Digital Archives

Word Cloud 2012!

By Richard M. Davis | 2012/02/09 14:55 Posted in Digital Archives, Digitisation, Repositories, Training | Comments (0)

Lots of updates in the pipeline for the coming weeks, and some spring cleaning for DA Blog, but for now here’s a Wordle Word Cloud from a recent report on our activities.

ULCC Digital Archives & Repositories Word Cloud 2012

The House of Books: Manuscripts and religious identity in Iraq

By Patricia Sleeman | 2011/11/21 21:12 Posted in Digital Archives, Digitisation, Training | Comments (0)

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.

The House of Books: Erbil, Iraq

By Patricia Sleeman | 2011/10/11 17:58 Posted in Digital Archives | Comments (0)

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

: Flag of Kurdistan

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.

Digital Forensics and creation of a narrative

By Ed Pinsent | 2011/07/04 10:11 Posted in Digital Archives | Comments (1)

I was very interested to hear Jeremy Leighton John speaking about the nature of digital forensics at the recent DPC event on Digital Forensics. He worked on the “Digital Lives” project at the BL as part of their eManuscripts lab. The day began with his overview and ended with the demo of a powerful analysis tool called BitCurator in a Box from Chapel Hill which can analyse, decompress, and extract at a super-fast rate and generate a bunch of XML on the side.

For a naïve non-tech archivist like me, this felt like a new way of looking at and thinking about digital data. The principle seems to be that it’s possible to capture an image of an entire disk, and then perform stepped analysis on all the data contained within that image. Most models of digital preservation, management or curation that I’m familiar with tend to focus on the file as the unit which we must identify, migrate, catalogue or preserve; here the target is different, and we’re dealing with a whole wodge of related digital spew that includes files, technical metadata, automated logs, and lots of system elements from the registry.

Digital forensics is often applied to “personal archives”, such as the disk image of a single author / researcher; or is used by commercial organisations seeking to prove something in a court of law; or in extreme cases in tracking down evidence of a crime. As presented by Leighton John, a number of characteristics of the forensic approach struck me as being quite resonant with the aims of digital preservation and/or electronic records management:
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Your friendly neighborhood Digital Archives team

By Richard M. Davis | 2011/06/01 09:59 Posted in All, Digital Archives | Comments (1)

In May, the University of London Communications Office invited us to answer a few questions about ourselves for an Intranet article. We thought we’d reproduce some of our answers here, for the benefit of anyone else who wants a quick introduction to what we do (and ourselves, in case we forget).

ULCC Digital Archives & Repositories Team, May 2011

Please introduce yourself
We are ULCC’s Digital Archives & Repositories Team, and you can generally find us in the basement of Senate House along with the rest of ULCC. We are five:

Ed Pinsent and Patricia Sleeman, our digital archivists, provide digital preservation training and consultancy.
Rory McNicholl is our lead developer and repository systems manager.
Silvia Arango-Docio is project officer for Web archiving projects and repository support.
Richard Davis is team leader, and actively contributes to all of the team’s projects, as well as pursuing new and interesting opportunities.

What does your team do?
Our department was created in 1997 to develop the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD), and operate it for The National Archives. NDAD was originally a joint project of ULCC and Senate House Libraries, providing a specialised cataloguing and preservation service for government databases.

Since then we’ve worked on many digital archive and library projects. The NDAD service ceased in 2010, but we continue working on innovative projects for born-digital and digitised records, developing repositories and related information systems for education and research. We provide specialist training and consultancy for the HE and cultural heritage sectors through the highly-acclaimed Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP).

Our current or recent partners and customers include most of the University’s colleges and institutes, the British Library, the Parliamentary Archives, the JISC, the UK Web Archiving Consortium, and the European Commission. We work closely with the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), and local groups such as the AIM25 archives network and theSHERPA-LEAP consortium of University of London repository managers.

Tell us one thing about your work that colleagues might not know.
Digital preservation issues might seem esoteric, but they are fundamental to every electronic and computer-based activity – in other words, pretty much everything in business, education and research. Understanding the best ways to manage, describe and preserve all our electronic information – from a single email, to complex Web sites, or collections of digital photos or videos – is an essential 21st century skill.

What aspect of your work gives you the most satisfaction?
We are very lucky to work closely with information professionals from around the UK and internationally. Patricia has recently delivered preservation workshops at the National Library of Jordan; Ed and Silvia are working on Web archiving projects for the JISC and the EU; Richard and Rory won the annual JISC Developer Challenge at last year’s Open Repositories conference in Madrid.

What is the most challenging part of your job?
Keeping up-to-date with constantly changing ICT landscape in education, libraries and archives. Electronic information systems evolve continually, as do the tools and methods for managing them. Luckily there is a wealth of current information on the Web, if you know where to look! We actively share our thoughts and experiences through our long-running Digital Archives Blog and on Twitter.

Name one thing that would make your working environment better.
Sometimes it seems we work with everyone except colleagues in Senate House! It would be great to work more with colleagues at the Central University, and bring more of our accumulated experience to bear on some of the University’s information and records management challenges.

If you could meet anyone (dead or alive) who would it be and why?
We’re not going to agree on this any time soon. Suggestions so far include Sofia Loren, Hypatia of Alexandria, Richard Brautigan and Pete Townshend.

Name three hobbies team members pursue – the more unusual the better.
Most of us have small children, so hobbies take a back seat. Ed is an accomplished artist, writer, broadcaster, musician and samizdat publisher. Patricia is about to learn how to stain glass before starting Arabic lessons for the third time.

If, as a group, you stormed the musical charts, what genre of music would that be in, what would be your stage name and who would be your lead vocalist?
We could be a psychedelic beat group called the Dates Of Creation. Our lead singer would have to be Patricia.

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