The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Group Archive has transformed in recent years. The recent adoption of Preserve365, a Preservica product that allows immediate and seamless transfers of records from SharePoint into our digital archive, marks an opportunity for our team to embed good archive and records management practice across the RCN. Being a UK-wide organisation, we manage the records and archives for 14 offices across four countries and nine English regions. This means our advocacy for records and collaboration with colleagues are limited to virtual environments. The employment of a digital archivist and establishment of our digital archive (Preservica) marked a turning point for our team as we made our first foray into digital records. We established a group of archive superusers across the organisation who were our contacts to transfer records, give advice on record retention, and share successes. Now with Preserve365, and a new records assistant post, we are better positioned than ever before to successfully embed good practice across the RCN, However, we have been presented with technical and organisational issues. There is a disparity between the leap in technological progress and remaining cultural resistance to records management across the organisation—kit versus culture. These issues are recurring from our initial collecting projects to the present and show the importance of a balanced approach to new technologies and the need for new approaches to create a positive archive and records management culture in our organisation.

In 2023 the National Library of Ireland launched its inaugural Digital Preservation policy driven by the need to collect, protect, and share Ireland’s digital heritage.

The policy contains 10 guiding statements reflecting a mix of our current state and future aspirations, including:

-the needs for a standards based approach to digital preservation,

-the need for skilled staff to advocate for digital preservation,

-the need for active donor engagement,

-the need to continuously improve our digital preservation capability.

Since the policy launch, one of the key changes since then, has been the creation of a new team within the Library: Digital Preservation and Repository Services (DPRS).

This session explores the implementation of this policy two years on, and the practical steps taken to embed the guiding principles behind the policy. We will look at what we are currently doing with born digital collections, and our future plans to integrate hybrid collections into our processes. We will look at where we are currently at, and our use of maturity models such as DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (RAM). We will also explore our plans for a new digital preservation system and how that will improve our current infrastructure.

Finally we will look at the new technologies and workflows we are investigating, such as FTK, to innovate our work in the National Library to ensure the long term preservation of Ireland’s digital heritage.

Our paper will present the findings from our TNA Resilience Grant-funded project “GM Digital Kits”. This project allowed the 10 local authority archive services that form the Greater Manchester Archives and Local Studies Partnership (GMALSP) to take the essential first step in building a collaborative digital preservation programme.

Digital Preservation is still in its infancy across GMALSP, with practitioners holding the theoretical knowledge of digital preservation best practice but limited practical experience. With no formal digital preservation system in place, we needed a creative solution to help us develop a digital preservation programme that each local authority can adapt to its specific needs. Using the Resilience Fund grant, we put together equipment and software to create two digital kits that allowed us to put theory into practice and test out a range of approaches to digital preservation. The kits travelled around all 10 local authority archives over the course of a year, with each service accessing and ingesting files to a digital archive.

In this paper we will reflect on the group’s learning during the project, in particular how our confidence grew in handling digital records and speaking about digital preservation processes, how the experience gained will inform future conversations with stakeholders, and how we learned that there is more than one approach to take. The key message that we would like to share from the project is that it is better to do something small than not at all.