Preserving BITs
BITs provides an important record of the history of the University during a transformative period. These records will not survive without proactive intervention and management to ensure future generations can learn from the legacies of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The recovery of BITs from obsolete media like CD-ROMs and DVDs was undertaken in 2023 through a collaboration between Graphic Design and Heritage Collections. Through the Digital Preservation Summer Internship, early editions of BITs were safely extracted and transferred to the University's Digital Archive, where they are currently being catalogued and made available to users.
Throughout the 2000s, the Graphic Design team primarily used physical discs to store files. These discs are susceptible to degradation over time and the files at risk of loss of association as staff move on. The risk of losing the troves of creative work housed within the Graphic Design team, and the historically significant content contained in BITs, prompted a digital preservation project to make these files readily discoverable and accessible for future generations. To take on this task, Graphic Design and Heritage Collections enlisted the help of Digital Preservation Intern Jasmine Patel.
Watch Sonia Virdi, Graphic Design Manager, introduce the project to recover BITs from 120 CDs and DVDs.
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This image shows Jasmine using a forensics workflow – similar to police forensics tools – to extract data off optical media like CD-ROMs and DVDs.
‘The imminent risk of data loss prompted us to act and archive these design files and ensure the longevity and accessibility of our creative endeavours for years to come.’ – Sonia Virdi, Graphic Design Manager
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In this video, Jasmine addresses some of these surprises and challenges she encountered while archiving BITs, (even discovering her aunt in one issue!), highlighting, the importance of digital preservation.
Student internships are a great opportunity for students to gain valuable work experience and for Information Services staff to learn from one of their main user communities. During her internship, Jasmine became fully immersed within the Graphic Design team. She became familiar with their working practices and got to know the people, work, and structure of Information Services. Through BITs, she unpacked the central lessons of the publication and what it achieved over the years.
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Despite the ever-increasing production and dissemination of digital content across the world, few people know about digital preservation. Without taking deliberate action to ensure that digital content remains accessible and understandable, important content can very quickly be lost. Rapid advancements in technology mean that file formats can become obsolete, so files can no longer be opened, while storage media such as CDs can degrade and become corrupted, or the hardware required to read them disappear.
Watch Sara Day Thomson, Digital Archivist, explain digital preservation and expand on why it’s so important.
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See here optical media belonging to the Graphic Design Team, containing original design files for editions of BITs.
‘We might not need to keep every Instagram post, but some digital things are the only record of important events or information, and we need to keep them for the medium or even the long-term.’ – Sara
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Producing BITs magazine was a huge task for one person to take on, alongside their assigned role in Information Services, and when Lauren left there was no one to take on BITs. With a vacancy for editor and the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the publication of BITs came to a halt. Summer 2019 marked the last edition of BITs as the main channel for communication from Information Services. Now, news comes mainly from the Information Services Group staff newsletter emailed out to all staff.
Watch Lauren Tormey, former Managing Editor of BITs magazine discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that came with editing BITs, and why BITs eventually came to an end in 2019.
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