As custodians of documentary heritage, archives and libraries are faced with the challenge of preserving digital content in a vast variety of formats and in an environment of on-going technological change. As a response to this challenge, the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, and the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago hosted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Preservation Management Workshop for information professionals from 2-6 March 2015 at the School of Education, UWI, St. Augustine Campus.

 The Workshop provided participants with the tools and techniques for developing a policy and an action plan for a sustainable digital preservation programme which addresses organisational and technological infrastructure as well as resources.  The Open Archival Information System (OAIS), approved as the ISO International Standard 14721:2012, was introduced as the digital preservation reference model and best practices were cited.

The OAIS reference model addresses a full range of archival information preservation functions including ingest, archival storage, data management, access, and dissemination. It also addresses the migration of digital content to new media and forms and the role of software in information preservation.

Twenty-three representatives from the National Archives, the University of the West Indies’ libraries at the St. Augustine, Cave Hill and Mona Campuses, and the National Library and Information Systems Authority (NALIS) attended the workshop.

The workshop was facilitated by Nancy McGovern, Head, Curation and Preservation Services, and Kari Smith, Digital Archivist, Institute Archives and Special Collections, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Courtney Mumma, Archivist and Community Developer, Artefactual Systems, Inc.

Facilitators, Nancy McGovern (right) and Kari Smith (left) address participants at MIT’s Digital Preservation Management Workshop.

Participants of the MIT Digital Preservation Management Workshop 2015.

Ms Avril Belfon, Government Archivist, National Archives, (left) and Ms Marsha Winter, Librarian III, Alma Jordan Library, University of the West Indies (right) with facilitators Ms Kari Smith, Ms Nancy McGovern and Ms Courtney Mumma (l - r).