Introduction: Archives are often portrayed as quiet rooms filled with manuscripts, inked ledgers, and fragile maps, things that one could call “echoes” of a distant past. While the National Records of Scotland (NRS) continues to care for these treasures, the nature of our national memory is changing. Today, Scotland’s identity is increasingly shaped by digital … Continue reading Why preserve: Protecting Scotland’s digital memory
Digital Preservation Day – Preserving Our Own Records
Today is World Digital Preservation Day, celebrating work to preserve the world’s digital heritage. Most of the records National Records of Scotland (NRS) currently holds are paper documents such as files, books and letters. Modern records however are mostly “born digital” – they have been produced in a digital format, such as email, PDFs, … Continue reading Digital Preservation Day – Preserving Our Own Records
Web Archiving & Web Continuity
National Records of Scotland is today celebrating World Digital Preservation Day. We caught up with our web continuity assistant Barbara Fuentes at West Register House, who told us about her work on archiving websites, helping to ensure that digital records are captured and preserved for the future… Digital Records NRS has been archiving paper records for … Continue reading Web Archiving & Web Continuity
Talking obsolescence in Oban: 2019 Community Archive Workshop Tour of Scotland
We’re constantly surrounded by digital material – tweets, photos, videos and much more – but stored information is surprisingly vulnerable and easy to lose, with community archives’ content particularly at risk. World Digital Preservation Day is an annual celebration of efforts across the globe to secure and preserve our digital record. In this blog post, … Continue reading Talking obsolescence in Oban: 2019 Community Archive Workshop Tour of Scotland
Aiming for quality: selection, capture, QA and preservation of the NRS Web Archive
This week we dig into the procedures that power the NRS Web Continuity Service. We are a multi-faceted service, dealing with numerous stakeholders and subject areas. With that in mind, we need to ensure our processes are efficient and effective, to help us deliver a high quality web archive. But what do we mean by … Continue reading Aiming for quality: selection, capture, QA and preservation of the NRS Web Archive
The NRS Web Archive and the NRS Web Continuity Service
So far in this blog series we have discovered government websites’ value as public records, and explored the world of web archiving. This week we combine these two threads, to introduce the NRS Web Archive and our Web Continuity Service. The NRS Web Continuity Service went live in February 2017. Delivered as part of NRS’s … Continue reading The NRS Web Archive and the NRS Web Continuity Service
What is web archiving? History, technology, collections
Following on from last week's introductory blog on web archiving this post takes a broader look at the technical and collecting environment of web archiving, as well as a brief look at its history. The World Wide Web was pioneered in the late 1980s to help share information more efficiently and effectively. Needless to say this … Continue reading What is web archiving? History, technology, collections
Surfing the Web…Archive!
Welcome to our blog! Over the course of few weeks, we will take Open Book readers on a tour of NRS’s new Web Continuity Service. Web archiving and Web Continuity represent an exciting new era for archiving at NRS, providing a digital tool that directly supports our mission to, “collect, preserve and produce information about … Continue reading Surfing the Web…Archive!
Digital Preservation for Local Authorities
For many archivists embarking on a Digital Preservation programme, the biggest challenge is knowing where to start. NRS has been helping local authority archivists to overcome this initial hurdle with two new tools to help archivists get started with digital preservation. Last summer, two Heritage Lottery-funded Skills for the Future trainees, seconded on year-long placements, … Continue reading Digital Preservation for Local Authorities
Open Book 