Regional Digital Archives Group

The City of Vancouver Archives organizes meetings to help us and the local community keep up to date on issues concerning digital repositories.

February 12, 2009

Progress on the City of Vancouver's Digital Archives

Heather Gordon gave an overview of the project rationale and history.
Peter Van Garderen discussed the design of the project, and the steps we have taken so far.
Evelyn McLellan demonstrated the software that has been prototyped so far. Live DVDs of the software were given to all participants.

Project wiki: http://artefactual.com/wiki/index.php?title=Vancouver_Digital_Archives

March 27, 2008

Ross Harvey, Visiting Professor, SLAIS, University of British Columbia
European Directions in Digital Preservation ( Powerpoint), 6 MB
This presentation notes how research projects in Europe , funded by the European Union, are approaching the long term preservation of digital objects. An overview of these projects (DELOS, CASPAR, PLANETS, DPE) is presented and some of the principles underpinning similarities and differences of approach are identified. The focus is on practical outcomes from these projects that can, when fully available, be readily adopted to archives contexts.

Ross Harvey
Ross Harvey is Professor of Library and Information Management at Charles Sturt University and Visiting Professor at the School of Library , Archival and Information Science at UBC. His publications about preservation include Preserving Digital Materials (K.G. Saur, 2005). Ross Harvey has taught at EU-funded DELOS digital preservation workshops in Europe, and in 2008 was Visiting Professor at HATII, the University of Glasgow , where he developed The Curation 101 online tutorial for the Digital Curation Centre.

Cheri Rauser
Putting in the Sprocket Holes - Moving Image Management ( Powerpoint, 0.8 MB)
Cheri will tell us what she learned at the Association of Moving Image Archivists' Digital Asset Symposium 2007 (http://www.das2007.org/) in the context of her 8 years of managing the Telus digital assets.

Cheri Rauser MA, MLIS
After a varied career in museums, academic research and teaching as well as heritage restorations and manual labour, Cheri Rauser settled on libraries/archives as a career 8 years ago,finding herself managing a largely uncatalogued and inaccessible studio archive at TELUS, numbering 15K+ items. In the early years of her tenure as media librarian, production consisted of teleconference tapes and marketing updates, livened up with corporate videos featuring "happy snap" montages of employees utilized as meeting openers, and her main duties were cataloguing and collection management. The media librarian position evolved to where Cheri provided leadership in the collection, arrangement and access to moving image assets (both digital and analogue) created and repackaged for events, meetings (including AGM and Senior Leadership Forum), marketing proposals (including 2010 bid) and in the production of a weekly television newsmagazine web-cast to 30,000 employees in both official languages.

Dec. 6, 2007

Leslie Mobbs, City Archivist and Director of Records and Archives, City of Vancouver
The Monetary Appraisal of Digital Records: A Beginning
Les gave a popular presentation on this topic at the recent National Archival Appraisal Board conference in Ottawa (http://www.naab.ca/conference_e.asp). The presentation was given five times, each time with facilitated discussion. He will review his presentation and summarize the results of the discussions.

Terry Eastwood, Professor Emeritus, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, The University of British Columbia
Report on the DELOS conference "Appraisal in a Digital World"
Terry is the keynote speaker at this conference (http://www.dpc.delos.info/rethinking_appraisal/) on the archival appraisal of digital records, and will report on the event.

Oct. 10, 2006

Peter Van Garderen, Artefactual Systems, Inc
Peter's Alberta Presentation
Peter Van Garderen is delivering a presentation entitled 'Digital Preservation: An Overview' at the upcoming (Oct 12-13) 'Managing Information Assets in the Public Sector' conference in Edmonton, Alberta: see http://www.im.gov.ab.ca/index.cfm?page=conference/index.html. The presentation will try to present an up-to-date overview of digital preservation best practices, standards and models and how those might be put to use in an institutional setting. He'd like to use the less-formal setting of the Regional Digital Archives group to give the presentation a test run and to turn himself over to the ruthless heckling, criticism, and corrections of his local peers. Please come join in the fun.

Evelyn McLellan , Corporate Information Analyst, Insurance Corporation of British Columbia
Normalizing Documents to xml-based and PDF/A formats
Evelyn will demonstrate the use of Xena (XML Electronic Normalising of Archives) to convert various types of records to xml formats and talk about validating and "fixing" PDF files to conform to the PDF/A standard using an off-the-shelf product called Apago Appraiser.

March 14, 2006

Brian Owen, Associate University Librarian for Processing and Systems, SFU
The Multicultural Canada Project at the SFU Library: An Overview
Archives and libraries have worked with individuals and cultural communities in Canada to collect and preserve the historical record of their experience. These documents are seldom available beyond the walls of the institution or owner. The intent of the Multicultural Canada Project is to provide free and greater access to existing collections. The Multicultural Canada Project is a unique initiative with a broad scope and time frame. It is a collaborative effort involving academic and community partners from all parts of Canada.

Partners are Simon Fraser University , University of Calgary , Sien Lok Society of Calgary , Multicultural History Society of Ontario, University of Victoria , Vancouver Public Library and the University of Toronto. It is an evolving project with new partners and new projects developing as interests and opportunities emerge. The project is very dynamic, reflecting Canada 's history and ever changing and evolving population and culture. The presentation will provide an overview and highlight several of the specific projects already underway.

Evelyn McLellan, Corporate Information Analyst , ICBC
Managing digital archival records in TRIM
A demonstration of the use of an EDRM software tool to manage archival records.

Sept 15, 2005

Mark Jordan of SFU Library will demonstrate the DSpace open-source digital repository system as it is being used in his institution. Further information on this demonstration will be available later in August. As it is expected that this demonstration will prompt discussion, no other talks have been scheduled.

Feb. 7, 2005

For the first meeting we have a guest speaker from Australia. Chris Williams is involved in the University of Melbourne 's web archiving program and has agreed to tell us about his experiences. Chris will speak and answer questions for under an hour, and then we will have time to discuss our own plans.