The second West Midlands local Group event of the year was presented online on 21 June 2021. The talk was presented by Dr Martine Barons, who is the director of the applied statistics risk unit of the statistics department of the University of Warwick, and David Underdown, the senior digital archivist at the National Archives, and chaired by the WM local group chair, Professor Tim Davies.
Martine outlined the presentation; David then explained what is meant by 'archives'. He outlined the technical and practical problems associated with archives - what to store, how to store it, what to select. While digital archiving is still considered as something new, there are now almost 500 TB of archive in digital form. One issue is that it takes time for professionals to know what data they need to monitor in order to better make decisions.
Martine then proceeded to outline a decision support system, IDSS (Integrated Decision Support System) - a consequence of a belief following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 that a scientific system to support decision making was necessary. The aim of this system is to network together inputs from disparate events in a coherent way, taking account of inherent uncertainties, so that different policy options can be compared in order to support decision making. Panellists from various areas create inputs into the system, based upon their expert knowledge; these inputs capture the variability and uncertainty of the situation, they maybe updated by the panellist as their knowledge of the situation develops. This system is a Bayesian Decision Support model for evaluating complex systems which produces a ranked list of options, via a 'white' as opposed to a 'black' box system. The process is explainable and open to scrutiny - qualities extremely important to policy makers. The mathematical elements of the system were outlined, and a theorem that specifies the rigor of the system was briefly outlined.
Both speakers concluded the talk by outlining the application of the system to digital archiving. The system allows comparison and prioritisation of very different types of threat to digital archives, operates well even when there is only limited data or imperfect evidence, and has been very favourably received by independent reviewers, which has contributed to increased funding.
A recording of the meeting is available to watch on the West Midlands local group YouTube page.
Author
Dr Paul Wilson, University of Wolverhampton