Nice to meet you

Introductions never go amiss I think. So I thought it was about time we introduced ourselves. I'm Patricia, (2nd on left in this photo of our Digital Archives and Repositories Team at ULCC). I'm an an archivist who has worked in ULCC for 15 years now on a many projects, one of which was the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD). I also have spent time training and developing training on digital preservation with the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP). Everyone has a dream and it has been mine to join these two up working with the Institute of Historical Research (IHR)

and Jane to develop appropriate acessible preservation training for researchers who create data in the course of their research and avoid the loss of this valuable unique resource which often gets lost over time after funding ends. SHARD is an opportunity to do this and to hopefully get people thinking about how access can be maintained over time to this valuable resource. The very experienced Ed Pinsent, (first on left) will also be helping along the way.

My name’s Jane and I’m based at the Institute of Historical Research. I’m responsible both for our traditional publications activity and also for managing our digital projects. Recently, we’ve been putting a lot of time and effort into developing online research training materials for historians, building on our longstanding face-to-face courses. The SHARD project is a wonderful opportunity to raise awareness of data preservation among historians, and to present this specialist training in the more general framework of History SPOT, thereby helping to ‘demystify’ it. It’s great to have the opportunity to work with Patricia and her colleagues at ULCC, and to help embed their work within historical research practice.