Maryna Chernyavska is the Digital Archivist at the University of Alberta Archives. In October 2025, she attended the No Time To Wait 9 conference in Dublin, Ireland, with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.
I first learned about the No Time To Wait conferences from colleagues at the Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) Archivum, where I taught in the Archival Summer School for Ukraine in 2023 and 2024. Zsuzsa Zadori and Csaba Szilágyi both spoke highly of this event. I have immense respect for the work they do at OSA, especially considering how emotionally difficult working with records in their holdings can be. The OSA Archivum is a human rights archive, and a large part of its holdings is audiovisual. What I heard about the NTTW appealed to me also because I spent over a decade of my career in the archival field working with audiovisual archives, and in my role as a digital archivist at the University of Alberta Archives, I was in the midst of rethinking access to audiovisual records in our holdings and developing workflows for their long-term preservation. So, when I saw a call for applications for the DPC Career Development Fund to attend the NTTW9 in Dublin, I knew I had to be there.
Image of NTTW9 conference poster greeting attendees at the National Library of Ireland.
No Time to Wait (NTTW) is an annual conference “dedicated to exploring open media, open standards, and digital audiovisual preservation” (MediaArea). It’s a hybrid event with about 100 people attending in-person, and a couple of hundred joining online. The ninth NTTW that I was lucky to attend in Dublin was hosted by the National Library of Ireland. The 10th NTTW will meet in Warsaw, Poland, hosted by the National Film Archive - Audiovisual Institute - definitely consider attending, if you are working in the field of audiovisual digital preservation.
The first thing that impressed me at the NTTW9 conference was the feeling of community. There were quite a few first-time attendees like myself, but many participants come every year. For some, it’s the only professional event they aim to attend any given year. Thanks to the DPC Career Development Fund and the support of my employer, I got a chance to partake in the event that is collaborative and practical, and learn from experts and practitioners dedicated to open-source tools and standards. To be entirely honest, I felt a little star-struck to be learning first-hand from those who were instrumental in developing tools and standards that I rely on or aim to adopt in my digital preservation practice - FFV1, RAWcooked, IFIScripts stood out particularly prominently for me.
Lego model of the National Library of Ireland.
The collaborative nature of digital preservation was once again emphasized in the presented projects and case studies wide ranging in scale and scope from discussions of national preservation practices and infrastructure across Ireland, to a partnership between the Irish Film Institute Archive and the Guinness Archive aiming to digitize and preserve historic advertising material on 16 mm and 35 mm film, to the Irish Traditional Music Archive helping rural museums to digitize their collections. As part of a small team at the University of Alberta Archives, I am responsible for management and preservation of digital archival records, but I work collaboratively with other units at the University of Alberta Library such as the Digital Preservation and Production Services and Metadata Strategies, as well as in the wider context of the digital preservation community in Canada. It was useful to learn what collaborations may look like in this field, and imagine future ways of working together.
Irish Film Archive.
Presentations and workshops that focused on hands-on, practical aspects of digital preservation and workflows were especially interesting and useful for me. I particularly enjoyed Joanna White’s workshop on extracting file metadata using Python and other open-source tools and writing them into a CSV file, and her presentation on building orchestrated workflows using Dagster, a competitor to Airflow, which we are working to adopt for our workflows. Since we spent over a year working on a project to preserve approximately 1,500 floppy disks at the Archives, with all the successes and challenges, I was thrilled to see Leontien Talboom talk about the Future Nostalgia project and gracefully demo a workflow creating a flux stream and logical image using Greaseweasel. I can’t wait to explore how Greaseweasel can help us tackle double-density and hi-density floppy disks, DIY flippy disks and other joys of legacy electronic carriers, we’ve been struggling with using Kryoflux at the Archives, Greaseweasel being such an affordable hardware to top it off. These are just a few examples to give you a taste of what NTTW has to offer. Presentation recordings from this and previous years conferences are available on the MediaArea YouTube channel.
Digital preservation at the Irish Film Institute – presentation for the NTTW9 attendees
However, the NTTW9 wasn’t only about things practical and hands-on, and the thought-provoking talk by Dave Rice (who seemed to be one of the lead driving forces behind the conference) entitled “Preserving the Future, Embracing the Sensuous: Digital Tools and Analog Experiences in Balance” is a great testament of that. However, I would like to highlight here the National Library of Ireland Digital Preservation policy. We all know how important institutional policies and strategies are. Having access to examples of digital preservation policies allows us to learn from others’ experiences and envision what may work in our individual context. Many Canadian archives are working to either develop or improve their digital preservation policies, and tools like the DPC’s Digital Preservation Policy Toolkit are a great help in this process. The NLI colleagues generously shared details about the process of developing the policy, having it implemented, and now two years later checking in as to how the policy has been working for the institution. Having beautiful printed copies of the policy available to conference attendees somehow reinforced its importance in a very tangible way.
I am still going back to my notes taken during the NTTW9 conference; and providing comments to Leontien Talboom’s new Copy That Floppy! guide is on top of my to-do list. I am also looking through my photographs, especially those taken during the tours of the Irish Film Institute Archive and the National Library of Ireland, and thinking about how I can use what I’ve learned to improve our digital preservation practices locally. I am hoping to be back to NTTW, and you should too, if you would like to understand why some digital preservation practitioners, including Joanna White of the BFI National Archive, think about the NTTW as the best conference in the world.
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.