Evanthia Samaras

Evanthia Samaras is an Australian-based archivist and digital preservation specialist. She currently works at Public Record Office Victoria and is a PhD Candidate at the University of Technology Sydney. Evanthia conducted her three-month research placement with the British Library’s Digital Preservation team to explore malware and virus checking practices.

Published date:: 8 January 2019

The research placement was an excellent opportunity for me to meet international practitioners in my field and raise awareness about malware in context of digital preservation.

During my placement at the British Library I researched a range of issues concerning malware and computer viruses in digital collections, including the issue of when should virus checking take place?

The research placement involved an investigation of relevant literature and a review of practices, technologies and digital collections at the British Library. It also included liaising with digital preservation specialists at the Library and other collecting institutions which was an excellent opportunity for me to meet international practitioners in my field.

The research also helped me to develop my writing skills as it provided me an opportunity to develop internal reports for the Library’s Digital Preservation Team. As well as produce public-facing blogs for the British Library and Digital Preservation Coalition to raise awareness about malware in context of digital preservation.

Overall, I hope the research project will lead to further investigation and discussion on this previously underexplored topic within the British Library and the wider digital preservation community.

Key points

To date, malware and computer virus checking has not been thoroughly explored in a digital preservation context.
Evanthia’s research project at the British Library aimed to explore when virus checking should take place to ensure digital collections are preserved over time.
Evanthia produced two reports for the Digital Preservation Team to help inform how the British Library should identify and manage malware in its digital collections.

Services

Digital preservation

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