Following a successful bid to The National Archives Resilience Fund, Manchester Libraries and Archives is delighted to be awarded a grant of £13,622 for a Greater Manchester wide project to help us preserve our valuable digital heritage. This project will benefit all ten local authorities in Greater Manchester
Digital records now form an increasingly important part of the history of Manchester and how successfully we preserve these archives is key to how we can tell heritage stories from Manchester’s communities.
As a partnership, over time, we have acquired a wealth of digital records stored on CDs, Floppy Disks of various sizes, Tapes, Video Games, Internal Hard Drives and multi-sized Memory Cards amongst many others. This includes Town Hall Photographer Images currently on 12 CD Spools, publicity material relating to the Library Theatre currently stored on CDs and Floppy Disks, records and photographs relating to the Commonwealth Games shown below:
Most current computers don’t have the hardware to read most of these items and until now we haven’t been able to fully access or process these archives. Additionally, as most records today are created in some kind of digital format often in large quantities, we are making this a priority ensuring we’re able to continue collecting records of historical importance for the future.
Digital Preservation solutions can come in lots of different forms, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. To help us find our way through this process, the Resilience Fund grant is vital as it will allow us to purchase the necessary resources to create ‘Greater Manchester Digital Preservation Toolkits’. These will be available for our partners to use within their own archives to access and make available their digital collections.
The primary part of this toolkit will be a laptop and a selection of free open-source digital preservation software which will help us to collect information to help in preserving digital material.
Reading digital files is often difficult as, the older the storage media, the older the files saved on them. Where software is out of date or no longer available, we’ll be able to use this toolkit to come up with solutions to make sure these archives can survive.
Digital archives are constantly changing and this project will be a learning curve for our GM archive partnership but we hope that it will allow everyone to find their best solution to preserving digital files, helping us add to our collections in the future. We’ll be sharing our journey and feeding back our experiences through our social media and blog posts so watch this space!