

Many copyright issues arose, in particular that of forgeries in the traditional manuscript environment. It seems that a lot of illegal copying takes place and it is difficult to contain. Issues such as translation were interesting. During my session on digitisation and preservation the Iraqi born but Aberystwyth-reared translator ran out of his booth proclaiming, ‘What is a plug in?!’ To which everyone loudly  had an opinion in return.

Translator in action

The translator explains metadata

I led the concluding session, working with the group about recommendations for next steps arising from the workshop. This proved interesting, considering I was again working with a translator with a group who spoke Kurdish, Arabic and Syriac, not to mention an Arabic English keyboard! Getting individuals to think by themselves and for themselves about what they would accomplish on their return to work is good in a big group. They then worked as teams of 4 to consider what the next steps would be in Iraq for libraries and archives.  The key issues were networking, the establishment of a national network or syndicate of librarians and archivists and information specialists involved in libraries and archives is deemed of great importance. The group also want to consolidate the information from the workshops and ensure that people are not reinventing the wheel in terms of developing best practise. The establishment of education and training programmes in all aspects of librarianship and archives is also vital.

Metadata matters but other things do too.

What was also key and hidden beneath the discussion of texts and metadata and the like was that this was a   moment or space away from the day to day. These people work in circumstances which we cannot begin to comprehend. Just to come to the workshop involved endless checkpoints and danger. Life is unsafe and violent. Civil society as we know it here in the UK is almost non existent in most of Iraq. Electricity cuts are regular, resulting in me being stuck in a lift fo 5 minutes. This is not the same for Erbil on the whole but most colleagues came from Baghdad, Mosul and other regions which are the news for tragic reasons.

The value of this little group of archivists and librarians from different ethnic and religious groups is more than just about metadata and file formats (as important as they are) but about bringing disparate groups of people together with a view to the flowering of a new nation where religious and ethnic difference no longer matter, where censorship doesn;t exist, where ideas flow freely once again. This is the vision of the INLA director Dr Saad Eskander.  It is not an easy vision in a divided society where sectarianism is rife. However it is not so unusual to consider the power of libraries as a social phenomenom and yet we seem to treat them purely as an informational phenomenon. The House of Books demonstrates that it works on at least 2 levels

Iraq as everyone knows has  a violent history of occupation and war, however during periods of serenity, the emergence of civilisations who have made numerous extraordinary contributions to the history of civilisation, these include  writing, and the concept of zero or  sifr to name but a few.  Original texts survive from the era of Babylonian mathematics. On day 1 of archives school baby archivists learn that the Babylonians wrote on tablets of unbaked clay, using cuneiform writing. The symbols were pressed into soft clay tablets with the slanted edge of a stylus and so had a wedge-shaped appearance (and hence the name cuneiform). Experts studying these learned that the Babylonians had developed the concept of sifr or zero.

Cunieform from Babylonian times: Top: 64 (1 sixty + 4 ones) bottom: 3604 (1 sixty2 + 0 sixty + 4 ones)

Sifr is also used in Arabic to denote a clean slate, a blank page. In Iraq hard work has begun of the rebuilding from scratch  of a rich cultural heritage of Iraq for the future.  I am glad that the preservation of digital heritage of Iraq is a part of this.  More later!

Map of Erbil

I have been invited to the 3rd House of Books workshop organised by Un Ponte Per…. It will take place in Erbil, Kurdistan and is under the auspices of the National Library and Archives of Iraq. The workshop is looking at best practise in relation to digitisation and preservation, follwing on on topics discussed at the last workshop. Our keen and alert followers will notice that this project has already been on DA blog. I will be posting when I get back about this workshop.

Question: What do alcohol and a VLE discussion forum have in common?

Clue: you’ll have to read to the bottom of this article to find out.

History Spot at Institute of Historial Research ( IHR) looks very good.  IHR is one of the many jewels in the crown of ten member Institutes of the School of Advanced Study, part of the University of London. It offers many training opportunities for historians and the like. History SPOT is a platform and an opportunity seized by IHR to launch and disseminate IHR activities.  It will significantly increase and enhance access to the materials by anyone who needs these skills/information/knowledge.  What we saw so far, looks intelligently designed with the user at the heart of the model.

On Tuesday we gathered to hear more about HistorySPOT and also from the Open University about their issues with VLEs, they knowing more than a little about such matters.  History SPOT was launched in March 2011 thanks to a grant from an anonymous donor to develop the IHR’s online presence (especially to widen participation of its research seminar programmes).  It was soon decided that they would use this donation to develop two core areas of the IHR’s remit.  The first was to widen knowledge of and participation in their internationally renowned research seminars through the use of podcasting, live streamed events, and vodcasting (video).  The second was to provide for the first time, free access to content from our research training modules and courses.

Dr Matt Phillpott gave us an overview of presently available online training courses relating to the Humanities and the concluded that there were not that many. The Open University is the closest we have and of course  iTunes is an option but this is not perfect as it neglects much contextual information about the courses on offer.  The OU also ran us through their various offerings, including the online tasters they provide (all in Moodle) which used to be called Learning Space but now is called Open Learn.

So all in all putting courses into a VLE is a good thing right? Well, of course! At IHR it increases access to the wealth of material being built up at IHR and hopefully adds to IHR’s income stream which will enable it to deliver more high quality and useful stuff to put into History Spot.

An interesting discussion arose about the age cohorts of people using our VLEs, many young people will be very happy with a purely online experience but the quite high drop out rate at OU reflects that not all can motivate themselves in this way. Agreement was reached that it is very difficult to teach about the meaning of something as well as it is to train via a VLE.

Of course putting our courses on a VLE is not as simple as it seems. Transferring the pedagogical experience to the environment of a VLE is not straightforward.  To recreate an experience of the  group dynamic which occurs in a training course or that magic of the learning moment, we can resort to forums, discussion groups and the like. However these will only go so far and the more is not the merrier. In fact the more forums the less likely people are to contribute and more problems can arise.

