Beagrie.com

It was terrific to see so many DPC colleagues and Handbook contributors at the official launch of the 2nd edition of the Digital Preservation Handbook in York last night.

All new functionality and content is now live and ready for you to use.

Really pleased to see it has been  so well received – some early feedback so far:

“Fantastic to see 2nd ed of the #dpc #digitalpreservation handbook released – a great practical resource reborn: http://handbook.dpconline.org “ Adrian Brown UK Parliamentary Archives [twitter]

“Overall the improvements to the Handbook make it, in my opinion, one of the more useful and flexible tools for identifying, understanding and getting to grips with practical approaches to the varying challenges of digital preservation. It uses approachable language, clear terminology and provides useful links to case studies and further reading which will be of benefit to students and practitioners alike.” Stefanie Davidson West Yorkshire Archive Service [peer review]

Take a look yourself, bookmark the Handbook and dip in to the resources and use them as work requires. It has an open licence and all images are creative commons by attribution so active re-use is encouraged.

Thanks to all the funding sponsors, contributors (content, booksprints, peer review, and advisory), and Digital Bewaring for wonderful images.

Charles Beagrie Ltd, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), and the UK Data Service are delighted to announce the public release of the latest DPC Technology Watch Report ‘Preserving Transactional Data’ by the DPC’s Sara Day Thomson. This report is peer-reviewed and available on open access. It tackles the requirements for preserving transactional data and the accompanying challenges facing companies and institutions that aim to re-use these data for analysis or research, presenting the issues and strategies which emphasize preservation practices that facilitate re-use and reproducibility.

This newest addition to the popular Technology Watch Series was commissioned by the UK Data Service with sponsorship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of their Big Data Network Support initiative.

‘The scale and velocity of data is pushing current methods and tools for preserving databases to their limits.’ explains author Sara Day Thomson. ‘These data – from government data to environmental data – possess significant characteristics that require much wider approaches to preservation.’

The report identifies a number of these approaches which consider an emergence of new uses for archived forms of these data. Through a range of use cases – examples of transactional data – the report describes the characteristics and difficulties of these ‘big’ data for long-term access.

Neil Beagrie, managing editor of the Technology Watch Report series on behalf of the DPC, added that the paper ‘looks at overarching trends to demonstrate potential solutions for maintaining these data in a secure environment based on end user needs and regulatory frameworks. It should be of huge interest to DPC members, and particularly those working within the business community under regulatory constraints.’

Download ‘Preserving Transactional Data’ now at http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr16-02

I will be giving a DPC member webinar on Weds 8^th June 2-3pm GMT on the new Digital Preservation Handbook. Looking forward to demonstrating the new functionality and explaining how we got there!

For further details see the DPC events page for the webinar.