My Favourite Tipples from a "Born Digital" Information Professional
Jinfo Blog

By Steph Taylor

Abstract

Digital information, including social media, is very transient. Keeping up with the latest developments in digital preservation can be tricky. In her "My Favourite Tipples", Steph Taylor, tutor on the award-winning Digital Preservation Training Programme at the University of London Computing Centre (ULCC), shares some of the resources she uses to stay current.

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As a tutor and consultant in digital preservation, being part of that community is central to my work. Digital preservation is a fast-moving area, so keeping current is very important. The field is constantly evolving, which is exciting but also a little scary. We learn from each other. Practical experience and the sharing of knowledge is crucial.

• Storify: Twitter is my go-to resource for gathering professional information. I am very aware of the transient nature of social media. Storify is my secret weapon. I use it to capture and save information from social media. In my #nodigitaldarkage Storify, I grabbed a fantastic overview of the exciting digital preservation work happening in the UK and beyond, and was able to create a resource to share and use myself in the future.
  
  
• COPTR: This is a wiki about digital preservation tools. All digital preservation is a constant weighing up of resources, problems to be solved and "best fit" for any given digital object, and new tools to help are constantly being developed. Run by and for the community it's a great resource. I was delighted when my colleague and I were invited to curate the Preservation Planning section.
  
  
• DigiPresNews: This is a blog by Paul Wheatley of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC). Paul collates the current happenings in digital preservation each week, and posts them to the blog. It's a good way to catch up and a really useful place to check back for things half-remembered. If it is or has happened in the digital preservation world, it'll be referenced here. The DPC site itself also has many fantastic resources including webinars, reports and event details - essential reading.
  
  
• DART Blog: This is the blog for my team at ULCC. Previous as well as current team members have written many useful posts, and I find myself referring to past posts by others on a regular basis to inform my own work. I write for the blog now, but I also use the work of others, past and present. I hope my own contributions are as useful to others as I find the back catalogue of posts is to me.

For fun:

• @evilarchivist: Tweets from an evil-minded archivist who is the founder of the #HailDarkivist hashtag. Always evil, always funny. And as someone with a library background now working with archivists, I appreciate the tweets about library/archive rivalries!

An article in FreePint I found particularly interesting:    

• To keep pace with developments, we update our courses on a regular basis. I found Robin Neidorf's report on how information professionals address skills development extremely useful. We've recently launched our own survey (in partnership with the DCC and the DPC) to research the training needs of digital preservation professionals, so learning about a similar initiative was great.

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