The last session of the day before getting on with our class project about the Internet Archive was on NDAD.
It’s a service that the ULCC perform for TNA by preserving UK government databases and records no longer in use. Sounds dull but of course these databases include the National Inventory of Woodland and Trees, a survey of British Bats, statistics on how many accidents there are in the home, crime statistics and the names and assets of victims of Nazi persecution who were compensated by the UK government. These databases are all transferred to NDAD who migrate them into sustainable formats, document them with good metadata and make them available to search online. It sounds like a great place to work if you’re interested in the history of computing as some of these databases were the largest of their kind at the time and represent significant historical moments in the history of computing. They also have to deal with all the legacy software and hardware issues, data analysis, system design and digital conversion as well as the development of emulators, data recovery and so on. Hacker heaven and it’s only a ten minute walk from AI.
We assessed NDAD against the OAIS standard and it does pretty well. Since TNA essentially do the selection of the databases, NDAD have no negotiation in the Ingest stage, but together TNA and NDAD are a functioning OAIS archive. And it’s only a ten minute walk from AI! It feels a bit like saying you live only ten minutes from Buckingham Palace.