A positive side to online discussions is that people who normally wouldn’t contribute in a face to face course may be more inclined to do so in a VLE.  However, and here is the pitfall, the experience of many hardened and wise VLE providers will indicate that all these courses and discussion groups need  constant moderation. People can write things and express themselves in ways online which they wouldn’t dream of doing face to face. Like alcohol it seems to have an emboldening effect and people will say things which whether intentional or not can be misconstrued and cause great upset. This has to be decided on when planning and designing the course.  The moderator will need to be alert to this at all times while running their course, and so the lesson is again ‘Moderation in everything’.

Fáilte go Sráid na Banrighinn

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris

Football and digital preservation seem an unlikely combination but on May 15th Ed and I arrived to a slightly damp Glasgow celebrating en masse the end of the football season, to deliver our DPTP north of the border.  There, I am afraid the comparison between football and digital curation ends but it is worth noting that on Monday our students did not consist, in the main of bleary eyed Scots.  As I am myself half Scottish I was looking forward to hearing about the digital state of play in my mother’s country but curiously we had a very international group, many had travelled far from places such as the European Central Bank,  European Commission, PRONI,  and near  such as from the National Records Scotland (who clearly cannot get enough of a good thing as we were with them 4 weeks previous).  The group was very creative who seemed to work well together. I know  I know, we say this a lot but this group seemed to shine for many reasons.  They were keen to work together and shout out about their ideas right from the start. And though being a disparate international group they managed to work together very neatly and develop some great case studies for us.

Internationally (and sometimes nationally!) language has always been a barrier  for communication, but  it is also an enabler  and this is again where we see something such as the OAIS being a useful way of empowering people to be able to communicate with each other, and other professionals.  The DPTP rarely (and rightly so) has students just from the traditional information management world (libraries/archives/etc).  Many people now being redeployed from different parts of their organisation and as such are often unfamilair with the idea/concept of an archive or indeed of the traditional notion of the lifecycle of a document/record. This is where OAIS is very valuable due to the way it which it expresses the way a digital object should be ideally kept and uses a language describe this.

In many of our case studies with OAIS, we often find that many organisations are actually mapping very well to the OAIS which indicates that it reflects  good and real practise when it comes to managing our digital repository. Our job in the DPTP is to take someone who has never heard of the OAIS (suprisingly more often than not) and by the end of the three days have them fluent in the OAIS concepts both through listening and through application to their own environments.  Our feedback from the course has proven that this is a job well done….DPTP abú!

A glimpse of Petra, Jordan

‘Machine replication of human functions, like reading, is an ancient dream’ *

One of the many topics discussed in the House of Books project in Amman was the issue of OCR and Arabic texts. Optical character recognition or OCR has become one of the most successful applications of technology in the field of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. It is now a necessary step in the transition from analogue text to the elctronic world, particularly due to the quantity of information now available in the electronic age as it enables rapdi searching and scanning. In the last five decades, machine reading of text has grown from a dream to reality.

Software for OCR is now almost 100% sucessful for Roman scripts. Middle Eastern library content however, particularly for Arabic and other non-Roman language materials, poses special challenges to the creation of digital repositories of arabic texts.  Arabic, being a diacritic language has many characters (letters) which have exactly the same form, and are distinguished only by the position of various dots over, above, or inside the main character block. This  poses special difficulty for OCR, as dots can be ignored by software as speckling or error, or even removed. Most institutions digitising Arabic manuscripts use Sakhr OCR software, but it does not seem to pick up the intricacies of Arabic script. What to do?

Some arabic fonts http://university.arabsbook.com/

It seems that if prepared well the Sakhr recognition software package has the capability to recognize generic Arabic fonts (called Naskh or Kūfī) with a fair degree of accuracy. However the software has to be taught to recognize any peculiarities or unusual characteristics in the font of the scanned volume in question. This is extremely time consuming and requires technical expertise. Also it is taken for granted in such a process that the font will be more or less consistent throughout any given volume; in many cases the hand can change in any manuscript so I imagine it would need to be reinstructed according to each section where the hand or the font changes. In addition the quality of any OCR depends on the quality of the original scanned file.  Also not everyone wants to use generic fonts, think of how much we like to personalise our own? Another headache for Sakhr.

Our group in Amman as a whole expressed frustration with  Sakhr and really hoped that it could in some way be generally instructed to recognise characters which it consistently fails to pick up. We felt sure that it will be solved soon and I personally cannot imagine that the military have not got a  solution up their sleeve  about this considering the politics of the world these days.

Interestingly in terms of resources discovery, Google Scholar does not allow searching in Arabic, while it allows for searching of both Japanese and Chinese scholarly texts. Surely as complex for an OCR piece of software to recgnise as Arabic?   This means that any texts written in Arabic cannot be accessed, which means that scholarship in Arabic is not being picked up by one of  the biggest and widest search engines for scholarly literature. Why such an oversight by Google scholar? I have contacted them and have yet to find out!

This of course brought home the real need for more collaboration between libraries and archives involved in digitsiation projects in the Middle East itself. There are many  projects based in North America such as Ameel and in the UK such as SOAS (which our own Repository folk in DART have been working on!) which unify and make available digital resources from the Middle East.  There was also an interesting JISC study with the University of Exeter about user requirements for digitised resources in Islamic studies. These are of course a western approach to arabic material, albeit in their own collections. It often also is concerned with transalations of arabic texts to greek or Latin as was the norm.

The issue of OCR and its sucess rate for non Roman fonts also raises questions about the power of the digital and askes the question that if OCR canot serve one of the great languages – Arabic,  how many minority languages which are also very diacritic are not being served well by the OCR sofwtare available.  The result of this must a tip in the balance of available reserach material in favour of texts in Roman script and sees an imbalance in what is being made available online.

