The DPC webinar on ‘Preservation Planning for Personal Digital Archives’ took place last Wednesday (29th June), and I duly gave my talk to a small select audience of about a dozen people. I believe this included one person from the Bodleian Library, one from the UK Parliamentary archives and two separate groups from the UN Archives and Records group – one based in Long Island and the other in New York. The Q&A at the end was interesting, but too short – I know I would have enjoyed spending more time talking about practical problems with these professionals. The two questions I can remember both came from the UN groups who are considering providing guidance to UN staff about how to preserve their digital files. The discussion highlighted that the Maintenance Plan I am proposing should eventually result in people not having very old unreadable files because the Maintenance Plan would be ensuring that they are regularly updated.
The full Webinar was recorded and is available via the DPC website at this link http://www.dpconline.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1720:dpc-webinar-preservation-planning-for-personal-digital-archives-with-paul-wilson&catid=33:conference-reports NB. This link no longer works. The webinar is now at the following link – though permissions are required: https://www.dpconline.org/events/past-events/webinars/dpc-webinar-preservation-planning-for-personal-digital-archives
However you may just want to look at the Powerpoint slides that I used which have speaker notes included.
In both the DPC paper and the webinar, I made it clear that I was looking for collaborators to apply the Preservation Planning process to my document collection; and a repository for the collection. Now that I’ve been able to publicise these wants through these DPC activities, I’m hoping that I might hear from someone who is interested. However, whether or not any such people emerge, I’m aiming to start the Preservation Planning work on my document collection towards the end of this year or early next – that will be the next phase of my digital preservation adventure.