Digital Archives Program Workshop
Dylan Bremner
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Dylan Bremner is the Digital Archivist at the City of Edmonton Archives in Canada. Dylan has supported his professional association, the Archives Society of Alberta (ASA), by sharing his knowledge with the local archival community. More specifically, he is being nominated for a workshop he developed and delivered for the ASA, the Digital Archives Program Workshop.
Dylan’s volunteer work for the ASA over the past 7 years has supported the association’s mandate to provide the provincial archival community with tools they need to successfully address their challenges. The ASA supports the provincial archival community by providing advisory services and professional development opportunities. Many of the members of this archival community are staff and volunteers who work in small communities and do not have professional training in archives. The ASA conducts advisory services in which it supports the archival community with advice about all aspects of archival work. When ASA receives questions regarding digital preservation/digital archives, ASA often seeks Dylan’s expertise to support the request. Dylan has also taught a digital preservation component of ASA’s introductory course to archival practice every year for the past 7 years.
Due to Dylan’s involvement in ASA’s advising and training, Dylan developed an understanding of the needs of smaller archives in the province. In noticing these needs and wanting to better support these archives, he approached the association and asked if he could develop and deliver a more focused workshop on digital archives. There is a large need for digital preservation in the provincial archival community, and many sites do not have established programs. These sites are not necessarily technically savvy, can feel overwhelmed by requests to acquire digital donations, may not have plans for digitization, and often have no digital preservation program.
To support these needs, Dylan developed a workshop that addressed the most common formats found in this region of the world – audiocassettes, VHS tapes and optical discs. ASA conducted a report in 2017 that indicated magnetic tapes were a dominant format in our province and most highly in need of preservation measures. To support the participants’ learning, Dylan produced a Digital Archives Manual which provides step-by-step instructions on how to digitize/convert, and then preserve these digital objects.
The Digital Archives Program Workshop was delivered twice for the ASA in a virtual format – once on February 6 and a second time on February 9, 2026, and both offerings were at full capacity. 40 participants in total attended the two workshops. During the workshop, Dylan showed participants each step taken to care for the three media types by sharing his screen and showing the equipment used on video. The presentation made digital archival management simplified and easy to follow. Dylan’s ability to simplify dense technical language and archival theory has allowed our membership to begin their digital archives programs at a basic level. The workshop supports the beginning of digital preservation for many small sites in the province. Due to the popularity of this workshop, the ASA intends on delivering it again in the future.
To get a sense of the impact the workshop had on some participants, here are some testimonials from the post-workshop evaluation.
""Thank you! Very well done. And Dylan was very generous in sharing his tips, tricks and contacts. Bravo!!""
""I thought the way this workshop was done was really great overall. I like the collaborative nature of it - how the host would answer questions during the workshop as if it were more of a conversation. The live demonstration was very helpful as this type of content is easier to understand being shown and told rather than just told through PowerPoint alone.""
""This was one of the best workshops I've attended in a long time. I would highly recommend Dylan as a speaker.""
""Many thanks to Dylan for taking us through and showing us how to navigate the software Audacity and Elgato. He was very encouraging to those of us who want to do digital migration in-house.""
Dylan is deserving of the Digital Preservation Coalition Award for Teaching and Communication as his workshop has built capacity for small archives to begin digital archives programs and preserve digital records. Without his initiative, many of these sites would lose digital archival holdings.