Update from the 2023 Archives and Records Association conference
The theme of this year’s Archives and Records Association (ARA) conference was ‘communities’. The call for conference papers went out at in January 2023 round about the same time the Digital Preservation team got together for a session facilitated by our Programme Management team, Jenny Grewcock and Ceri Bennett. The session was an opportunity to reflect on the work of the previous year and to plan for the coming year. At the reflection session, my colleague Leontien Talboom highlighted the amount of engagement that had been involved in our work successfully launching and embedding the first two digital preservation services -the Deposit and Transfer services. Leontien’s point resonated with me and inspired me to propose a paper for the ARA conference about working with stakeholder communities to build Cambridge University Libraries’ Deposit Service.
The conference was held in Belfast from the 30 August to 1 September and my paper was part of a joint session with Bryony Hooper from the University of Sheffield who spoke about her work “Developing and Sustaining a Digital Preservation Community at the University of Sheffield” and Amy Adams from the National Museum of the Royal Navy “DAMS to Digital Preservation: A National Museum’s journey to understanding its Digital Assets”. There was a lot of overlap between our papers — especially relating to the challenges of dealing with large-scale legacies of digital assets and building shared understanding across different parts of complex organisations.
In my paper I explained the background to Cambridge University Libraries’ Digital Preservation Programme. Putting the focus on dealing with people allowed me to pay tribute to the work of our Programme Management team in laying the foundation for stakeholder engagement with digital preservation. The Programme Management team carried out stakeholder analysis at the start of the Digital Preservation Programme and used this to build a governance structure to underpin engagement with many of our high influence stakeholder groups. If you’re interested in tools for stakeholder analysis and evaluation, you might like to check out the Boston matrix and the RACI matrix. The final sections of my talk focused on working with the Born Digital Archives Working Group to build the minimum viable product for the Deposit Service and subsequent progress embedding the new service.
Diversity, Equality and Inclusion was a theme that ran through the whole conference programme with thought-provoking sessions about embedding it more firmly into archival practice. Emma Markiewicz and her colleagues from the London Metropolitan Archives gave us a fascinating insight into revisiting their Unforgotten Lives exhibition and taking it to the streets of London. Jenny Moran hosted an “Is it Okay?” session when we heard from panelists with disabilities or experiences of living with long-term health conditions about their experiences. We also heard from Sarah Trim-West about her experience working with an assistance dog in the archives at Brunel University.
Belfast was an excellent choice for the 2023 ARA conference as the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) is celebrating its centenary this year. A highlight of the conference programme was a guided walk to PRONI and tour of the building with the chance to see some of their treasured documents about the peace process. The impact of Ireland’s history and events on the archival record and how digital initiatives have been able to make archives available were strong themes of the conference. We heard from Dr Peter Crooke about the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland which digitally reconstructs the records of the Public Record Office of Ireland which were destroyed in 1922. Brendan Lynn introduced us to the CAIN archive- conflict and politics in Northern Ireland which brings together records from a wide range of sources, including PRONI and the National Archives of Ireland.
I am very grateful to the Archives and Records Association and to the Digital Preservation Programme for the opportunity to take part in the conference.
