"Save your digital stuff!"

A blog post from Jenny Mitcham our Digital Archivist - written for International Digital Preservation Day

Most of us have a computer of some description (sometimes more than one!). Working with digital has become very much a part of our everyday life, but what do we do with the stuff that we create on the computer? How do we make sure that the important bits (those bits that we want to keep) are looked after for future generations?

Memories in the form of physical photographs have been handed down to children and grandchildren since the advent of photography, but now we create digital photographs (often with no intention of ever printing them out), how do we ensure they last as long as their analogue counterparts?

It is my job as a digital archivist to think about these sorts of things...but that doesn’t mean that everyone else shouldn’t be thinking about them too. The fragility of digital information should matter to all of us if we care about our personal and collective histories and the digital legacy that we want to leave behind.

Today is International Digital Preservation Day, a day that aims to: “create greater awareness of digital preservation that will translate into a wider understanding which permeates all aspects of society”

I think it is fair to say that many of us are better at looking after our physical things than our digital files. A couple of years ago I blogged about a personal example of this, discussing the different levels of care that even I apply to a physical photo book over the digital originals. Ironic really given my job description!

So today I’d like to talk about Personal Digital Archiving - not what I do in my job but what you can do to look after your digital stuff. 

What is a personal digital archive?

A personal digital archive doesn’t have to be anything formal or special, it doesn’t necessarily need to be visible or accessible to anyone other than you as the owner. It is your own collection of digital files that you have decided that you want to keep hold of, perhaps just for your own purposes or perhaps with the intention of handing them down to your children or grandchildren in the future.

Just like we may have kept physical photographs, film or audio recordings and correspondence in the past, now we keep digital photographs, digital video and audio and email.

But digital is by its very nature fragile. While we have the ability to keep many copies of the same thing we also have to guard against problems such as:

• Hardware obsolescence (will there be a computer that can read this disk in ten years time?) 
• Software obsolescence (will there be a programme that can open this file in ten years time?) 
• Hard drive failure (my computer has died and I’ve lost everything!) 
• Accidental damage (I’ve overwritten or deleted my files by mistake!) 
• Malicious damage (a computer virus has corrupted all of my files!)

I found some of my old data from the 1990's in a bedside drawer. Does anyone else still have data stored on floppy disks?

We should all be taking some small steps to actively manage our digital stuff. If you care about it, don’t leave its survival to chance.

How to manage a personal digital archive?

The good news is, there are many things we can do as individuals to manage our own personal digital archives. All it takes is a little bit of time and thought and potentially some financial investment in a good backup or storage solution.

File and directory naming

Descriptive file naming and the use of logical directory structures will help ensure that you can locate your files when you need them. This doesn’t actually take a lot of time when it is done at the point of creation. Unfortunately it does take much longer when you have to go back and make sense of many years of accumulated digital ‘stuff’...or worse still if someone else has to sort through your digital legacy in the future.

Gone (thankfully!) are the days when we only had 8 characters with which to create our file names (and 3 additional characters with which to record the file extension). Back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s there was good reason why our filenames were cryptic, but today there is no excuse for not naming files in a descriptive and logical manner.

Happiness for me is knowing what a file is when I double click on it to open it up. This is such a basic thing but makes a real difference when you are trying to locate something. Having to open up lots of files in order to find the one you want is not only frustrating, but so easily avoidable.

Weeding and deleting

Storage is relatively inexpensive and this means it is all too easy to just keep things for the sake of it. If you keep everything you’ve ever created this will make it harder to find the really valuable things in the future. It is worth periodically checking over your digital files and weeding out those things that do not have longer term value and do not need to be kept. 

Storage and backing up

A reliable digital storage solution is key to managing your digital files. There are no hard and fast rules as to which type of storage is best but I have a few tips.

It is difficult to manage data that is scattered over numerous types of portable media. Portable media certainly has its fair share of problems. We were once told that CDs were indestructible but this is clearly not the case! USB sticks are handy to have but are also incredibly easy to lose. Other portable media types such as floppy disks are now obsolete - when did you last see a PC with a floppy disk drive? It is better to gather your digital files in one place where there is adequate space - your PC hard drive, a portable hard drive or a cloud service for example.

