Bits and Pieces

An overview and lessons learned from challenges faced in the management of our dark repository.

Turmoil at Twitter is causing concerns about the platform’s long-term stability. Here are a few methods for copying and preserving your Twitter data.

In the summer and early fall of 2021, the Digital Preservation Steering Committee undertook a focused assessment to surface current roadblocks to implementing a more comprehensive digital preservation program. Keep reading to find out the results and our plan to address our programmatic gaps!

In the Spring of 2021, a researcher I regularly work with informed me that he had included the citation to his dataset in the References section of the paper that he had just submitted to AGU JGR Planets, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021JE006875. I thought it was an excellent opportunity to follow one of our datasets through the process from a mention in the References section all the way through to the DataCite Data Metrics badge, https://support.datacite.org/docs/displaying-usage-and-citations-in-your-repository, in the Deep Blue Data repository indicating this dataset has been cited.

In early 2021, I was trying to verify whether the DataCite Data Metrics badge, https://support.datacite.org/docs/displaying-usage-and-citations-in-your-repository a tool for displaying usage and citation information, was working or not. However, I had no easy way of knowing whether any of our researchers had actually cited any of the data sets we host in Deep Blue Data in their published articles, let alone whether other researchers had. So, I decided to begin the process of adding citations to our datasets via the DataCite API, based on information we have in our “Citations to related material” field. I was using the instructions on https://support.datacite.org/docs/contributing-data-citations#.

The following is my process and the results of that process.

We have drafted a document outlining what "digital preservation" means at our institution.

Announcing the publication of the Digital Archiving Research Guide, with tips and recommendations for organizing and preserving your personal digital files.

Over the past year our work has been featured in a video and podcast.

The Personal Digital Archiving zine is now available in the Digital Preservation Lab and in Shapiro Library Design Lab's Design-o-Matic 4000 vending machine!

The U-M Digital Preservation Unit celebrated World Digital Preservation Day on November 7 with zines, cookies, and a 3.5-inch floppy disk data rescue demonstration.