What did you do before working in Digital Preservation?
I’d always been interested in computer graphics, so I had a brief foray into the videogame industry. I worked on a port of a Playstation game to the Nintendo 64. The dev kit was great – it had board in the PC that connected to this oversize N64 cartridge that you inserted into a bog standard N64. You compiled the code on the PC and then with the click of a button you were playing whatever you’d written on the actual N64. Great fun to play with. Sadly, the company I was working for didn’t last long, and I really didn’t gel with the commercial environment.
How did you get started in Digital Preservation?
After my aborted foray into videogames, I got a 6-month contract working on a couple of collaborative research projects at the University of Leeds. One project didn’t go anywhere, but the other project was the groundbreaking Cedars, which laid a lot of the foundations for digital preservation in the UK and beyond. I stayed at the Uni and went on to lead the Camileon Project which explored the use of emulation for preservation. After that I was hooked!
Who influenced your early career?
I was really lucky to work closely with Dave Holdsworth and Derek Sergeant who both played major roles in Cedars. Dave had worked on preserving some valuable cosmic ray research data from the 1960s as well as writing emulators for mainframes from that era. He was doing digital preservation long before most people knew it was a thing. Consequently, he had a lot of valuable advice to share with an enthusiastic lad in his early 20s. One of the first things Dave gave me to read was a thought experiment by Doron Swade from the Science Museum as he considered accessioning various objects. A telescope, a packet of paracetamol, a “poisoned” arrow, and then a still shrink-wrapped copy of Windows 1.0. What does it really mean to preserve these items and their function? That shaped a lot of my preservation thinking. Margaret Hedstrom from Uni of Michigan worked for the other partner in the Camileon Project who was also great to work with and was a brilliant host when I visited the States for the first time.
What work have you been most proud of?
The Spruce Project really stands out. It was the first big chunk of work that I played a leading role not just in making it happen but in devising completely from scratch, although of course we put together a great team of people to make it happen. We had done a really small, experimental project that ran a couple of collaborative hackathon events – bringing together digital preservation experts and curators to solve problems and share and discuss the results. All in 3 days. The funder, Jisc, loved it and came back to me and asked if we could do the same thing again but 20 times bigger! Yes, we certainly could! I learned so much working with practitioners from around the world on practical digital preservation problems. The digital preservation world seemed to have often been building solutions to theoretical problems. We took it right back to real world challenges with some data on disk that a curator had in their hand and that we worked to solve as a group during our events. That was a real eye opener. At any particular moment our participants were solving digital preservation problems, but the events as a whole were really hands on training courses, as I eventually realised halfway through the project!
What’s the most common piece of DP advice you find yourself giving?
Keep it simple! There’s a sort of natural scope-creep that drags almost any digital preservation development work into trying to solve every problem, sub-problem or special case that’s going. Once it turns into a big project, the chance of success takes a nosedive. Step by step, learn from the process, adapt and move forward.
How has DP changed over the time you’ve been in the field?
This is the almost polite way of saying I’m getting old, right? I have been in digital preservation for quite some time, and there aren’t many of the folks from that Cedars era I was talking about who are still working in this field. Of course it has changed a lot. Outsourcing storage, and repository management would have been unthinkable back when I started in digipres. I do get frustrated by seeing the same topics coming back round though. I’m not sure how many more schemes for scoring file formats we need, before we realise that none of them have been successful over several decades of opportunity.
What trends do you think are going to be important in DP in the near future?
Is the “correct” answer AI? Where we are on the hype cycle, suggests there’s a way to go before digipres can substantially benefit from it. Look what happened to Blockchain in digital preservation, right? In the short term, I think AI is just going to make digital preservation much harder as fake content proliferates and swamps the real record of what we’re trying to capture. There’s a massive challenge and opportunity for this field to do provenance well. And I hope someone can have some success applying AI in a really targeted way to a specific digital preservation problem. It’s worth thinking about how we can be building useful training data and maybe we can do some exciting things with them in the future. The LLMs trained on everything scraped off the internet aren’t going to automate digipres for us anytime soon.
How are you finding the return to consultancy?
It’s really exciting to be working with Sharon and doing our own thing. I’ve been advising DPC members in a way that has at many times felt very close to consultancy, so it doesn’t really feel like a huge leap. Ten years ago, I completed consultancy contracts with the British Library, Harvard and the OPF and really enjoyed that work. So, I’m hoping there will be plenty more opportunities to work across the community over the coming years.
What’s your favourite escape from DP?
I spend a lot of my spare time doing conservation volunteering as well as just enjoying wildlife photography. I’ve been leading a project focused on Peregrine Falcons for the last few years and it’s just coming to fruition. As I’m typing this, I’m also half watching a live stream of Peregrine Falcons nesting on a 70metre high chimney in a nestbox my project installed. Don’t worry – we have steeplejacks, I watched from the ground and helped haul the nestbox up with a pulley! No way I’m going up there! The Peregrines have got two chicks who are tiny little fluffballs right now, but (if all goes well) they will be taking their first flights in a few weeks’ time. Our engagement work is only just getting going, but we’ve already had some great feedback from local schools with the kids hooked on the live feed. We’ve got to get the next generation engaged in looking after the natural world.