Archival Support Programme
There are an estimated six to seven hundred places in the State of Victoria which hold archive collections, about 120 of which are recognised as Places of Deposit by PROV. PODs in this Australian context are “community facilities that meet the storage standards required by PROV to preserve records of significance to local communities”.
The Archival Support Programme started around ten years ago, originally as a small grants programme for archival supplies, and is run in collaboration with the Australian Society of Archivists and the National Archives of Australia. The programme takes the form of a travelling roadshow, with around four seminar topics presented each year.
This year’s programme included a roadshow seminar on “Computers and Small Archives”. This covered the basics of digitisation, designing online exhibitions, and using a computer to catalogue archival records, all focused on the kinds of practical situations likely to arise in a community archive setting. The seminar also included a session on digital preservation issues. This outlines the preservation issues of obsolescence and poor management, and encourages communities to adopt good practice in selecting appropriate long-term preservation formats, to copy media regularly, and to take care with storage conditions and handling, to take periodic backups, and to ensure documentation about the archives themselves, if maintained on a computer, can itself be exported and preserved over time. The central message is the need actively to manage digital information to ensure its continued accessibility.
The messages conveyed in this digital preservation talk are similar to those I incorporate in a WYAS presentation aimed at local Family History Societies. However, the emphasis in the PROV session on the various simple, yet effective, solutions which might be employed is striking, and is something which I will incorportate in future versions of the WYAS presentation.
Around the World in 80 Gigabytes 
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