Read a report below written by Andrea Byrne, Digital Preservation Process Administrator at Archives New Zealand, from her attendance at the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPres).
I was fortunate enough to attend the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPres), hosted by the School of Information and Library Science and the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The conference is held on an annual basis and rotates between Asia/Oceania, North America and Europe. There were about 300 attendees, mostly from across the United States, but Europe, Asia, Australia and, of course, New Zealand, via National Library’s Jessica Moran and myself, were represented. New Zealand seems to have strong reputation across the world for doing innovative work in the digital space, going on all the enthusiastic feedback I got from other conference goers about our institution and colleagues past and present.
The conference was interesting in that, while there were folks in management, researchers, vendors and representatives from organizations like Open Planets Foundation and Digital Preservation Coalition, the majority of participants appeared to be practitioners. And those practitioners, whether their organizations had established Born Digital workflows heading back forty years, or were just given the task of setting up a digital preservation programme at their institution, face the same issues we are currently exploring our interim response to born digital records. So the good news is, digital preservation and the long term preservation of born digital objects is not solved and we can continue to have many iPres conferences in the future and talk and talk about policy, engagement throughout an organization, ways to provide access, and getting those born digital files from agencies into a preservation system for years to come!
iPres set up the conference in such a way fostered frank and interesting discussions around the above issues and many more. For example there was Policy and Practice Documentation Clinic, where we weren’t lectured to about policy, but instead attendees talked in small groups about the challenges creating and implementing policies at our institutions and discussed what makes a good or bad policy. Notes from the clinic can be found here. Another feature iPres implemented was to encourage participants to contribute to notes from the sessions and workshops by hosting collaborative documents on Google Drive. The iPres organizers also had a set of “Get a Room” sessions, where folks put forth their ideas for topics to discuss in a given timeslot, and space was allocated in response to voter input.
On another note, there appeared to be a strong effort to include more voices from women in the digital preservation community. A number of conferences with a technical leaning are starting to recognize the ways women are often talked over, ignored and harassed, even within professional communities, and are trying to figure out ways to reverse that trend. One method some conferences employ (but iPres did not) is establishing a code of conduct and/or anti-harassment policy. Even though a code of conduct was not established, a large number of the talks were presented by women and both of the keynote speakers were women. Lisa Nakamura, one of the keynote speakers, gave a talk called, The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Public Feminism and Open Access, about how people are using Tumblr to curate memory and facilitate distribution of the until recently out-of-print and seminal feminist book, This Bridge Called My Back. Beginning Wednesday morning with a woman of colour discussing the intersections of feminism, race, technology and open access activism hopefully helped to encourage a more inclusive conference culture.
I came back from the conference refreshed and stuffed full of ideas to share. There are a lot of exciting new tools and projects in development, like National Archives of Australia’s Project Chrysalis, which, if all goes to plan will provide an end-to-end solution to getting digital records from an agency. Digital Preservation may not be ‘solved’ but with avenues to contribute to and collaborate, we can work together to find better methods and solutions within our institution and beyond.