‘One day it’s there, one day it’s not’
The Bodleian Libraries are working to secure crucial, yet fragile, digital evidence of life in the 21st century.
Exploring the archives of tomorrow will look very different to today. There will still be fading handwriting to decipher and centuries-old paper to examine, of course, but soon historians and researchers will also need to navigate through an abundance of data: websites, blogs, social media posts, emails and text messages.
To equip them for such a formidable task, it is critical that today’s archivists have the skills and experience they need to capture, secure and make accessible these digital sources for future generations. Relatively few at the moment do — but it is something that the Bodleian, with support from donors, is working hard to change.
Training the digital archivists of the future
Francesca Miller is just months away from completing the Bodleian’s Trainee Digital Archivist Programme, a two-year paid traineeship aimed at equipping graduates with the digital skills badly needed, but currently lacking, in the archival workforce. The programme has been running since 2014 and Francesca will soon be the 14th person to complete it, emerging with the experience she needs to secure crucial evidence of life in the 21st century for future researchers.
Here, she helps us to get to grips with the complexities of digital archiving, and shares the latest on the Bodleian’s ongoing project to protect and preserve digital content related to the war in Ukraine.
What exactly is digital archiving, and why is it so important?
Digital archiving is essentially the same as traditional archiving, but focused on digital material. That could be material that has been digitised (so making sure that physical collections are searchable online) or it could be material that is born-digital, like emails, websites, videos and audio recordings.
With the Ukraine project, there’s a big risk that that this digital material is going to disappear — that’s always an issue in digital archiving because things can be deleted so quickly, either by accident or maliciously, so we need to keep a record of it. Things are changing in terms of how we get information and how that information is exchanged; a lot of it is now done on the web, which moves very quickly, and so it’s important to capture it, otherwise it’s lost and you can’t get it back.
There’s a big risk that that this digital material is going to disappear… things can be deleted so quickly, either by accident or maliciously, so we need to keep a record of it.
What kind of material are you archiving for the Ukraine project?
What we’re trying to do with the war in Ukraine is look at it from a human perspective, so capture the human experiences of what’s happening there, as well as what’s happening inside Russia and in surrounding countries. It’s something that we don’t think is being done anywhere else at the moment.
We’re also in contact with other groups that are taking slightly different approaches. For example, there’s a group called Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) that is working to identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content and data in the country’s cultural heritage institutions. There are libraries in the Ukraine that are having their digital collections attacked and deleted by Russian hackers, so action is needed now because it could soon be gone. One day it’s there, one day it’s not.
Everyone has their own little bit that they’re trying to do, but we’re also working together to make a difference.
How do you decide what to capture?
With the Ukraine project we’re actually working with volunteers because we don’t have enough of the cultural and linguistic skills to select the right sites ourselves. We have a good contact, a Ukrainian scholar, who is helping us at the moment. We’re asking them to nominate sites that we can capture or people that we should be following on Twitter, that kind of thing.
What are some of the challenges you’ve come up against so far?
Well, I don’t speak Ukrainian (I tried to do a crash course but I’m not good enough!) so that has been quite difficult. And I’m not even going to get into the technical side of how to capture something that is coming from another country — when error messages come up in different languages it can be a bit like: hmmm, something has gone wrong here but I just don’t know what!
What do you do when that happens?
Ask people who speak the language to help, and turn to Google translate! Capturing websites in different languages is not something I’ve really done before, so it’s definitely stretched my web archiving skills over the last few weeks.
Do you have to think carefully about capturing misinformation?
That is something that comes up in web archiving in general, because there have been instances where misinformation has been spread through archived websites: even if the misinformation gets taken down online, if it has been captured before that happens then it can still be shared and spread.
So, there is quite a lot to think about in terms of web archiving and the ethics of it, and misinformation and documenting all sides of the story… It hasn’t come up yet in the context of this project, but I’m sure when it does, we’ll need to think about how we balance both sides and consider carefully how we present it.
There is quite a lot to think about in terms of web archiving and the ethics of it, and misinformation and documenting all sides of the story…
Will the Ukraine archive be made available to the public?
We’re hoping so, but it is permissions-based and we’re in a unique situation where content owners are not necessarily going to be able to give us theirs right now because they have other concerns.
Another recent project that we did about COVID is available to view online now though. That focuses on capturing the University’s response to the pandemic, because as with Ukraine, we were concerned that everything was changing so quickly. It seemed that every day there was new information, there was a new variant… we had to be on it constantly in order to map the timeline and capture what was going on.
How do you actually go about capturing websites?
How it works with web archiving is that we can do a one-time crawl, a one-off capture of a website, or we can schedule them, so do them monthly or weekly or even on a daily basis. We’ll have these scheduled crawls where choose a website and say: right, every six months we’re going to get new information about this, so that we can see over the course of six captures how the site evolves.
What else have you been working on besides from the Ukraine and COVID projects?
I’ve been working on the digital collection of Felix Dennis; he was a businessman who later on in life became a poet. We have his literary collection and I’m doing the digital side of it, which includes things like tour photos, promotional materials, videos, PDF copies of his books and audio recordings of him reading his poetry.
I’ve also been working on the archive of Edward Turnour, 6th Earl Winterton, who became a Conservative MP in 1904. It contains letters and correspondence and other documents — so that’s the other side of my job; it’s not just working with digital documents, it’s also making analog collections accessible digitally.
How have you found your experience of training at the Bodleian?
It has been really good. COVID did make it quite challenging, so I was trying to learn a completely new job while based miles away from anyone else, but everyone here has been really supportive and I just love the variety of it. For example, I spent the morning reading through old letters and this afternoon I’ll do some digital archiving. It’s been very varied, and I think it’ll set me up well for the future!
Help us to capture and preserve the history of the early digital age
Philanthropy has played a critical role in enabling the Bodleian to run the Trainee Digital Archivist Programme since its launch in 2014. However, with those sources of funding now at an end, further support is needed to secure the programme and ensure that graduates like Francesca are equipped to preserve and protect the world’s digital heritage for future generations.
The Bodleian has recently launched a fundraising appeal to help meet this critical need. Find out more and give your support now.
