Sally O’Callaghan is Senior Project Officer, Digital Archives Preservation Research, at National Archives of Australia. She recently attended the 2025 iPRES Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.
This year, I was fortunate to receive a DPC Career Development Fund grant, which allowed me to attend iPRES 2025 in Wellington, New Zealand. This was an incredible experience that resulted in career highlights for me and tangible learning to take back to National Archives of Australia.
Through my involvement in National Archives of Australia’s partnership with the Australian Emulation as a Service Network (AusEAASI) project, I was allowed to participate in an iPRES panel submission, showcasing AusEAASI in Practice in Australia. When our panel was accepted, I really wanted to try to attend in person. I had never attended iPRES before or presented at a conference. Around the same time as submissions, National Archives had also made some structural changes to my team that created greater ownership and focus on digital archiving and preservation. iPRES couldn’t have come at a better moment; it was the perfect chance to sense-check newly established practices as well as inform future work as our team evolves.
On all fronts, iPRES did not disappoint! Every day was fantastic, with a few moments that really stood out. The best aspect of the conference was the strong alignment with current work and decision-making, hearing from and sharing solutions with peers in the field.
At National Archives, I have been leading our AusEAASI partnership project, including setting up a workstation using a gifted Kryoflux from AusEAASI. This setup was completed 2 weeks before I jetted off to Wellington. To prepare, the team had spent a bit of time discussing prioritisation for data recovery and had decided the best course of action was to conduct a small collection survey on digital records on obsolete carriers. The intention was for the findings in this survey to help with the beginning stages of our approach to prioritisation when scaling up a standard workflow for data recovery. With prioritisation fresh on my mind, I attended the first afternoon paper sessions, ‘Crossing the Divide: Migrations’. I was excited to hear from Ish Doney, with whom I’d completed the DPC Python workshop, and to support my colleagues from National Archives of Australia. A welcome discovery in the session was a paper from the University of Kentucky Libraries called ‘Bourbon meets Scotch: Prioritising media migration by uniting Technical Prioritization with archival appraisal’. This paper was presented by Andrew McDonnell and Megan Mummey.
The University of Kentucky was looking at the University of Glasgow’s Special Collections and Archives’ Media Prioritisation Tool to assist in the reappraisal of unmigrated and under-described digital media carriers. Throughout this paper, all the pain points that the University of Kentucky described around description and discoverability of this collection material were exactly what I was experiencing. The difference was that they were several steps ahead in this process. For National Archives, this means the Glasgow tool, and the universities’ lessons learned could directly help in our next steps. Being at iPRES, I was able to chase them down afterwards and thank them for their presentation as well as swap collection stories.
Day 2 felt designed for me! This day included my panel in the morning, followed by many sessions given by peers in the data recovery space. My fellow panellists included some fantastic people from the AusEAASI consortium, some of whom I had not had the pleasure of meeting in person until iPRES. I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better first conference presentation experience and want to give a special shout-out to Melanie Swalwell and Cynde Moya for facilitating the whole thing.
Following this, I attended the paper session ‘Encounters with the Past: Legacy Media’. This whole session was fantastic and so entertaining as frankness, joy of discovery and humour led the charge.
Developing a data recovery workflow has required many collection management and preservation decisions while recovering material from floppy disks. These decisions were shaped by my experience with AusEAASI, my broader career, and the specific needs of the national archival collection. I had felt pretty good about the choices I was making in this space, but this was deeply cemented following Leontien Talboom from Cambridge University Library and Chris Knowles from the Churchill Archives Centre paper, ‘Beyond the Image: Examining the Overlooked Variability of Floppy Disk Imaging Practices.’ Many of my choices aligned with their findings, confirmation I didn’t know I needed. In particular, the natural comparison of both their collections while working together led to the emphasis that each collection may sometimes call for its own solution. This was something I had also prioritised in my work and the needs of the national archival collection. This mirrored my own approach, where some decisions seemed overly cautious when looking at other collections but were necessary due to internal access requirements and permissions complexities at National Archives.
To top this experience off, on Thursday, I attended the panel ‘Preservation.exe: Working with ICT in Digital Preservation’ discussing the challenges encountered in digital preservation when working with ICT to process digital carriers and using obsolete or crowdsourced software. Many of the points discussed resonated with my experience setting up the Kryoflux workstation. Joanna Fleming from the Art Gallery of NSW raised a point about insurance for bespoke digital equipment, something I paid close attention to, as I had just started the process of getting an asset number for our KryoFlux and was encountering the same unique needs when looking at old hardware components.
I revisited this topic with Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand on the final day of iPRES, when we were treated to a tour of their building, including their new digital preservation lab. They’re tackling many of the same challenges as National Archives of Australia, but at a more established scale. I was not only in awe of their entire setup but also grateful for the chance to ask detailed questions about how they handle assets and track equipment.
Overall, I felt incredibly lucky, not only to learn from so many people in the field, but to have so many talks and projects directly relate to my current work, often presented by people who are a few steps ahead in their journey. I’m so grateful to the DPC for making this opportunity possible.
Acknowledgements
The Career Development Fund is sponsored by the DPC’s Supporters who recognize the benefit and seek to support a connected and trained digital preservation workforce. We gratefully acknowledge their financial support to this programme and ask applicants to acknowledge that support in any communications that result. At the time of writing, the Career Development Fund is supported by Arkivum, Artefactual Systems Inc., boxxe, Cerabyte, DAMsmart, Evolved Binary, Ex Libris, HoloMem, Iron Mountain, Libnova, Max Communications, Pictoscope, Preferred Media, Preservica and Simon P Wilson. A full list of supporters is online here.