Ever since returning from Glasgow last month I have been meaning to get my thoughts down on my own iPres experiences. Writing this post has been a good way for me to organise my own thoughts and learnings from the conference and also a good excuse to dip into some of the written proposals and presentation recordings, but I think the time spent has been worth it. This is an account of how iPres was for me!

Robin Wright is Head of Australasia and Asia-Pacific for the DPC

In August earlier this year Australasia Preserves, a Community of Practice that supports the discussion of digital preservation in Australasia, collaborated with National and State Libraries Australasia to hold an online meetup session exploring Digital preservation frameworks, strategies, and policies.

Rachel MacGregor is Digital Preservation Officer at the University of Warwick

I’m writing this with the stardust of iPres 2022 still glinting on me and reflecting back on everything I did and everything I learnt at the conference. Everyone has a different conference – this one was no exception - and the packed programme meant that there was always going to be lots of stuff I will never catch up (although a great deal was recorded). You can read William’s blog about the organisation (which was amazing) – all I am aiming to do is to share some of my highlights and what I plan to do next with what I have learnt.

Robin Wright is Head of Australasia and Asia-Pacific for the DPC

During iPres this year, online delegates from Australasia and the Asia-Pacific had an additional way to engage with the iPres program and other attendees from their region by tuning in to iPres radio. This was a series of five half hour open zoom sessions run by the DPC’s Head Australasia and Asia-Pacific each day at 14:00 AEST (12:00 SGT, 16:00 NZST) that was designed for online delegates from the Australasia and Asia-Pacific region.

It provided an informal forum for delegates from the region allowing them to interact and find out more information about events at iPres at a convenient local time. The sessions also provided an introduction to the iPres Sunrise sessions being held later that day at 7.30am Glasgow time (16:30 – 18:00 AEST, 14:30 – 16:00 SGT, 18:30 – 20:00 NZST).

In November 2011, the organizers of the annual fireworks display in the beautiful town of Oban got in a muddle. Instead of their show taking 20 minutes, the whole carefully choreographed lot went up in 45 seconds. It was all perfectly safe so the (surprisingly short) video of the event is one of the most stupendously silly things you will find on the internet today: chaotic, brief, stunning, colourful, intense, loud, joyful and somewhat predictably called the ‘Obang Fiasco’.    

It’s a strange place to start a blog about iPres but it came to me while I was driving home from the conference on Friday. iPres 2022 started with an email exchange in the first week of March 2017: five and half years in planning and less than five days in delivery. I have common cause this week with the astonished audience of Obang. What on Earth has just happened?

A new paper in Learned Publishing by Tom Cramer (Stanford University Library), Chip German (University of Virginia Library), Neil Jefferies (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) and Alicia Wise (CLOCKSS) looks at the intersection between the rapidly changing worlds of Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing.

Clair Waller is Digital Archivist at the University of Kent

Introduction

The University of Kent Archive (UKA) is the repository for records created by Kent’s central administration and other constituent parts of the University. It was established in the year of our 50^th anniversary, 2015, and has been developing in terms of scope, practice, and content since then. The UKA holds collects and preserves content from across the university, including papers on foundation and establishment of the University, minutes of committees, printed material such as Annual Reviews, prospectuses, newsletters, photographs documenting staff, students and the campus, student generated content, and records of campus institutions, such as the Gulbenkian Theatre.

Matthew Addis is Chief Technology Officer at Arkivum.

Introduction

Have you ever wondered what the actual carbon footprint is of doing digital preservation?  For example, what are the CO₂ equivalent carbon emissions associated with archiving and preserving a TB of data for 10 years? 

There’s been some brilliant discussion and ideas in the digital preservation community around environmental sustainability of long-term digital preservation.  The DPC have a page that rounds up many of the resources, reports and blog posts that are available, including my previous blog post on the topic.  But there is a real paucity of quantitative data to support this discussion and debate. 

Arkivum has measured the actual carbon footprint of doing real digital preservation in the cloud.  I don’t think anyone has put numbers out there for the kgCO_­2eq emissions per TB when ingesting and processing different types of data in a real-world digital preservation system (please tell me if I’m wrong!).   This blog post is our attempt to change that.

Tom Wilson is Associate Archivist at United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

Introduction

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has a mandate to support and advocate on behalf of one of the most vulnerable groups of people in the world today. As one of the major issues facing the world today, the plight of refugees, internally displaced people, stateless people and other persons forced to flee is an ever-growing issue. Whilst the title of this post primarily refers to the work of digital preservation, it can also refer to the people that UNHCR supports. The content preserved as part of the work of UNHCR’s Records and Archives Section (RAS) often showcases the resilience of persons forced to flee and how they attempt to continue their lives as best they can under adverse conditions [1].

Zoe Warner is Senior Systems Administrator, Mediaflex at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. She attended IDCC22 with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I am grateful to the DPC in facilitating my first attendance at the annual International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC), held virtually from 13-16^th June 2022. This was a conference that opened my eyes to the big world of data curation (particularly scientific research data) and the challenges therein. These challenges however are still somewhat familiar to my stomping ground at the NFSA (National Film and Sound Archive of Australia).

The topic for IDCC this year (IDCC22) was Reusability, setting off existential thoughtlets about the fundamental purpose of storing, well, anything really, but in this context, data in all its forms and flavours.