Microforms, once a space saving and efficient solution for preserving critical historical and cultural information are increasingly becoming redundant, and the tide shifting due to the escalation of digital technologies. As microforms readers become scarce and the long-term stability of the microform format becomes questionable, it becomes essential to migrate and repackage, orphan microforms in digital format. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to promote the digitisation and preservation of microforms at the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ). Microforms are often regarded by many as an outdated archival format, yet their importance is still evident in this green revolution epoch. The study investigated how digitisation promotes preservation and access, as well as the skills and knowledge of archivists and librarians in microfilming technology. A case study research design was employed with a data collection methods triangulation of face-to-face interviews, observations, and document analysis. The participants included public archivists and librarians. The data were analysed using thematic content analysis with an interpretivist perspective. The results showed that while digitisation of microforms enhances preservation and access, public archivists and librarians lack the technological skills to digitise and preserve microforms. The study recommended that by adoption of analogue and digital practices for preservation, conversion, storage and access management, archives can bridge the gap between analogue and digital formats. Capacity building and upskill training for collecting professionals, and the use of standard digital preservation software will ensure continued availability of these crucial information resources for future generations.

If you qualified in the UK in the last few decades, your training would have included basic principles that you may now consider relegated to physical records. However, the simple records survey should not be dismissed as unnecessary in a sector pivoting into digital domination.
Management of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) archive service requires contemporary collecting for the RCN Group which is almost exclusively digital.
In the last 7 years of operating the RCN digital archive, staff were faced with unexpected collecting projects which changed the current digital landscape for the whole organisation. The first major digital collecting project with the RCN governance team. The urgent decommissioning of a network server. The sudden introduction of Microsoft Teams and subsequent move away from network record storage which closed down a shared network space containing over 2 million records. The cyber-security related desire to remove the remaining network servers. And more recently, the ambition to embed SharePoint-Preservica automated records management using Preserve 365.
Every one of these projects were urgent and would have been disastrous without solid surveying of the scope of each challenge, location and type of records. Some were more successful than others. It made the archive team consider formats and migration much more closely, start to run projections on digital storage and ultimately to fix their eyes on a more streamlined system of automated archiving.

The session will cover recent transformative work at Newcastle University Special Collections focusing on the UNESCO Memory of the World Gertrude Bell Archive as a testbed for utilising digital scholarship to encourage engagement with and interpretation of cultural heritage. Exploring the drivers, methodologies, and impacts of three recent projects – Gertrude Bell and the Kingdom of Iraq at 100, Evolving Hands and Beyond the Margins – the session will consider the ways in which improved metadata, enhanced digital resources and the use of emerging technologies and standards have increased the equitable accessibility of the archive by researchers nationally and internationally, particularly where the content of that archive is disputed and colonial, with a legacy of curation that has at times reinforced rather than challenged these aspects. Highlighting the use of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Text Encoded Initiative (TEI), as well as Geographical Information Systems (GIS), the session will explore the advantages and challenges of developing non-traditional skills and competencies. It will explore the ways cultural heritage professionals can benefit from cross-sector collaboration, including the role of academics and research software engineering professionals in the creation of a bespoke visualisations and entry points. The session will consider the ways in which emerging technologies and positive change can be utilised to increase accessibility, understanding of and engagement with cultural heritage in an evolving, dynamic way.