Dynamic Collections Digital Strand: Project Update!
Rachel Stevenson, Project Assistant Archivist (Digital)
7th November 2024
To celebrate World Digital Preservation Day 2024, we would like to share an update on the Digital Strand of the Dynamic Collections project at Croydon Archives!
Introduction to the Digital Strand
The Dynamic Collections project began at Croydon Archives in January this year, with the goal of digitally transforming the service, and working with young people to foreground their voices and explore under-represented histories in Croydon through our Young Archivists project.
This digital transformation project has come at a crucial time. Traditionally, Croydon Archives’ has received records in physical formats such as paper, parchment or photographic prints, but we live in the Digital Age now and information is largely created in a digital form. Croydon Council, other organisations and individuals are now creating vast amounts of digital information. Archives services must transform their ways of working to ensure digital records with historical significance and evidential weight are not lost. These digital records require the same degree of care and management as historic physical collections, to ensure that they remain accessible forever.
It is essential that digital preservation systems and activities are set up and embedded at Croydon Council, to avoid the risk of digital information being lost through corruption (errors which alter the information and render it unreadable) and technical obsolescence (technology which has become outdated and is no longer in use).
As a result, the digital strand of our Dynamic Collections project breaks down into five key activities:
· Procuring and setting up a new digital preservation system, to allow for the permanent preservation of digital records
· Establishing a digital preservation policy and strategy, and creating workflows for the transfer of digital records to Croydon Archives
· Identifying and reviewing Croydon Archives’ existing digital records
· Collecting, cataloguing and making publicly accessible the records of Croydon’s year as London Borough of Culture, to ensure that its legacy is preserved for future generations
· Working with other Croydon Council departments to improve overall records management and the transfer of the Council’s digital records to Croydon Archives.
Arkivum Digital Preservation System
The Little Manhattan digital collection successfully ingested into the Arkivum digital preservation system.
Digital preservation systems store and actively preserve digital records, to ensure that they are protected from the risks of bit rot (the loss of data due to the small electronic charge of a bit), technical obsolescence, and eventual inaccessibility. Digital preservation actions performed by these systems include:
· Ongoing, automatic integrity checks of digital records to identify and mitigate any possible risks of loss or corruption
· Migrating data from an aging or obsolete file format into a new file format where this is required
· Virus checking
· Storing copies of data in multiple, geographically separate locations for the purposes of disaster recovery.
As part of the project, it was important for Croydon Archives to procure a digital preservation system that would be compatible with its needs and requirements going forward.
With Arkivum being interoperable with the existing catalogue software, AtoM, and with the system offering direct integration with Microsoft 365, it seemed a perfect choice!
Following the procurement process, a five-year contract was signed in May, and we have now completed our initial five training sessions on how to use the system. We have also ingested (transferred records into Arkivum for permanent preservation) our first set of digital records this month, which was the records of the Little Manhattan project - very exciting!
Setting up Digital Infrastructure, Policies and Processes
When the project began, Croydon Archives did not have the digital infrastructure or workflows required to allow for the safe and secure transfer of records into its care.
We first worked with Croydon Digital Services to set up a restricted access network staging area, separate from Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, which allows us to temporarily store and process digital records before they are transferred into Arkivum. Avoiding SharePoint has meant that the metadata of records (e.g. the date last modified and the date a record was created) is not overwritten or amended, and that records can be easily transferred from external media such as hard drives or USBs.
Rachel Stevenson, Project Assistant Archivist Digital, setting up the Croydon Archives digital preservation work station.
We then went about setting up transfer workflows for each different type of storage medium, including Google Drive, USBs, hard drives and SharePoint. Each workflow needed to be tailored to ensure that the records make their way safely from one place to another, without losing any data in the process.
It was also important to bring the Croydon Archives donation agreement up to date to incorporate digital records transfers. The form is signed by individuals and organisations when they donate their records to Croydon Archives, and usually includes some descriptive information about the material. However, to assist with future preservation activities, key technical information should be captured about digital records, such as file formats, the size of the digital collection, and the method they were transferred in, such as via a USB, or a cloud-based transfer i.e. Google Drive. The form is now fit for purpose for both digital and paper records, and includes new sections for detailing information about personal data or copyright in the collection being transferred.
We have also drafted an initial digital preservation policy and strategy, to demonstrate Croydon’s commitment to digital preservation, and to define how it plans to implement these activities going forward. These documents are in their early stages but will eventually be shared with the Council’s senior management team, and will hopefully be embedded across the organisation, to ensure that digital preservation is considered across all policy and decision-making.
Collecting the records of This is Croydon – London Borough of Culture
Alongside setting up Arkivum and the processes surrounding digital transfer, one of the main focuses of the digital strand has been collecting the records of This is Croydon – London Borough of Culture. 2023-2024 was a historic year for culture in Croydon, and it’s important that the records of this year are gathered together in a coherent collection that can be shared with the community and beyond for many years to come.
In the first instance, this involved reaching out to all the delivery partners that were involved, to introduce Croydon Archives, the project, and what we needed from them. Although there is no concrete checklist for what records should be transferred to the archives, we came up with the rough list below:
· Recordings of events or video content put together to tell the overall story of a project or event
Folders from the Croydon Council Borough of Culture SharePoint site. These records will form the bulk of the Croydon Archives London Borough of Culture collection.
· Photographs of projects and events
· Any other creative outputs such as podcasts, manifestos and zines
· Press releases and communications
· Advertising materials, such as flyers, posters, or programmes
· Planning documents, such as project plans, budgets, and proposals.
The process has involved many consultation sessions, meetings and email communications with individuals and organisations, and we are pleased to say that we have received some form of engagement from 89% of total delivery partners to date. So far, we have received records from 51% of delivery partners, and we hope that this figure will rise before the collection is released to the public next year. This currently equates to 15,602 digital files and 2,105 digital folders of fascinating and vibrant material (plus many boxes of physical material too!), that come together to tell the wider story of This is Croydon.
We are also collecting the central Borough of Culture records from Croydon Council, which will include material on governance, strategy, organisational structures, policy, finance, management, delivery and evaluation.
In addition, we have developed a partnership with the UK Web Archive team at the British Library, which has allowed us to capture web content related to This is Croydon, including the main Culture Croydon website and other online exhibitions such as Faces of Croydon and Our Croydon.
The final goal of this work will be a fully catalogued and accessible London Borough of Culture collection that showcases the creativity and excitement of the year, and which can be accessed both online and via digital access booths in the Central Library. We hope to launch this around summer 2025.
The digital strand of the Dynamic Collections project will run until March 2026, and we hope to update you all again soon as we continue to progress through Croydon Archives’ digital transformation.
Our Dynamic Collections project is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, we have been able to start digitally transforming Croydon Archives.