You should implement regular backups. It is very risky to have only one copy of the files that are important to you as they could easily get damaged, corrupted or stolen. You should ensure that files are backed up and stored elsewhere. Think about what would happen to your data if there was a fire, flood or break in at your home or office (note I had to think about just this a couple of years ago).

Make sure that you have other copies of your data elsewhere that you can access if you need to. You could use a cloud service provider for example or store a portable hard drive containing a copy of your files in a different location.

Whatever you choose to do, try not to make it too complex and if you can make use of an automated backup service, this can often be more robust and reliable than remembering to do it yourself!

Where do I find out more?

This post has only really touched on the very basics of managing your personal digital archives but there are so many great resources available on this topic if you want to explore this in more depth.

Firstly we have some good practice guidance on the Borthwick website for those people and organisations who are creating digital files - Managing your digital material: some good practice guidelines for donors and depositors. It was originally aimed at those who are intending on donating or depositing their material to an archive but the advice is applicable to anyone working with digital files.

Preserving your digital memories by The Library of Congress is a really helpful and easy to follow brochure. It gives tips on how to preserve some of the most common elements of a personal digital archive: Digital Photographs, Digital Audio, Digital Video, Electronic Mail, Personal Digital Records and Websites. It is really quick and easy to read with one side of key tips and pointers for each of these media types. Well worth a look.

Guidelines for creators of personal archives from the Paradigm project is a useful resource if you want to know more about file naming, documentation, file formats and backing up. From the same project, 11 top tips for preserving your personal data is a great quick reference guide to what you can do to manage your files and when you should do it.

Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving is an fascinating and eclectic selection of blog posts from the Library of Congress relating to personal digital archiving, brought together into one publication. It includes ‘Four easy tips for preserving your digital photographs’ and an interesting piece called ‘Remember when we had photographs?’. In a call to action entitled ‘Forestalling personal digital doom’ the author states “Like organizing a closet, or rearranging a kitchen cabinet, personal digital archiving is easy to put off, easy to forget and easy to make excuses for avoiding.” Hopefully after browsing this selection of short essays you will be encouraged to tackle it head on!

Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories by the Council on Library and Information Resources is well worth a read if you are planning to offer your digital files to an archival institution or repository. It is aimed at both donors and repository staff and perhaps of particular interest in this context is appendix D which is a checklist of recommendations for donors and dealers.

Feeling inspired?

If this post has inspired you to do something to protect your digital legacy today, we’d love to hear about it! Add a comment to this post or Tweet to @UoYBorthwick with the #IDPD17 hashtag to tell us what you’ve done.

Sledmere House - Rising from the Ashes

Sledmere House today (picture courtesy of Sledmere House)

One of the largest and most interesting sets of plans in the Atkinson-Brierley collection is that relating to the rebuilding of Sledmere, a country house in East Yorkshire. The house was built in the 1751, and in the 1780s and 1790s underwent significant renovations. Like many grand Yorkshire houses in the period, it was updated with fashionable Adam-style interiors by Joseph Rose, a specialist in fine plasterwork, and the gardens were landscaped by the famous Capability Brown.

The Library at Sledmere House today (picture courtesy of Sledmere House)

However, disaster struck in 1911, when fire gutted the building. Though estate workers and local people did their best to rescue Sledmere’s treasures, the building required extensive repair. This is where Walter Brierley came in. Using Rose’s original plans and surviving photographs and drawings, Brierley and his team worked to restore the house to its previous glory, as required by the then owner Sir Tatton Sykes. The plans reveal the intricate detail of this work, including beautiful coloured ketches of the parquet flooring and plasterwork which decorated the celebrated long library.

Meanwhile, the plans of the house exterior show how it was rebuilt and extended in sympathy with Georgian architectural fashions. Rebuilding continued through World War One, and by the late 1920s, Sledmere was once again a vibrant country estate. Thanks to the careful restoration of Brierley and his team, Sledmere survives today for visitors to discover elements of both Georgian and Edwardian aristocratic life. Here at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, the 181 Sledmere plans and archived correspondence tell the story behind his massive and marvellous restoration, newly cleaned and available for all to enjoy!

