RCSI Heritage Collections celebrates World Digital Preservation Day today.
As an increasing number of our collections are being digitised or are born-digital, Digital Preservation is becoming a key aspect to our cataloguing and archival work. In order to meet the requirements for these new types of collections we are working towards putting in place a robust system, workflows and IT infrastructure to ensure that our digital records will remain accessible and usable in the years to come.
For today we thought we would delve a little into an ongoing Digital Preservation project- the RCSI COVID-19 Archive.
About the project
RCSI Library has invited students, faculty, staff, alums and other members of the RCSI community to document their personal experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and contribute them to the RCSI Heritage collections.
While RCSI’s official response to this unprecedented event will be recorded and preserved in the University Archive, we want to ensure that personal experiences and reactions are included as well. We invite and encourage all members of the RCSI community to participate.
From early this year, COVID-19 dramatically changed our lives and how we do things, in so many ways. Many of us have had to adapt the way we work, how we interact with people and generally how we go about our day to day. We have had to go from meeting people in a coffee shop to meeting people on Zoom or Skype. In the blink of an eye, many of our lives have been transformed from a physical world to a virtual one.
This change has been a big factor in the type of content we can receive for the COVID-19 archive and how we receive it. Under normal circumstances we’d be happy to receive both digital and analogue donations but due to public health adherence and simple practicalities we decided to focus this project on digital assets only.
Submissions can be entered digitally through our COVID archive form where we ask people for some simple metadata and where they can then attach their digital records alongside it.
It is quick and easy to navigate from the RCSI Library website through our Libguide: https://libguides.rcsi.ie/documentingcovid19
Once submitted, Heritage Collections ingest the form along with the digital files in our Digital Asset Management System- Preservica, a standard based (OAIS ISO 14721) preservation software. This platform allows us to:
1. Keep content safely stored
2. Makes sure it can be found and trusted
3. Provides secure immediate access
4. Automatically updates files to future-friendly formats
Preservica themselves have played a big part in supporting COVID-19 related projects like ours. They have provided additional training support and have set up a LinkedIn group where organisations participating in similar digital preservation projects can connect and share ideas and best practice with the community. They also donated 250GB additional free cloud storage for COVID-19 related collections.
Once ingested into Preservica we can be safe in the knowledge the digital assets will be preserved in the long term no matter what digital format we receive them in.
Contributions made so far
Contributions have been really varied so far and whilst they have been mostly photographs they have also included emails, podcasts, videos, newsletters, poems, personal experiences and short stories.
One of the earliest submissions we received came by way of a few short paragraphs and was a personal account of a student working in a hospital during the beginnings of the pandemic. It gave a real and immediate insight into how COVID-19 has impacted the vital work carried out by healthcare workers. Many of us, even within the RCSI community, wouldn't have this particular insight, but it is very real, very important and now it is captured and digitally preserved.
"I still remember the first covid patient I took blood from, under all the PPE I was worried to the point of trembling, thinking about the possible repercussions. Would I contract the disease, or even worse would I bring it home to my family who may then suffer at the hands of covid?"
- excerpt, from Benjamin M MacCurtain
Our own RCSI social media channels have also been a source of some wonderful COVID-19 related submissions and paint a varied reality of peoples' experiences throughout this year both in a professional and personal capacity.
We all have unique experiences and vantage points and we hope many members of the RCSI community are in a position to share their frontline observations with us.
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| Street Mural in Dublin |
Many people took the chance to return to nature, reclaim the garden, learn new skills or return to dormant ones.
"Being stuck at home in Canada meant exploring my own backyard! My brother and I went on a road trip to the Rocky Mountains during the beginning of July. The stillness of Lake Moraine, which is usually a hot spot for tourists, was definitely something quite special" - Chloe Chan
"Planting sunflower seeds with my 4 year old and having time to watch them grow little by little every day" - Breffni Smith
"Eliminating my long commute and staying so close to home gave me the unintended opportunity to become an apprentice beekeeper, to my dad. One sunny day in June, I saw my first swarm completely by chance and it was a surprisingly exhilarating experience. Wild Irish honeybees just kept accepting our standing invitation to take up residence in our nice cedar-wood hives. We went from two to five thriving hives over those months, all of which look set to over-winter safely. We didn't collect much honey, but that wasn't really the goal!" - Sarah Timmins
"Lockdown gave us time to go back to things we did in the past – for me it was knitting. Both my nieces were pregnant and it was a chance for me to brush up on my knitting skills... It is hard to believe we are now eight months on from the first lock down (into another one now) and yes, we did survive it – for some it was devastating, loved ones died, business went bust but we did survive it and life does go on. Baby James arrived in October 2020 to the delight of the whole family." - Anne Gregg
All of us ringing each-other
Texting memes, recording happy birthday songs
Loving and recognising the love
In life, in everyday life.
- Claire Costigan
Scan the QR code below to contribute now or simply go to https://rcsi-ie.libwizard.com/f/covidarchiveform
Thank you and stay safe.