Baghdad at night, 2011

There is a need for the countries which created this material to work together on such projects. Many very interesting and topical projects  to do with the emergence of which were being proposed in Amman relating to digitisation and working together to track missing journals as well as trying to avoid duplicating efforts.

So how to do this? Several libraries attending our workshop in Amman highlighted the necessity to coordinate the effort for  Arabic texts digitization in order to avoid duplication, share best practices and develop common standards, index and software. To enable this  a decision was made to work on  developing new cultural cooperation interventions for digitisation in the Middle East; to fund-raise for this and to set up groups in a social network (facebook, linkedin) including all the participants from the House of Books project. Importantly further workshops will be run to encourage this cooperation and hopefully see strides being made in cooperation and digitisation of arabic texts in the Middle East.

* http://www.nr.no/~eikvil/OCR.pdf

**Thanks to Qaiss Hatef  Saeed of the Iraq National Library and Archives for his help.

Newspapers in National Library of Jordan

Baghdad, 2003 -  when Domenico Chirico, Director of Un Ponte Per… first asked various organisations for support and resources for the reconstruction of the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA) destroyed during the Iraq invasion and occupation, he was met with cries of bemusement and disbelief:

‘Why worry about books and archives when we have lives to save?!’.

Some if not many  struggled to understand that a library in Baghdad could be a priority during such horrific times.  But they had not yet met Dr Saad Eskander, Director of the INLA…but that is another story which has been told.

Cairo,  2011 and the ‘Spring revolution’ is happening in the Middle East.  In Egypt almost as soon as unrest broke out, two public libraries in Cairo were  burnt to the ground however cheeringly in Alexandria, news came of staff and citizens forming a human chain around the Biblioteca Alexandrina (much supported by Susan Mubarack) and another around the National Mususem of Egypt to protect it, though it wasn’t so lucky. These stories as told via Twitter cited what had happened in Iraq. Iraq, sadly is not alone in having suffered such destruction to its cultural property. These attacks,  fire, pillage, looting to order and just plain old theft  do more than just destroy a building or some documents. They are attacks on civil society, denying Iraqi people  access to engage in democracy, to access information as well as to their cultural memory.

Amman, 2011 – In light of all this, it was with great interest that I agreed to participate in the ‘The House of Books/ Dar El Kataub’ workshop run by the aforementioned Domenico Chirico’s NGO UPP and UNESCO.   Its purpose was to work on challenges facing the digitisation of Arabic texts.  I was there to look at the preservation aspect of digitisation, a shock to some as it is often thought that digitisation is itself a preservation strategy! So there was work to be done…

William Kopycki and I leading a session

We had a wide range of people from Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar/Australia, Jordan, Egypt/USA, Italy and the United Kingdom.  From an digital archivist’s point of view (and in my view the right one),  the projects represented presented us with the gamut of activities which are now present in a digital library or archive, from the development of impressives copyright legisalation in Jordan to a start to finish overview of a project digitsing  journals relating to the 19th centroy arab cultural renaissance Al-Nahda. We also heard about training and devloping infrastructures for digital object management in Iraq, as well as an overview of the current project in the INLA to reconstitute many of its collections through digitisation. We had a good deal of course about preservation from myself and Giovanni Bergamin from the University of Florence and Maurizio Messina.

My work consisted partly of leading the group in a consolidation of ideas discussed during day one.  A very important goal of this workshop is collaboration and as a result we wanted the group to think individually and in groups of four about why they saw the need to collaborate and then to tell us how they would approach collaboration.  We ended up with great points which reinforced the absolute need for collaboration in terms of standardisation, best practise, resource discovery, lobbying and important networking opportunities across the arab speaking world.

I also was there to speak and work with the group a lot about digital preservation and digitisation. This is an area which can be neglected often as many considered digitisation to be simply about simply delivering access to materials.  In addition these digital objects are considered digital surrogates and little consideration is given to their preservation as the analogue copies are available. It is important to consider preservation of these digital surrogates over time at the point of their creation.  Do we really want to invest the time and money again in their re-digitisation? I very much doubt it! However unless consideration is given to their long term sustainability this is what will happen, data loss or re-digitisation. This is time and money few of course can afford to spend.

Touching of some of the issues we covered in terms of preservation we looked at planning digitisation projects in light of preservation and their sustainability and explored the main points to consider for preservation of digitised content, drawing a lot from our very popular report on digitisation and preservation produced by DPC/ULCC and PORTICO. I reinforced the real need for honest sharing and for sharing failures as well as successes, we have all had them so we can only progress through acknowledgement of both.

Looking at the 1923 magazine on women’s issues called  Layla, we explored in a session what characteristics we would like to preserve over time.  Many things which we assume will be kept in the paper based world, have to planned for in detail  in the digital world, not much if anything can be left to chance.

Workshop over!

All speakers were extremely interesting individually and collectively as they gave an outsider like me the overview of the digital library/archives world in this part of the Middle East.  Qaiss Hatef  Saeed of the INLA spoke about the motivation of the INLA to establish a digital library  due to the loss of their holdings in the library during and post conflict.  Much of the library is being rebuilt literally from ashes by means of digital content,  and popular holdings need to be digitised to give as Quaiss said ‘ books a rest’ from handling.

Qaiss also proposed that in 100 years hard copy books will no longer exist and everything will be digital. Fighting talk! But  digital libraries however will only survive as long as we invest in their sustainability.  Digital resources have great power in terms of access but they are also very vulneable in terms of long term sustainabilty.  As such action needs to be taken an now to stop bit rot and technology obsolesence being the next threat to access to information which is now increasingly digital.

*Note: The House of Books workshop was picked up by 16  newspapers in Jordan and Iraq. These include  articles in the Baghdad press, The Jordan Times and even the Iraq National Congress.

Susan Corrigall(NRS), Patricia Sleeman & Ed Pinsent (ULCC).