AB 7/1a: South West Elevation of Sledmere House

Further reading:

• P. Nuttgens, Brierley in Yorkshire: The Architecture of the Turn of the Century (York Georgian Society, 1984
• http://www.sledmerehouse.com

Ruth Mather, Volunteer, Atkinson Brierley Conservation Project

You can read more about the Atkinson Brierley Project on the blog and on our website.

Keeping Up the Pace (and Sims) at the Borthwick

Death and Dairies at Castle Howard
 

Our week began with a brief introduction and tour of the Borthwick Institute’s archives and stores. The collection is massive and the works are housed in strong rooms which we were certain could survive the apocalypse! The collection varies from maps and photographs to books, wills, church registers and architectural plans which is what we focused on for the week. The Pace and Sims collection includes plans and sketches to English landmarks like Castle Howard. The works we were assigned are relatively contemporary, primarily dating between the 1960’s and the 1980’s with our most recent plan dating to 1999. The plans include designs for everything from entire buildings to notice boards and toilets. We even came across a full size sketch of a pillar in the Castle Howard Mausoleum which, at nine meters, stretched the length of the large Lifelong Learning Room!

Loooong drawing of pillar at Castle Howard Mausoleum

 The sketch was not very detailed and we believe this was because the architect may have been attempting to get a better idea of the height of the column.

The collection also included sketches of the Mausoleum on the grounds, originally designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. These photos are copies of the original plans by Hawksmoor. These were interesting in that they included a stamp and address of where they were kept as well as, presumably, a signature from the person who kept or collected these plans. With these copies we were able to see the differences and similarities between older and more modern plans. Here, we observed likenesses in handwriting between eighteenth-century architects and twentieth-century architects. Most interesting was the stamp from National Buildings Record Office in Swindon. This was interesting as we discovered that the office in Swindon housed records and archives from various collections that were thought to be at risk from bombing during the Second World War. 

Memorials and Mysteries at Newcastle Cathedral

Amongst mountains of architectural plans emerged designs in a language which we could not decipher….Danish! These were plans for the organization of text for Danish memorials at St.Nicholas Cathedral in Newcastle at which Ronald Sims was Cathedral Architect for a time. In researching, we discovered that the memorials are still displayed at the cathedral in recognition of the Danish merchant navy which made Newcastle its home port during World War II (see http://www.danskekirke-newcastle.co.uk/kirke/uk/window-uk.htm for more information).  We found these plans to be poignant as we were not expecting to handle documents for World War II memorials, especially to those outside of England.

The plans for Newcastle Cathedral also included sketches for a stolen noticeboard which was replaced in 1999. It was interesting to watch the progression of designs from the original board to the creation of a new board. This included many revisions which allowed us to experience the evolution of something that is seemingly insignificant.

 A Canadian in England!

In the first roll of plans from Clifton Campville Church we found plans for memorials and various inscriptions for the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Prince Edward Island. We have tried to make a connection between Prince Edward Island, Canada and Clifton Church in Staffordshire (a tiny parish in English midlands) but have not been able to find its relevance. This was particularly significant for one member of our team as she is a Canadian. It was fun to come across something that was tied to Canadian heritage and history within mounds of rolls of English architecture.

Detail of the Canadian inscription

This week has been particularly useful and full of surprises. Not only were we given the opportunity to handle and catalogue archival materials but also learned how to clean these sketches (rolls from the Atkinson Brierley drawings). We were given the opportunity to view and handle doodles, names and scribbles within the margins of these plans giving us insight into the personality of the architect and the day-to-day management of a major architectural firm.

One of our volunteers in action!

This post was written by students from the University of York on a work experience placement. 

