Practical Digital Preservation Training & Education — Canada Series

About the Training & Education Series

Over the last couple of years, remote working and online access to digital materials has become increasingly important for many Canadian government, academic, cultural and commercial organizations. But, this digital content is at-risk. It is easily corrupted, lost, tampered with, or worse stored in formats that can’t be read or used by future applications.

Gartner have been highlighting this: ​“As formats change, software is retired and hardware becomes obsolete, the data that organizations might want to keep can be lost forever.”

Here at Preservica, we've made that our mission – to work with our customers and the digital preservation community – to ensure the world's digital legacy is easily preserved and available to future generations.​

That's why we've launched Free-forever digital preservation in Canada and worked with industry partners to bring your this free practical training and education series designed for professionals including archivists, records managers, and independent practitioners.

Learn from Preservica experts as we explore the practical steps of building a digital archive using Preservica Starter edition (free-forever 5GB).

This four-part online series is packed full of best practice and real-world examples to help you jump-start your digital preservation journey by quickly building your very own digital archive in Starter.

• Digital Preservation 101
• Essentials Skills
• Building The Business Case
  
• Preparing For The Future

Thanks to our partners

In coordination with our launch of Free-forever digital preservation in Canada, this practical training & education series is designed for professionals including archivists, records managers, and independent practitioners in Canada, and available through a partnership with ARMA Canada and the Association of Canadian Archivists.

Lesson 1: Digital Preservation 101

The digital challenge – digital content is fragile, easily corrupted, lost or tampered with so ensuring your unique long-term digital information is protected and can be easily found, used and trusted is critical to the long-term success of your organization. In this session, we'll explore the core pillars of digital preservation.

What you will learn

• What is digital preservation and why do we need it?
• The core pillars of digital preservation
  
• Preservation strategies & industry standards
  
• Preservation in practice at TfL
• Key business drivers & goals

Lesson 2: Essential Skills

In this practical session, participants can follow along using Preservica Starter as we explore preservation fundamentals, including securely adding content and enriching metadata alongside organizing your collection hierarchies to enhance discoverability, user experience and engagement with your digital archive.

What you will learn

• How to quickly and securely preserve your digital content
• The importance of metadata creation and enrichment
• Saving time with bulk upload & editing of metadata
• File formats and vital digital preservation workflows
• Flexible collection hierarchy to ensure findability

Lesson 3: Building The Business Case

Building the case for digital preservation at your institution starts with advocacy and highlighting institutional value, but it also requires practical examples and proof points. Impress stakeholders by showcasing your new digital archive and highlight what can be achieved with limited resources whilst securing wider engagement and advocacy.

What you will learn

• Benefits of doing something, now
• Importance of appraisal & understanding content value
• How to outline and present the case for digital preservation
  
• Utilizing Google Analytics to provide data points
• Next steps for scaling your archive

Lesson 4: Preparing for the Future

Technology refresh rates and the acceleration of digital transformation means the time to act is now. This session demonstrates how digital preservation technology can be seamlessly integrated to deliver protection and future-proofing in ways transparent to records producers but compliant with information governance and retention policies.

What you will learn

• Handling increasing collection volumes & data complexity
• Embracing new processes: Extract Transform Load (ETL)
• The role of technology & digital transformation
• Embedded digital preservation
• Opportunities for upskilling & continuous learning

Testimonials - see what others are saying about this training

“The opportunity to use Starter without signing a contract and to familiarize myself with basic features of the system for free, prior to discussing with stakeholders, is a huge benefit. I loved inputting metadata”
Past attendee

"We are at the very start of our digital preservation journey so this series has been really useful in providing an overview of the key issues and context."
Past attendee

“I have loved extending my knowledge of digital preservation. Training sessions given by Preservica have been excellent - informative, interesting, inspiring..”​
Past attendee