We gave a 2 day in house workshop to the National Archives of Scotland last week.  As Ed Pinsent has noted in his post about legal admissability, our timing was quite interesting; we arrived on the Monday the week after NAS had merged with the General Register Office, to become  the National Records of Scotland.  Interesting times for all and while we couldn’t have known in 2010 what a pivotal day it would be for NAS, we hoped  our training session on digital preservation would be in some way timely.

The 20 staff attending were very varied in their reponsibility and roles in the NAS/NRS, however wisely it was felt that all needed to have a entry level awareness of the issues relating to digital preservation.   NAS has been engaged for some time in the management of its digital resources and it is looking at cost effective ways of doing so.  Staff are being skilled up in relation to digital preservation, in this way NAS are ‘maximising their current resource potential’, to use a buzz word.

Working with a group from one organisation in situ is quite different for us as normally the DPTP is an open course which sees a variety of delegate hailing from many very varied organsiations. As a result we cover many topics to give a good grounding in what we feel are the most important aspects fo digital preservation, while trying to accomodate varying levels of expertise and knowledge.  This type of course is sucessful in many ways – it can often lift spirits, particularly for peope working in a solitary environment to see how much in common they have in terms of digital preservation and its challenges. The social aspect of the course is important as people recognise that digital preservation affects all communities involved in any kind of management of digital content in the long term.  A lot of what we aspire to do is build confidence in people to tackle the issue.

Working in an organisation who has commissioned the DPTP is quite a different experience. We see the coming together of a group already known to each other to a greater or lesser degree. However very often they come from different sections and this ‘time out’ together should be of value in many ways:  as a collective learning opportunity, socialisation and in a time of change an opportunity for supporting each other.

We also get the chance during a class project to investigate a particular issue of note for the organisation.  This hopefully enables the group to leave with a finished product.  In the ‘open to all’ DPTP we want our group to leave with a better understanding of everything but more precisely to have gone some way regarding the implmentation of theory to real life work situatsions through our classwork.  To leave the course with soemthign immediately implementable within the workplace we feel is important. Our class session at NAS/NRS remains confidential but we thoroughly enjoyed it and felt that it translated a lot of what was hitherto theory into a an enhancement of an existing practise to enable improved digital object management.

Interesting times for all and I feel perhaps it was timely that NAS are skilling up their staff to embark on digital preservation now.  Digital preservation is a concern for all government departments but who can manage it? Archivists as a profession have a good set of tools and concepts from their profession which translate well to digital preservation.  In fact OAIS tells many archivists nothing new – they are doing most of it already in the analogue world.

Thus archivists hold one major key on our large key set which we need to unlock digital preservation.

Know your rights, the future is unwritten

My 6 year old son brought back from school a booklet about the Convention of the Rights of the Child. As a school councillor he is expected to have a copy on his person, or so I believe, in case any one might need to check out their rights in the playground or corridor! It is a neat and accessible booklet explaining the many rights which we take often for granted here in the UK but which are  absent for many children around the world. I am constantly being reminded of the right to play!

I had heard a lot about it from my son but never actually read it. When I did do so, the archivist in me was drawn to Articles 7 & 8.  Article 7 states ‘every child has a right to a birth certificate’ in the child friendly version, and states in the actual convention that:

‘1. The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and. as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.’

Article 8 reinforces this notion of identity:

‘1. States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference.

2. Where a child is illegally deprived of some or all of the elements of his or her identity, States Parties shall provide appropriate assistance and protection, with a view to re-establishing speedily his or her identity. ‘

The importance of a birth certificate

Interesting yet  blindingly obvious to most of us reading this blog. It is wonderful to live in a society where it would never occur to us that we couldn’t have a birth certificate or if we lost it we couldn’t get a replacement. So many people around the world do not live with this certainty. Despite 191 countries ratifying the Convention, the births of millions of children worldwide go unregistered.  Birth registration opens the door to rights to children and adults which many other human beings take for granted: to prove their age; to prove their nationality; to receive healthcare; to go to school; to take exams; to be adopted; to protection from under-age military service or conscription; to marry; open a bank account; to hold a driving licence; to obtain a passport; to inherit money or property; and to vote or stand for elected office.

If there was any doubt about this, this map of the percentage of children under 5 whose births are registered demonstrates that this basic right is not met in many countries around the world. Questions of birth certification integrity have arisen in recent times in the ‘developed’ world, just think about how much controversy Obama’s birth cert has caused!

The importance of records for our identity

Barack Obama's birth cert

Records, on the whole, including records of births have lived in discreet repositories most of their lives and it usually their absence/loss  during  wars/conflicts that bring them to most peoples’ attention. During most recent conflicts one of the first targets will be a library and archive or a museum. The destruction of archives occurred in Bosnia and Iraq during conflicts there.  This has been termed ‘cultural genocide’. I would go further and if I were to use such language I would call it ‘identicide’ , the destruction of peoples’ identity. Now that this vital data is increasingly if not primarily electronic we are looking at increased risks and vulnerabilities of data loss or corruption – not by totalitarian regimes or warring ethnic conflicts but by that single enemy known as benign neglect due partly to hardware, software obsolesence and our neglect or inaction.

Bringing it all together

Musing on all this I landed in Millfields school, thanks to Jonathan Everingham, the teacher in charge of history at Millfields.  He asked me to speak to a group of  children at the school in year 6 about ‘My Job’.  I never thought I would speak to fifteen 9-10 year olds about data and data creation.  With children I usually steer clear of this and show them ‘fun’ documents such as old alphabets or old archive footage of children their age – fun fun fun. I really wondered how they would respond. I knew from Jonathan they were studying Ancient Egypt and knew they were doing some simple data gathering and making graphs. Fun! I really wanted to communicate to them the importance of primary sources whether it be electronic or analogue but I was going to focus on data this time. But how to make data fun? I decided to combine the two topics they were studying – Egypt and data gathering – and weave them into my talk.

