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!
