The World Digital Preservation Day theme this year is “why preserve?” This is a question many digital archivists ask themselves as they wait hours for content to upload, painstakingly attach metadata to files and spend dizzying amounts on preservation systems. I’ll be answering this question in the context of the RCSI Digital Heritage Collections and also highlighting some of the gems of our collections along the way.
First, it’s important to explain what I mean by “digital preservation”. It’s a term that gets a lot of blank looks when I try to explain my job to people at parties. The official Digital Preservation Coalition definition is digital preservation “refers to all of the actions required to maintain access to digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological and organisational change”.
At RCSI, digital preservation involves a combination of preserving born-digital files and preserving digitised physical materials. “Born-digital” refers to digital files created in recent years, such as e-newsletters, annual reports, governance records and any other digital files relating to RCSI that might be worth keeping. The digitised physical materials refer to the historical RCSI heritage collections that we send away to be scanned. This is a very time-consuming and expensive process, so when we receive the digitised scans back, we want to be confident they’ll last a long time!
I upload the born-digital and the digitised files into our digital preservation platform, Preservica. The system automates the process of digital preservation, making sure that files don’t change over time and are protected against viruses. Preservica allows me to attach descriptions to the files so they are easy to find, and it can convert files into up-to-date file formats. Preservica's ultimate goal is to protect the digital assets from being lost through degradation or technological change.
Digital preservation doesn’t end when an item is first preserved: it is a long-term process that requires continuously checking up on the digital objects.
Preservica also facilitates public access to our digitised collections through a public portal: RCSI Digital Heritage Collections
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| Homepage of RCSI Digital Heritage Collections |
Here, anyone can explore material relating to the history of RCSI since 1784 and regarding the development of medicine and surgery in Ireland more generally.
On the public portal there is a wide array of historical digitised materials. To mention but a few:
On the public portal there is a wide array of historical digitised materials. To mention but a few:
• The papers of prominent individuals associated with RCSI. These include the papers of Emily Winifred Dickson, Sir Charles Cameron and William Wallace. These personal archives are full of fascinating correspondence, diaries and illustrations that give great insights into the individuals’ lives and impact on medicine and surgery.
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| Illustration of Peter Hacket by William Wallace |
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| Sir Charles Cameron's diary 1880-1883 |
• Photographs of historical medical instruments. They illustrate how significantly medicine has developed since the founding of RCSI in 1784; but keep in mind, this collection is not for the faint-hearted!
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| Cataract scissors |
• The Hayes, Conyngham & Robinson collection. It tells the story of a family-run pharmacy chain originally founded in 1897. It includes everything from product labels to formula books to a register recording the sale of poisons.
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| Hayes Conyngham & Robinson Medicine and product labels |
• The Annual Reports from 1844 to the present. These are valuable sources for the administrative history of RCSI. The typed reports have Optical Character Recognition, so it is possible to search for a word instead of trawling through the entire document.
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| Cover of RCSI Annual Report 2023-2024 |
The RCSI Digital Heritage Collections website is a great resource for many reasons. First, it’s completely free, so people of any age from any sector of society with an internet connection can view our collections. It supports diversity and inclusion, as researchers with disabilities or care commitments, who could not travel to RCSI, can still have access to the collections. Second, it has a positive environmental impact, as people can reduce their travel by plane or car to conduct their research. Third, it contributes to RCSI’s international reputation, as communities from around the world will be able to see the impact RCSI and Ireland as a whole have had on surgery and medicine. It’s also just entertaining for any history nerds that have a spare hour and want to go down a rabbit hole of looking at 19th century skin disease illustrations!
To conclude, digital preservation is vital to protect the history of RCSI and make it accessible to users for generations to come. As the vast majority of the records we are currently creating in RCSI are now digital, digital preservation will become more and more significant in the coming years. Everyone must soon learn the answer to the question of “why preserve?”