A quick visit to the time of the Ptolomies

Demotic census, Petrie Museum, museum number - UC32223

So closing our eyes we paid a visit to the time of the Ptolemies in Ancient Egypt and looked at a census from then written in demotic. They were a clever group but no demotic readers! I explained that it had 21 columns of a Ptolemaic census-return for a household. We discussed why governments then and now gather data and the idea of language as code and the absolute need for a demotic dictionary to intterpret this data. They also noted how well the papyrus survived despite its age. I showed them pictures of the people this data could have related to, beautiful portraits of soul searching greco-egyptian men and women looking at us across the ages from their coffin paintings.

Greco-Egyptian Tomb portraits

I asked them to identify which records produced by the government today did they think related to them? They themselves came up with birth and death and discussed what you needed these for and what would happen if you didn’t have the record of your birth. I wanted them to draw a direct relationship between their lives and the record of their lives and to think about what it would be like NOT to have this information, what it would mean to them as individuals. I also wanted them to be enfranchised/ connected to the fact that the state holds and is supposed to look after these their records of their important life events.

Back to the future

Primary births dataset, 1963-64. NDAD, TNA reference RG 71/2

We then cut to a slide of a 20th century census. This time it was the register of primary births in the United Kingdom in 1963, i.e. the stuff needed to prove you were born. I had worked on this dataset while on the NDAD project. I showed them a snapshot of the raw encoded data and asked them to identify anything which made sense! They immediately zoned in on identifiable codes, one recgonised it as ‘some sort of data’ but agreed it was gobbledegook on the whole. In assessing the data, they quickly realised that something crucial was missing to accompany the data – the data dictionary. We hummed and hawed a while trying to dicipher the code but to no avail. I then showed them the partially decoded data. They could easily read through the data and understand each field and what a field was. The speed at which things ‘clicked’ for them suprised me. So these students are ‘digital natives’ I had heard about ! They are removed  from people like me (not hard) and their teacher who are in many ways always trying to catch up with technology. They then were very keen to discuss what data should be kept about them – facebook! Twitter! Photos, text messages. They were outraged by the idea that facebook may not be being kept! I think they were also outraged that a government department with responsibility for such crucial data would not keep the dictionary explaining the code. This is their/ their parents’ data!

What fascinated me was these 9-10 year old children easily made so many leaps in understanding. 1. The leap of association between encoded data and language as a code. 2. The identification of data as having a role in their lives 3.Awareness of the fragility of digital stuff 4. that they should have a say in what is being kept.

This is out data, look after it please

Should we be talking to these ‘digital natives’ more than we do? Shouldn’t everyone be engaged in what is being kept in relation to their collective memory? This generation and each subsequent generation have such an aptitude for technology and its uses that is astounding. Do we do them a diservice not asking them what it is they would like, while bearing in mind their youth and inexperience but also bearing in mind they will inherit whatever we have left behind in our (in the minds of the future) clumsy inept approach.

Digital natives

Since the visit to Millfields I have discovered CensusAtSchool, a project where national census can be used to help children learn and do statistics. I think there is a lot of potential here to look at working with children and enfranchising them with regards to data and its use. I like this important idea of enfranchising people – there is so much disenfranchisement around. Data isn’t easy and people need help but it is also up to the creators, especially government to make it easy to access and view. A message from Hackney ‘This is our data, let’s reclaim it.’

Keep Hong Kong Clean - Government poster from Hong Kong Public Records Office see http://www.grs.gov.hk/ws/Posters/html/c3.htm

The title of this blog post comes from comments made by colleagues who attended the last Digital Preservation Training Programme in SOAS. As far as feedback goes this is one great terrific result. ‘Empowering’ was another common thread in our feedback.

Of course it is nice to pat ourselves on the back but why not look at the negative reviews?  One comment noted that we shouldn’t really present a topic as ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’ as this has a psychological impact on learning and immediately a mental barrier is set up in people’s minds.

This interests me quite a lot as often the thought of digital preservation and electronic records is enough to stop people in their tracks and look for the closest exit (or cliff whatever’s closest).

I am not talking about people who have dedicated their career to research and development in the field of digital preservation etc. In this context I think about people who have spent most of their working lives working with traditional analogue records and have now been asked to work on electronic records and their preservation. This will increasingly be the case with many institutions now having moratoriums on recruitment. It is all about redeployment of resources and that obviously includes staff. It is also about change management, a change of mentality and overcoming that mental barrier which very often exists in relation to anything electronic in our sectors. Does the fear factor exist for those coming from the other direction? E.g. developers and other technical folk embarking on digital preservation. I’d say not.

‘Many new ideas are, initially, simple and straightforward. They become complicated only because they have been expanded (through research) over a long period of time. When this is the case, introduce the idea so that students can see it is simple. Then add complexity incrementally, occasionally reminding students that the original idea was simple.’

Taken from ‘Emphasis on Teaching’ by Marshall Brain, Five Techniques Make Material More Understandable at http://www.bygpub.com/eot/eot7.htm

We see this in the course. Every year new ideas emerge and need to be considered for inclusion within the course. Being up to date is crucial to the quality and subsequent success of DPTP however there are some simple basic ideas that will never be dropped off the DPTP.

These include the OAIS model of course, OAIS simple?! Never! I hear you cry, well the outline view is quite straightforward and one of our big successes (Big thanks to William Kilbride of the DPC) on the course is the way OAIS is simplified – and reviewed again and again in various practical ways over the three days.

For the rest of the message of the DPTP? Well you will just have to come to the next one in 2010.

Big thanks to all the people who attended last week, from Hong Kong to West Yorkshire, you were all stars and had us working hard! Massive thanks also to the DPC for the scholarships which enabled people to attend.

Patricia

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/projects-and-work/digital-preservation-faqs.htm

‘It’s designed to demystify issues and give a lead in to more detailed information provided by us or others in the DP community. So ….. please take a look and let us know what you think.’

