JISC Beginner's Guide to Digital Preservation

The JISC Automating Quality Assurance Project (AQuA) is running a series of free events in April and June for coders, technical experts, collection curators and digital preservation practitioner.

The events will be helping attendees explore a number of questions including:

• Do you have large amounts of digital content to look after?
• How well do you know your digital content?*
• Is your file what it says it is?
• Do your users do your QA for you?
• Are you Intimidated by digital preservation tools?

The AQuA events will be held 11-13 April 2011 and 13-15 June 2011 and will bring together digital preservation practitioners, collection curators and technical experts to automate quality assurance of our digital collections.

Preservation or quality issues can occur in our digital content from
many sources:

• When we create the content via digitisation (eg. missing pages, duplicate pages, poor focus/contrast)
• When the collection is stored (eg. bit rot)
• When the collection is processed or moved from store to store (eg. when processes run out of memory or disk space)
• When technology changes (eg. when our standards and file formats become obsolete)

Manually checking material for these kinds of problems is laborious, challenging and, most critically, expensive. Checking samples of material reduces the cost, but can let through problematic quality issues. Automated tools that can check every digital item in a precise way should allow us to reduce our costs and increase the overall quality of our digital collections.

The AQuA events will provide the opportunity to get hands on experience of developing and applying digital preservation techniques and technology to digital collections.

• University of Leeds, 11th – 13th April 2011: Join the team for the first Mashup retreat at the beautiful Weetwood Hall Conference Centre and Hotel
• British Library, London, 13th – 15th June 2011: Get involved in the
  second AQuA Mashup in the heart of London at the UK’s National Library

Inspiring locations, cross discipline collaboration, challenges and prizes, and evening social events. Plus it’s FREE! Accommodation and
refreshments are paid for.

More info at http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/AQuA/Home

Register at http://aquamashup.eventbrite.com

AQuA is a JISC funded collaborative project between the University of Leeds, the University of York, the British Library and Open Planets Foundation.

Questions – by email to digital@leeds.ac.uk