World Digital Preservation Day 2024
World Digital Preservation Day, every year on the first Thursday of November, serves to raise awareness of the importance of digital preservation and is supported by the Digital Preservation Coalition.
In 2024, a collaboration between UGent, Het Facilitair Bedrijf (Digitaal Archief Vlaanderen), meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives and VRT brought the 20th edition of iPRES (International Conference on Digital Preservation) to Belgium. It is the most important conference on digital preservation, aimed at promoting international interaction. It was a successful week that once again proved why social dynamics and collaboration are so important for digital preservation.
As a university library, we are committed to digital sustainability. Long-term preservation requires the right actions to prevent data becoming unavailable or unusable over time, for example due to outdated software, degradation of storage media or a lack of sufficient contextual information to keep the data understandable.
We therefore archive and preserve our digital collections in the most secure way possible. GREP is the digital archive in which all digitised and digital collections of the university library are kept. Currently, more than 990,000 items are in GREP; digital born collections, the output of digitisation happening within the Book Tower, the results of the Google Books project, dissertations, and so on. Digital archiving enables new life for the material, to manage and reuse it.
We also have a longterm collaboration with meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives, for the sustainable preservation of digitised newspapers, glass plates and audiovisual material. Items we were able to have digitised through the GIVE project.
Within the university library, our focus not only lies on our (digital) collections, thanks to the Open Science Team we also support researchers in the long-term preservation of research publications and data. With training, research tips, knowledge clips and advice, the team guides researchers in managing their data and publications.
Looking ahead, we are committed to the FAIRVault project, an inter-university collaboration between four Flemish universities (Ghent University, Hasselt University, Antwerp University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel). In time, the project wants to offer researchers from participating institutions a solution for archiving and unlocking, in line with the FAIR principles and the motto ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’ of finished research data that cannot easily be stored in one of the existing external data repositories (e.g. more sensitive data).
Focus here is primarily on archiving, preparing/packaging the information and putting it in an appropriate repository so that it can be kept for the applicable retention period.
This project is still in the preparation phase.