The DPTP gets a nice recommendation here under ‘Where can I learn more?’. Many thanks!

The DPTP is an intensive 3-day course designed for all those working in institutional information management who are grappling with fundamental issues of digital preservation. It provides the skills and knowledge necessary for institutions to combine organisational and technological perspectives and devise an appropriate response to the challenges that digital preservation needs present. DPTP is operated and organised by the University of London Computer Centre with contributions from leading experts in the field.

The Digital Preservation Coalition is again generously offering three fully funded scholarships so that DPC members and associates can participate in the DPTP October 2010. For further details please see the DPC training page.

Here is a sample of the feedback over the last few years:

‘Very encouraging – gave me lots of practical ideas as to how to move forward and not to “byte” off more than I can chew.’

‘Excellent exposition of model and practical application – will make a great difference to how I engage with projects and discussions in the profession.’

‘…the most beneficial and well presented, thought out course that I’ve ever attended in 10 years as a professional.’

‘Thanks to you for your efforts to consolidate all digital preservation related subjects in one course. I believe this has enabled the participants to understand the wider picture of digital preservation in a national and international context.’

‘Well done, excellent content and a very enjoyable course.’

‘The course was very good and value for money.’

‘…thanks to all of you for your work on the fantastic DPTP course. It was without doubt the best training course I’ve ever been on, and I’m sure I’ll be referring to my folder for years to come. Somehow you even managed to transform the OAIS model from something confusing and a bit scary, into something understandable!’

‘I really enjoyed the interactivity of the course; it broke up the day & helped put learning into context.’

The course costs £763.75 (incl. VAT). Lunch and other refreshments are included in this price.

Bookings for DPTP are now open at the ULCC store. Please note that currently only payment by credit/debit card is fully automated online, and this would be our preferred method of payment. However, if you require to be sent an invoice, please follow these steps:

1.       Register at the online store

2.       Start the online booking process and complete all steps

3.       Please make a note of your Booking reference (this will show up once the booking process has been initiated)

4.       Complete all steps until you are being asked to enter your credit/debit card details

Please note that at this stage your place is reserved, but not guaranteed. In order to complete the booking please email us at booking@ulcc.ac.uk with the following information so we can process the payment and invoice you/your organisation:

Name of approver:
Approver’s Job title:
Approver’s Email address:
Approver’s Telephone number:
Total amount:
PO number:

If you experience any problems with your booking/payment, please contact booking@ulcc.ac.uk.

For information specifically about the course please contact us at dptp-admin@ulcc.ac.uk.

We hope you will join us!

Safely home in Firdos Square, Baghdad.

Our last Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) was attended by many people from the UK and abroad.  Thanks to the British Institute for the Study of Iraq and the British Council in Iraq among the attendees were two colleagues from the Iraq National Library and Archives in Baghdad (INLA).  The INLA was destroyed during and post the 2003 invasion and conflict in Iraq.

In April of 2003, the National Library and Archives (Dar al-Kutub wa al-Watha’Iq) of Iraq, which was located directly across from the Ministry of Defense, was burned and looted. The burning and looting appeared to have taken place on two occasions: April 10 and April 12-13. These fires were set professionally with accelerants. A report was later given by Saad Eskander, the director–general of the National Library and Archive, regarding the destruction. He noted that three days before the invasion, library staff were told to destroy all archival material related to the Ba’athist rule. Eskander also reported that the destruction was performed by “a mix of poor people looking for a quick profit, along with regime loyalists intent on destroying evidence of atrocities”.

In total, an estimated 60 percent of its total archival materials, 25 percent of its books, newspapers, rare books, and most of its historical photographs and maps were destroyed.

Before the destruction, the library and archives were reported to have held 417,000 books, 2,618 periodicals dating from the late Ottoman era to modern times, and a collection of 4,412 rare books and manuscripts. According to Eskander, Saddam loyalists burned the entirety of the Republican Archive, which contained the records of the Ba’athist regime between the years 1958 and 1979. Also completely destroyed were the Ba’athist court proceedings detailing the charges against and trials of party opponents. Records of Iraq’s relations with its neighbors, including Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, are missing. Iraq has accused neighbouring countries of stealing sections of its national archives. In addition to these documents, which would have been of great interest to Iraqi citizens as well as to historians, the INLA lost records and documents from the Ottoman reign, the British occupation, the monarchical era, and much more. The destruction or loss of these materials, according to Eskander, did not occur only during the April 2003 attacks.

Saad Eskander, director of the library and archives since 2003, kept a diary through the British Library’s website, with entries starting in November 2006. His entries document the events covering the library and archive’s restoration. By 2007, the center “had already become a safe haven for intellectual activity, fully accessible to the public, with a state-of-the-art computer center”. In addition, there is also a facility for transferring documents to microfilm, a cataloging operation, and a department that locates documents from Iraqi government ministries. Having been a major player in the history of Iraq, the British Library was able to help the reconstruction, by providing microfilm copies of rare books and microfiche copies of documents relating to the administration of Iraq from 1914 to 1921 that were held by the British in India. Despite the fact that five staff members have been killed, along with the library closing for days at a time due to heavy fighting, Eskander says he sees the institution as “an important source of uniting and unifying the country.”

Having been a major player in the history of Iraq, the British Library was able to help the reconstruction, by providing microfilm copies of rare books and microfiche copies of documents relating to the administration of Iraq from 1914 to 1921 that were held by the British in India. Despite the fact that five staff members have been killed, along with the library closing for days at a time due to heavy fighting, Eskander says he sees the institution as “an important source of uniting and unifying the country.”  The British Library is also digitizing important collections for the INLA. As a result, at  CILIP’s award ceremony in his honour, Dr Eskander articulated the need for training in relation to digital preservation and to ensure good management of these and other digital resources. The Digital Preservation Training Programme offered to find funding to enable some colleagues from the INLA to attend.