You can read more about the experience of earlier students on the work experience programme at Keeping Pace

Dishing the Dirt on the Atkinson Brierley Conservation Project

Drawing for Middlesborough War Memorial Gates at Albert Park from the Atkinson Brierley collection

Archivists might baulk at the old stereotype of the ‘dusty archive’, but it is an image that rings true
for some of the items in the Atkinson Brierley collection. When the collection was assessed in 2011/
2012 of the 6414 architectural plans there were only 99 that did not require cleaning. This is where
we volunteers come in. Thanks to generous funding from the Shepherd Charitable Trust, we meet
every Wednesday morning under the supervision of the Borthwick’s conservation technician, Tracy.
There are four regular members of our team – our longstanding volunteers, Catherine and Dave, and
more recent (August 2013) arrivals, Kate and myself. We also occasionally have additional students
or volunteers who want to find out more about conservation. At the start of the project we received
training in handling the plans and in careful cleaning with special brushes and smoke sponges, and
since then we have cleaned architectural plans of all shapes and sizes and in various degrees of
disrepair. We get through about 1.5 smoke sponges per two-hour session and, as of June 2014, have
now cleaned 25% of the plans identified for attention.

A dirty plan from the collection

It might seem like a fairly mundane task, but cleaning the plans is a really important part of ensuring the Atkinson Brierley collection remains accessible to the public. Even when the plans don’t look particularly dirty, they can carry ingrained dust and grime which then rubs off on archive user’s hands and can be transferred onto other documents. Over time, the dirt will cause the document to deteriorate, so it’s really important that we clean as many of the plans as possible. Doing so means that people can continue to visit the Borthwick and use this fascinating collection, which includes plans of many of the public buildings in and around York, providing a wonderful source for localand family historians as well as those interested in architectural history from the Georgian period onwards. The collection includes documents as well as plans, and covers schools, churches, war memorials and country houses, not only in Yorkshire but as far afield as Ypres in Belgium.

Our volunteers hard at work!

As for us, the volunteers, we’ve gained a vital insight into what goes on behind the scenes in an archive. Every week, we handle a number of interesting documents and learn more about howthey are cared for. We’ve also had talks on more intensive conservation procedures from the team, and learned about a digitisation project which used some of the plans we had cleaned to create an exhibition about the war memorials designed by the architectural firm. Last but not least, there is always good conversation during our sessions, and even occasionally cake and a coffee once the plans are safely back in storage! Our current list of plans to clean stands at 4618 documents, and we are hoping to secure funding to continue with the project after our current grant expires in October. The best thing about working on the project is the sense of helping to preserve a collection so that it can continue to be enjoyed for a long time to come, and possibly be digitised for even wider use.




We’d love to hear from others who’ve used the collection – what do you love about the plans and why?

Ruth Mather, Volunteer, Atkinson Brierley Conservation Project

Conservation and The Science of Light

A data logger hidden behind an exhibit

The Conservation Department has recently been involved in the installation of two new exhibitions: ‘The Architecture of War Memorials’, which can be found on the third floor of the Raymond Burton Library, and ‘The Pity of War’, which is on display along the ground floor main corridor in the Harry Fairhurst. We decided that this would be a good opportunity to set up some environmental monitoring, so that we could investigate the environmental conditions within the display cases for the duration of an exhibition. We positioned data loggers in various cases to record temperature and relative humidity, hiding the loggers under exhibits and behind stands. We also agreed that we would conduct some light monitoring for the exhibition areas.

Data Logger hidden behind an exhibit

It is difficult to be discreet about our light monitoring – the blue wool sample cards that we have positioned in the cases need to be in direct light to give an honest indication of light exposure in the cases. You should be able to spot two sample cards in each exhibition.

Blue Wool Sample Card

The principles behind the blue wool scale were originally developed for the textile industry in the early eighteenth century. French chemist Dufay was appointed to be Inspector of Dyeworks in 1729, and instructed to develop regulations to control the operations of the dyers.[1] He carried out systematic comparative testing on dyes, by exposing test materials alongside standard samples of graded fastness. Although there have been various developments in the materials, this method of using dyes of known light-fastness is still widely used today.

The blue wool scale tests for light fastness. The sample card we use today is made up of eight swatches of blue wool, which are dyed so that each consecutive dyestuff has an increased resistance to fading when they are exposed to light. 

Blue wool scale card in exhibition case

Standard 2 takes twice as much exposure to fade to the same level as standard 1, and standard 3 takes twice as much exposure to fade as standard 2 and so on up to standard 8. The sample cards are used in a variety of industries that need to test their products for light-fastness. This could include testing the dyes in clothes, the colour in wallpaper or watercolour paints used by artists. A standard test will expose the blue wool card to light alongside a sample of the dye. Half of the blue wool sample is covered (as you can see in the sample in our exhibition cases) and half of the dye sample is also covered. After a pre-determined amount of light exposure both the blue wool sample and the dye sample are uncovered and compared, and the dye will be awarded the standard on the blue wool scale that has faded the closest amount.

