ABSTRACT

This article presents an overview of the creation and development of emergency associations for the protection of archives, libraries, and museums in Germany. This is a response to several wake-up calls, notably the Elbe floods of 2002, the destruction by fire of a significant portion of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar in 2004, and the collapse of the Cologne City Archive building in 2009. The emergency associations have come together on a voluntary basis to offer mutual support in the event of natural and human-made disasters.

Drawing on the experience of the Augsburg association founded in 2015, the author explains the role and success of the new networks. Annual meetings have consolidated regional and nationwide collaboration, and deepened experience and preparedness. Training courses and major incident exercises with fire services as well as the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief form the bedrock of the cooperation.

ABSTRACT

This case study re-evaluates a large-scale project carried out by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) between 2003 and 2006. The project aimed to identify obsolete digital media (physical data carriers) in its collection and to describe and recover the data from the carriers using a third-party data recovery provider. ¹ A detailed process for data recovery was developed that included the capture of a full audit trail of steps in the data recovery process. The project was completed in four stages: phase 1 obtained bit-level images from the carriers; phase 2 extracted individual bit-files from the carriers; phase 3 identified duplicate files and proprietary or complex file formats; and phase 4 was a final report that documented processes, made recommendations on future processes, and provided lessons learned. Recent work described in this article indicates that files extracted from the carriers in 2004–2005 can be accurately rendered in current computer environments. The ongoing significance of the project is that it is an early demonstration of the success of bit-level preservation and the need to create disk images as part of a preservation workflow, suggesting a sustainable methodology for digital preservation. The project also influenced archival policy at the NAA and influenced the development of subsequent software tools that became widely known in the broader digital preservation community. The focus on archival principles of authenticity, integrity, chain of custody, and provenance of the recovered records were key learnings to ensuring long-term access and usability. Finally, the metrics resulting from the project, for example, rates of readable carriers and rates of data recovery by carrier type, are useful data from a point in time that correspond quite closely to similar data recovery projects undertaken by other institutions at about the same time and provide a benchmark for future research.

ABSTRACT

As academic and cultural heritage institutions increasingly offer digital collections and services, technical upskilling—the process of acquiring and/or expanding technical skills—has moved from an individual prerogative to an institutional imperative. In this publication, the authors share their experiences with, and lessons learned from, a series of four collaborative technical skills development initiatives—the ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project (2014–2016), a series of Curation Team Workshops (2015), a Technical Skills Pilot Project (2017–2018), and the development of a Bentley Audiovisual Quality Control Utility (2019)—at the University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library. In doing so, the authors advocate for the value of increasing the technical literacy and skills of entire teams/units (as opposed to focusing on the development of individual skills) and provide information and best practices that will enable and empower other institutions to undertake similar initiatives. They conclude by making the case for organizational cultures that value learning together.

EDITOR

Amy Cooper Cary (2020–2023), Marquette University

Editorial Board

Sumayya Ahmed (2019–2023), Simmons University
Shirley Franco (2022–2026), Universidade de Brasilia
Rebecca Hankins (2022–2023), Texas A&M University Libraries
Katharina Hering (2019–2023), German Historical Institute
Eric Hung (2020–2024), Music of Asian America Research Center
Jessica Lacher-Feldman (2020–2024), University of Rochester
Maria Matienzo (2021–2025), Stanford University Libraries
Marlee Newman (2021–2025), Archival Consultant
Sylvia Welsh (2020–2024), Harvard University

Reviews Editor

Rose Buchanan (2021–2024), National Archives and Records Administration
Stephanie Luke (2021–2024), University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign

GENERAL INFORMATION

American Archivist (ISSN