Waleed Al-Naqshabandi and Zahraa Al Lami both work in the INLA. Waleed’s father is a government scultor who made the iconic sculpture which was pulled down on the 9th of April 2003. His father still works as sculptor for the present government. waleed is a senior IT specialists at the INLA and came to the DPTP to learn more about the preservation of the many digital copies of documents which the INLA is gathering from aroudn the world to replenish its holdings. Both spent time at the British Library being shown various projects relating to digital preservation.  Waleed and Zahraa were very keen to emphasise their Iraq identity regardless of religion. Both have suffered during the post invasion aftermath. Waleed carried his old era Iraqi passport everywhere with him as a reminder of how bad things were under Sadaam Hussein’s regime.

I felt very humbled hearing about Waleed and Zahraa’s life in Baghdad. While we all hear about how dangerous life can be in Baghdad, it was plain to see how much they both love their city and their country.  I learned a lot, not just about life in Baghdad but how to get visas fastracked from Jordan to Baghdad, the kindness of the British Council’s Iraq based team but also where to get some fine Iraqi food in London and of course I learnt some Arabic!

Both have been letting me know how they are proceeding at the INLA since their return and I hope to maintain my connection with the INLA and continue this programme.

Zahraa, a very good student!

Waleed hard at work at the DPTP

Sunny SOAS and Senate House

Hard to believe that yet another DPTP has come and gone.  We had a full house again for this course and had to close bookings due to demand.  We had a very international attendance once again with people from the Netherlands, Iraq and Venezuela (via Essex) attending.  Our UK represenatation was very impressive with large and small organisations being represented.  We were also very chuffed that the DPC once again awarded the DPTP  with five scholarships.  Thank you! It enables many who could not attend take part in the DPTP.

In terms of feedback our score cards shows that we our ratings are constantly improving for all our modules which sees the standard of content and presentation improving course by course, as it should be doing.  We aim for excellence in each of our modules.  Again and again we see that the more we work with the students the richer the course becomes.  Each person and their experience which they bring adds significantly to the course. You can take a look at some outputs here. I think the presenters will all agree that working with the students makes what could be a quite a long three day event very enjoyable and rewarding.  Here are some photos of the course.

So good stuff.  But what did our students really think of the course? here are some of the comments we got:

‘I really enjoyed the interactivity of the course; it broke up the day & helped put learning into context.’

‘Very encouraging – gave me lots of practical ideas as to how to move forward and not to “byte” off more than I can chew.’

‘Excellent exposition of model and practical application – will make a great difference to how I engage with projects and discussions in the profession.’

And one which speaks for itself: ‘Ace!’

Enough for now.  A big thanks to everyone for their hard work and participation.

Patricia

We are pleased to announce a series of of one-day workshops to be delivered as a follow-up to the established Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP).

A one-day workshop on web archiving will be held at SOAS on 28th June 2010. The workshop will look at the selection, capture and management of websites and web resources, introducing and assessing various organizational approaches and technological tools which exist. The training will look at website archiving within the framework of the OAIS model which is currently taught on the DPTP, and illustrate the concepts with practical examples and exercises. Attendees should leave the course with the ability to understand the why, what and how of web archiving and be in a position to apply the learning to their own institutional context and requirements.
The course costs £100.00 exclusive of VAT. Refreshments are included in the price.

To register your interest and book on the course please look here: http://www.dptp.org/events/web-archiving-day/

As an outsider sometimes it feels that reading/hearing about digital preservation research is a bit like reading an article on particle physics.  In fact sometimes lectures on particle physics might be clearer.  The number of acronyms, the amount of jargon per project and also the amount of assumed knowledge can, at times make our subject inpenetrable to many, not to mention boring.

So with this in mind I steeled myself for a few days at the PLANETS workshop in London recently.   At the DPTP we talk a lot about OAIS and I was keen to hear about PLANETS’  ‘suite’ of tools developed with the OAIS model and digital preservation in mind. The OAIS model implies a number of flexible preservation workflows so I was looking forward to hearing about what the  PLANETS team had done.

Ross King’s  wonderfully clear session really drew the crowd in.  He set out the business case for digital preservation, provided explanations of the technical elements that make up digital preservation, the technical problems behind preservation; the options available and the decisions that need to be taken. While not taking away from the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ being created and which will be created as well as the challenges, it was a very motivational session. Next Clive Billeness drew our attention to the fact that risk is the only real motivating factor when it comes to getting the powers that be in organisations to take digital preaservation seriously. He says that we need to talk to financial planners, CEOs in terms of risk, using the language of risk. Companies are now being asked to keep a ‘living will’ so that they can garantee that they can operate in case of a disaster, ensuring that records needed to operate are kept in a manner which can ensure operations.

So what are these PLANETS tools? I am not going to cover them all but Hannes Kulovits introduced us to PLATO,  PLANETS preservation planning tool.  Preservation planning for digital preservation includes preservation policies, legal obligations, organisational and technical constraints, user requirements and preservation goals. It also describes the preservation context, ‘the evaluated alternative preservation strategies and the resulting decision for one strategy, including the rationale of the decision.’ During the workshop we looked in depth at how to decide on preservation strategies and factors which influence decision making.  Input is needed from a wide range of persons, depending on the institutional context and the collection. PLANETS have also pinned down some essential characteristics for digital objects with regard to their preservation.

I was a bit narked that I didn’t get to actually play with it on my laptop there and then but I have done so since the workshop.  How long this planning process takes place is another issue. This was a bit of a drop for us all, yes planning takes time but that much time?

A quick survey of the crowd by me during and after revealed that some people felt that while they enjoyed initial content they felt that the workshop  wasn’t for them, too technical or too highbrow. I consider myself to be a low to middle brow kind of girl (dp-wise I hasten to add) so was suprised by this as I felt that it was one the clearest events I had been to on digital preservation.  I felt this response was a real pity, perhaps there needs to be more interaction with the groups attending these workshops (one remaining) to gauge receptivity.  I struggle with projects who really cannot communicate their products. I didn’t feel this case here. The Planets Framework is really good and may need definining but I really enjoyed it and look forward to next developments.

