From 2019 to 2022 Plugged In, Powered Up delivered 12 programmes that began to address digital skills, resilience and capacity in the sector.
Some highlights:
We ran Archives School, where 12 archive professionals attended a taught course on digital preservation delivered by digital preservation experts at The National Archives in Kew.
We produced a promotional film that introduced the digital challenge and how The National Archives could help organisations meet that challenge.
Working in with one of our key strategic partners, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) we created the Novice to Know-How learning pathway, which provided learners with the skills and confidence required to implement active digital preservation workflows and processes within their organisation. This free online learning resource has been accessed by over 2500 users from 52 countries.
Our peer mentoring programme helped to build relationships between confident digital practitioners and professionals who had limited experience of digital work. In the three years that this programme has been running, mentees from 52 organisations have completed digital projects, with the support of mentors from 12 organisations.
We established Digital Archives Learning Exchange (DALE) in 2019 to explore digital challenges, build capacity and improve digital skills across the archive sector. Facilitated by The National Archives, DALE provides regular – opportunities for archivists to feed into the programme, share learning and explore relevant issues. As well as highlighting examples of best practice and projects from across the sector, DALE provided an introduction to a range of initiatives led by The National Archives.
Our digital preservation workflow guidance has received over thirteen thousand page views since its launch in 2020. The guidance aims to support archives in the UK to move into active digital preservation work by providing those who look after archives with:
- Practical examples of workflows for managing born digital content, which you can change and use in your own organisation.
- Actions for how to process and preserve born digital content, including using free software.
We created a digital engagement toolkit to help archives develop how they use their collections to tell stories online and engage audiences in different ways. The toolkit offers guidance on how to tell a story with the ‘Creative Inspiration Guide’, gives an overview of different platforms to use for digital engagement work and explores audience types and how archives can target their approach to engagement to reach a particular audience.
Manage Your Collections has become an established tool that allows archives to add, edit, delete and restore information about their own collections in Discovery and is used by over 300 UK archives. It allows archives who don’t have other means to publish their catalogue data to build their digital capacity and have a presence online.