Data, Digits, and Irn-Bru: CUL Digital Preservation’s Report on iPres 2022 in Glasgow!
The International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPres) recently took place from September 12–16 in Glasgow and brought together a community of enthusiastic individuals to discuss all matters digital preservation, from systems and tools, to policy and strategy, to advocacy and engagement, amongst others.
There were also some very fitting sartorial choices captured by Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty, Director, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, who was one of the keynote speakers this year.
This year’s conference was hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and had the theme Data for all, for good, for ever: Let Digits Flourish that invited attendees to reflect and debate how the digital preservation discipline supports flourishing communities, ecologies, economies, and ideas.
Cambridge University Libraries, a full member of the DPC, sent staff members focused on the preservation of digital collection materials. Natalie and John were first time in-person attendees, as was Frank Bowles, an archivist in the Library’s Archives & Modern Manuscripts team who’s also part of the Libraries’ Born-Digital Archives Working Group.
Leontien and I had both attended iPres before, and we had the chance to present on some of our research at this year’s conference. Leontien recently completed her collaborative PhD with University College London and The National Archives on the topic of access to born-digital materials, and took part in a session about this topic and the Computational Access: A beginner’s guide for digital preservation practitioners she created. I had the opportunity to co-lead a workshop on preserving more complex types of digital formats with colleagues from Edinburgh University Library and Tate Time-Based Media Conservation.
All of us took something away from our attendance at iPres, and we wanted to use this post as an opportunity to highlight some of these takeaways.
As always, thanks for reading!
Caylin Smith
Glasgow 2022 was the second in-person iPres I’ve attended; I previously attended in 2019 when the conference was held in Amsterdam. I was grateful to attend again this year to present about ongoing research as well as catch up with friends and colleagues in the field and meet some new faces.
Along with Sara Day-Thomson (Edinburgh University Library) and Patricia Falcao (Tate Time-Based Media Conservation), I led a workshop on the first day of the conference. Titled “Preserving Complex Digital Objects: Revisited”, this workshop picked up on the workshop we gave at iPres in 2019 and focused on supporting the collection management of digital materials for which few or no solutions currently exist. Attendees were asked to discuss and propose a Minimum Viable Preservation solution to examples Sara, Patricia, and I provided.
It was great to see Karen Hanson (Portico) and Deb Verhoff (New York University Libraries) present Preservation Strategies for New Forms of Scholarship and whose guidelines on this topic were recently published.
I also participated in a panel session titled It’s All Important of Course, But… where each participant made a case for the most important thing about digital preservation. Entries included considerations around decolonisation and whether special collections are inherently colonial, being able to respond to change, having a vision for digital preservation, mitigating any threats to digital scholarly record, collecting less stuff, having strong advocacy, and ensuring appropriate funding. In the end, the winner was an entry from an audience member: people.
Lastly, the final part of iPres consisted of visits to cultural organisations in Glasgow and elsewhere in Scotland. I chose to visit the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. The latest exhibition — Vaccination: finding the ‘perfect disease’ exhibition — was incredibly interesting because of my work on the Archive of Tomorrow project. Specifically, it was interesting to learn about how information about early vaccines was communicated and received by the public at the time!
Leontien Talboom
iPres 2022 was the second time that I attended the conference; my first time being iPres 2019 which was held in Amsterdam. When attending the conference in 2019 I had just started engaging with the wider digital preservation community. I was getting to grips with my PhD subject around access to born-digital material and was still getting familiar with all the different research that was happening within our community. This time around I felt far more at ease, and it was lovely to get the opportunity to meet so many people in person which I had met virtually throughout the pandemic.
As I was part of the programming committee for iPres this year, I got the opportunity to help organise and a number of events during the week. The biggest highlight being the Digital Preservation Bake Off. There is no actual baking during this event, but practitioners within the community get the opportunity to showcase their tools by using a pre-defined dataset. This was such a great event to be part of. It not only showcased all the great tools that individuals within our community use, but it also showcased how the community really emphasises working together. Many of these tools are built on top of other tools or integrate with each other, and that was very clearly shown during these sessions.
