This has been a busy year for the Digital Preservation Unit at NARA, full of growth and new opportunities. As 2024 comes to a close, I wanted to share some highlights from the past year.
Our team of five, Mackenzie Beasley, Leslie Johnston, Amanda May, Hannah Wang, and myself (Elizabeth England), have recently started working in new areas and undertaking additional projects. Some of the topics our team is currently exploring include interpreting punch cards, digital certification of electronic records, and legacy media guidance.
We’ve expanded our internal training program, releasing a training module on NARA digital preservation activities and infrastructure, and integrated the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Novice to Know-How course on email preservation into NARA’s Learning Management System. We also began hosting NARA archivists participating in an internal career development program where they complete small projects to increase their understanding of digital preservation. I’d be remiss to not mention that this blog itself is new, having debuted in October.
A significant accomplishment of the past year was a major revision to the Risk Matrix, NARA’s instrument for measuring the preservation risk of digital file formats in our holdings and formats we anticipate receiving in the future. The process and outcomes are described in a four-part Fixity Check series, starting here with Part 1.
We participated in a number of groups and initiatives both internal and external to NARA. Within NARA, Digital Preservation contributed to the Transfer Guidance requirements around Federal agencies transferring PDF Collections (also known as PDF Portfolios) to the archives. After receiving requests from the digital preservation community, we released a new dataset for research use: file extensions data from our holdings, which can help identify extensions to be researched further for file format identification. We co-authored a paper for the 2024 International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) with colleagues from the Library of Congress, titled All Risk Is Local: File Format Risk Assessment in Two U.S. Government Contexts, celebrated the launch of the DPC Americas in Washington, DC, and began participating in the FADGI Audio-Visual Working Group.
Looking ahead to 2025, we look forward to continuing to grow our team and scope of work. Next year we’ll complete our biennial ISO 16363 self-assessment for Trustworthy Digital Repositories to measure our digital preservation program maturity over time, release the final module of our internal training program, and work on a project to improve access to our Digital Preservation Framework.
On behalf of the NARA Digital Preservation Unit, we wish our colleagues around the world a Happy New Year!