The British Library digital preservation strategy
On 12 December 2006, State Library hosted a presentation by Rory McLeod, Digital Preservation Manager, British Library.
Rory discussed preservation issues and how these issues are being addressed at the British Library.
Rory's presentation is now available - The British Library digital preservation strategy [new window 3 MB].
More about Rory McLeod
Rory McLeod is the Digital Preservation Manager for The British Library [new window] in London. Rory is leading a range of new initiatives around Digital Preservation as part of the development of a UK wide digital library. The main focus of the role is providing strategy, guidance, policy development and technical implementation of Digital Preservation across the BL. Rory is using this approach to provide input to proposed changes or extensions to legal deposit legislation and its impact on long-term preservation and rights issues within electronic publications. This work involves the other UK legal deposit Libraries (Scotland, Wales, Dublin, Oxford, Cambridge) and some Higher Education Libraries. Rory is also working across Europe and internationally, the EU PLANETS project [new window] being a good current example of the type of work undertaken by the BL’s Digital Preservation teams to develop long-term solutions to immediate problems. PLANETS is an €8,000,000 European collaboration, led by the BL.
Rory completed the British Library's 10 year strategy for Digital Preservation based on the testing, evaluation and risk analysis of The British Library’s digital collections. His role, and this Digital Preservation team, signifies the level of the British Library's commitment to the long-term custodianship of the nation’s digital heritage.
Rory's background is in business, change and project management specialising in technology, archiving, digitisation and service analysis. His responsibilities include full preservation planning for all digital data from documents and records, sound and video, images and web archiving to e-journals and e-serials. Rory has a range of International experience having worked in both the UK and Australia.
LIFE- Economic modelling
Rory has fulfilled the role of Project Manager for the LIFE (Lifecycle information for e-literature) project [new window] in partnership with University College London; this project is developing an economic model for measuring the real and predicted future cost to preserve digital assets throughout their lifecycle. This groundbreaking project was able to extract and project future requirements for the long-term storage and preservation of digital information within Higher Education facilities and Libraries.
PREMIS- Preservation Metadata standard body
Rory has been appointed to the PREMIS Editorial Committee [new window] coordinated from Library of Congress, Washington. This is an international committee of experts tackling the many practical challenges in implementing reliable, sustainable digital preservation strategies. The PREMIS Editorial Committee is addressing this issue by breaking the challenge into the following areas Provenance, Authenticity, Preservation Action, Technical Environment and Rights Management. Rory's appointment is for two years and will involve a complete revision of the work done so far. The aim is to take this evolving International standard into an implementation phase within Libraries and Archives.
Last reviewed and updated August 10, 2009, 7:40 am