I also got the opportunity to present the Computational Access Guide, which is a piece of work that I have been doing as part of an SSI fellowship and in collaboration with the DPC. This was so much fun to do. I organised this session together with Jenny Mitcham from the DPC and we decided to introduce the guide through a panel. This meant that we were able to elaborate on a number of topics within the guide and the other two panellists, James Baker and Sonia Ranade, gave some great perspectives and insights on the topics.
I feel really grateful to have had to opportunity to attend iPres in person this year. It was great to see some familiar faces, but also meet new people. The amount of research that is happening within our community is really encouraging and I am hoping to bring some of this energy back to my day-to-day tasks and commitments.
John Gostick
This was my first ‘in-person’ iPres, having only attended the previous one virtually. Whilst a slightly strange experience to be around so many people again after the last few years of Covid-related restrictions, it was fantastic to meet in person and be able to speak directly to so many members of the Digital Preservation Community who I’d previously only corresponded with online.
Glasgow is a beautiful city and the whole conference was extremely well run and put together, so all credit to the DPC who did a fantastic job of organising and hosting the event throughout the week.
I attended many interesting seminars, talks and workshops, and it was fascinating to hear from others working in the same field about challenges they’ve faced and how they overcame them, research, and innovative ways of tackling long-standing digital preservation challenges. I learned a lot and came away feeling very inspired and grateful to be a part of such a strong and supportive community!
Natalie Adams
I attended the 2021 iPres conference online, just a few months into my first hands-on Digital Preservation job so Glasgow 2022 was my first in-person iPres conference. Digital preservation is a huge discipline and one that is always evolving so there was a lot of valuable content in the formal conference programme. Equally valuable to me was the opportunity to (finally) meet colleagues working in digital archives across the world in person, after seeing so many on screen at DPC events, and to share experiences and challenges with them.
I am part of the Digital Preservation team at Cambridge University Libraries and we are working at pace to create and deliver a range of new services. The pressure is definitely on, and we are tightly focused on delivering successful results as soon as we can. So, although I found research-focused sessions at iPres inspiring, the ones that covered real-world implementation of pragmatic solutions held much more impact for me. The standout session for me was Garth Stewart’s paper “…provide a lasting legacy for Glasgow and the nation” Two years of transferring Scottish Cabinet records to the National Records of Scotland (NRS). From the start I knew the session would be memorable when Garth kicked off his talk by showing us a slide of the official tartan for Irn-Bru (who knew?). He talked about how the NRS had taken a transfer of Scottish Cabinet records for 2005–2006 that were deposited in digital format (for the first time) and had met the challenge of providing online public access to them very quickly (at a time when the searchroom was closed due to Covid). Making sure that the records arrived in the best shape possible had been vital to success- this had been achieved through liaison and guidance for depositors and ensuring that the records were supported with good metadata.
I am grateful to have had the chance to attend iPres in person and felt very fortunate to have an entire week when I could step away from the demands of my day job to think and learn about wider digital preservation. It was also lovely that there was a team of us from Cambridge University Libraries in Glasgow together. It is a wonderful city and I hope to return there soon. I took a lot of learning and inspiration away from the conference that I’m already putting into practice now I’m back.
Frank Bowles
The Library, being a member of DPC, can nominate a member of staff to attend iPres who has never been to the conference before. This year I was that lucky person.
As someone who is not at present involved with digital preservation on a regular basis it proved an interesting experience, giving me an understanding of how broad the subject is. The subjects of the talks and workshops I attended included the environmental impact of digital preservation, preserving hip hop culture through digital storytelling, providing access to sensitive data in Scottish Cabinet records and the preservation of NFTs created by digital artists.
The technical information discussed during some of the talks I found somewhat abstract, and sometimes I felt I needed a real-world example to make me understand what was being discussed. However, I am sure that what I learnt will make more sense as digital preservation processes becomes more prevalent in the Library and I will be able to use the knowledge in my day-to-day work.