The Digital Preservation Coalition are also generously giving three, yes THREE scholarships to attend the DPTP. Once again open to DPC members. Remember folks, this can include your institution or your professional association.

Hope to see some of you there!

The magic bullet holes the French made in Alicante

Well, as many of us know it doesn’t exist! This was part of my opening speech for the XV Jornadas de la Conferencia de Archiveros de las Universidades Españolas. This is the annual meeting of all Spanish university archivists. I spoke about “El perfil del archivero en el entorno digital”, or “the profile of the archivist in the digital world”. Most universities in Spain have an archivist, who also performs the role of records manager. Records manager as a profession doesn’t exist in Spain. Repositories existed in almost all universities but were on the whole in the libraries and not within the archives. There is a big divide between librarians and archivists in Spain also so not a great deal of exchange goes on between these sectors. Many questions concerned costs as well as approaches to preservation. An excellent book has been written in Spanish about digital preservation by Jordi Serra of the University of Barcelona, “Gestión de los documentos digitales: estrategias para su conservación” =” Electronic records management: strategies for long term preservation”.

A lot of discussion revolved around the struggle to convince the superiors in the organization of the importance of digial preservation; a lot of discussion about how access drives so much of what is going on, also the big problem of engaging our techy friends in the area of digital preservation and making them aware of the issue. The biggest universities such as Complutense and UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.) were of course represented. UNED is the UK equivalent of the Open University with braches all over the world and is based in Madrid. A lot of discussion also took place about the involvement of non-anglo saxon countries in international fora such as ISO panels and ICA. While all these endeavours are important a certain amount of frustration is evident in relation to decision making and power!

Much talk and walking through the historical centre of Alicante, and in the interests of professional scholarship and in keeping with traditional Spanish culture I stayed awake until 3am catching the plane home the next day to rainy London.

Japanese Zen garden at Brunei gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies.

So another DPTP over! As presenters we felt it went really well. We again had a great group of people. The level of knowledge was very high and even so it seems the course really does help consolidate many levels of knowledge about digital preservation. For many it was OAIS and the class project seems to have helped put the theory into practice. One quote from the feedback:

‘Things really fell into place for me during this exercise and models started to make proper sense. Moved things from theory to practice.’

Overall the level of satisfaction with what we are providing is high.

‘Overall an excellent course. Bringing together so many disparate ideas and concepts and making sense of the muddle! Just hope we can move forward using the models. Excellent group too, good interaction and discussion – I got as much out of this element as from the taught content. Thank you so much all!’

We are now looking to developing links with the DCC as well as moving on to another stage of the DPTP. We will keep providing these 3 day courses with readjustments and updates but we are also looking at developing the modules into e-learning objects. Now all we need is funding!

Iraq National Library and Archives, Baghdad, Iraq.

So we are on tenterhooks awaiting the visa applications of Rawaa and Waleed from the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA). The visas are now being processed in Baghdad and should be ready any day. Thanks to the British Council and the British Institute for the study of Iraq, Rawaa and Waleed are (hopefully) coming to attend the next DPTP which takes place in SOAS on the 18th-20th of May. The programme is really shaping up, we have added a few things and altered the schedule somewhat in light of feedback from the last course. So exciting stuff.

More about the INLA: The Iraq National Library and Archives had 95% of its holdings destroyed mostly during and post conflict. This was an institution which held 417,000 books, 2,618 periodicals dating from the late Ottoman era to modern times, and a collection of 4,412 rare books and manuscripts.  Now with the energy and dedication of its director, Dr Saad Eskander and his staff the library is being rebuilt with donations and a lot of digital surrogates. Rawaa and Waleed are coming here to learn more about how to manage these digital assets which are vital to the reconstitution of Iraqi culture and history.

The alert among you will remember me talking about Dr Eskander before.

Here’s looking forward to meeting our Iraqi colleagues as well as everyone booked on the next DPTP.

On December 8th I was invited by Dr Saad Eskander, the Director of the National Library and Archives of Iraq, as his guest to an awards ceremony he was having at the British Library.

The story behind this is that in 2006 I met him in Abu Dhabi speaking about his work and I subsequently asked him to write a blog for our community of archivists and librarians about his day to day life. This blog was picked up by almost all main stream press around the world. Here is an article about him in the International Herald Tribune. In an interview with Fran Monks (in her website on How to make a difference ) Saad spoke about how through his own free will he decided to return to his home city of Baghdad in 2003 after 23 years of absence, of which 13 had been spent as an academic in the UK. After Sadaam had been removed, Saad and a group of Iraqi artists, writers and academics from the UK returned to their country to see what they could do. All of the group except for Saad returned to London almost immediately because they were so shocked by the security situation. Saad alone was prepared to risk his life in order to assist with the rebuilding of the nation that he loves. Saad believes that the future of Iraq and Baghdad must be non-sectarian and democratic and have equal rights for all citizens, including women. This he practises in the Library which he has restored. Saad described his shock on first seeing the library: “95% of the contents had been either destroyed or looted. Everything had been burnt and even the marble had melted. Everything was covered in soot and the stench was almost unbearable.”

At the dinner after the ceremony were many of the great and the good from UK with specialities in the Middle East. I was an incongruous figure among them…as this obviously does not include me…I also sat beside Ann Clwyd who is a Welsh MP and Gordon Browns’ special envoy on Human Rights in Iraq. A lot of interest in the digital preservation training we do here and also the potential of VLEs being developed to facilitate learning in this area. It is seen as priority for the INLA to learn about how to manage their digital surrogates as their collections of archives is largely made up of these surrogates from the British Library as well as other places.