The Warwick3 Workshop: Digital Preservation and Curation Summing up + Next Steps available now on Slideshare is the eighth of 12 presentations I have selected to mark 20 years in Digital Preservation. The remainder will be published at monthly intervals over 2015.

I have chosen it as it briefly allows us to look back at aspirations and achievements in Digital Preservation over a 20 year period from the very first (and seminal) Warwick 1 workshop held in 1995 to today. The first Warwick workshop considered the Long Term Preservation of Electronic Materials and a UK response to the final report of the RLG/CPA Task Force on Digital Archiving. Two further Warwick workshops followed in 1999 and 2005 to review progress and set a forward agenda.

The two-day workshop that took place over 7 – 8 November 2005 at the University of Warwick aimed for the first time to address digital preservation issues for both scientific data and cultural heritage and to map out a future research agenda for them. Sponsored by JISC, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the British Library and the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), the invitation-only event drew a wide range of national and international experts to explore the current state of play with a view to shaping future strategy. The slides are from my summing up and conclusions at the workshop close.

Part of my conclusions (slides 12-13), outlined the recommendations of the previous Warwick workshop held in 1999 and reviewed the progress that had been made in implementing them over the subsequent five years with a very subjective level of achievement √ (some) to √ √ √ (good) as follows:

Raise awareness

√ √ √ DPC advocacy, EU council, UNESCO, CODATA, ICSTI, NSF,RCUK

Encourage cross-sectoral communication

√ √ Established Digital Preservation Coalition 2001 – now 27 members

Develop guidelines

√ √ Preservation Management Handbook, Curation Manual, Cornell tutorial

Preservation Centre/Network of centres

√ √ Digital Curation Centre, British Library, The National Archives

Certification criteria

√ RLG/NARA checklist (TRAC)

Checklist to determine complexity and cost

√JISC 04/04 funding programme (LIFE project, assessment tool project)

New research – emulation, dynamic data

√Camileon project, JISC 04/04 programme, DCC research agenda

So how have we done 10 years further on?  Overall, OK I think with the caveat progress in digital preservation can take a long time. Perhaps I would raise the achievement levels if doing this exercise again in 2015 for “Encourage cross-sectoral communication”, “Checklist to determine complexity and cost”, and “New research”. However I would probably move Raise Awareness down one level. The others would probably be about the same. How about you?