Conservators monitor light exposure so that we can limit damage to the materials that we care for. Light is energy, and energy is damaging to organic materials. I read a comparison of light and heat damage recently that I thought very expressive. Garry Thomson suggested that we imagine organic molecules as people on a commuter train.[2] People are jostled, but this causes minimal physical damage, just as a steady, cool temperature causes minimal chemical damage to our archives. If the temperature on the train is raised, this jostling can get out of hand, and this is when chemical reactions to our molecules also become increasingly likely.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum

Now, Thomson associates light energy with projectiles fired at the commuters by a riot control squad. The damage that the projectiles cause is dependent on the type of projectile: a ping-pong ball or a pebble might only cause minimal damage, whereas a rocket or a hand grenade would cause considerably more. Light travels in waves, with the shortest wave-lengths in the visible spectrum at the violet end, and the longest at the red end. Ultraviolet (UV) light lies beyond the visible at the violet end, and infrared (IR) at the red end. The shorter the wavelength, the more energy delivered; and the more energy delivered, the greater the damage. As a result the violet waves of light are more dangerous than the longer red waves; and the UV waves are the most dangerous of them all, equivalent to the hand grenades thrown by the riot control squad. During my research, I was amazed to discover that to get a supply of useable energy from heat comparable to the energy delivered by light in the UV range one would have to heat up to 200°C.[3] This demonstrates how powerful light energy can be.

In our exhibition cases we are not testing individual specimens, but have chosen to use the samples to give us an overall indication of light exposure over a fixed period of time. We also take light measurements with a handheld monitor in our exhibition areas, which give us ‘lux’ and UV values. These tell us how much visible light and how much ultraviolet light can be detected. To reduce light exposure in our Borthwick exhibition area there are blinds on the windows. A shaft of light that once escaped from between the blinds was measured to be 1767 lux, whereas the next highest reading from the cases next to the windows with the blinds down has been 582 lux. Direct sunlight can be very intense, and the blinds significantly reduce this exposure.

The glass of windows and exhibition cases also reduce the amount of light that reaches our archives. UV light is reduced, and only between 80 and 90% of visible light is transmitted.[4] As UV is the most damaging type of light, we aim to reduce this as much as possible, and so we also use UV filtered glass for our exhibition cases. The graphs shown here relate to the display cases in the Harry Fairhurst, and demonstrate how much visible light is blocked by the glass as well as how much UV light is filtered by the glass.

We calculate light exposure by multiplying the time by the intensity of exposure. We aim to limit the ‘light hours’ that our archives receive by restricting the length of time we have them on exhibition. Some more light sensitive materials, such as photographs or watercolours, are given even shorter exhibition periods, and are frequently substituted with surrogate images. We also alternate between exhibitions of original items with those full of surrogate material, so that we can continue to raise awareness of the collections we hold at the Borthwick without putting any items at risk from regular display.

 Although our exposure calculations are necessary, we are excited to see the results of our blue wool samples at the end of these exhibitions. Our calculations convey some numerical sense of light exposure, but the sample cards will be a significant visual indication of deterioration.

References

Forrester, Stanley. ‘The fast and the fugitive: light fastness testing of dyed textiles up to the 1870s’, Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists, 91 (July, 1975), 217-223.

 Guthrie, J., N. Tayan and L. Wilson, ‘A novel approach to light-fastness testing’, Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists, 111 (July/August, 1995), 220-222.

 Pugh, Samantha and James Guthrie. ‘The development of light fastness testing and light fastness standards’, Review of Progress in Coloration and Related Topics, 31 (2001), 42-56.

 Thomson, Garry. The Museum Environment, Second Edition, London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1986

With thanks to Tracy Wilcockson for the photographs and light monitoring statistics.

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This post was written by Catherine Dand, a Conservator at the Borthwick Institute

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[1] Forrester, 218

[2] Thomson, 3

[3] Thomson, 190

[4] Thomson, 5