DPC

Read Jaye Weatherburn's account of sessions on Acquisition & Appraisal at iPRES 2017. Jaye attended iPRES 2017 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by our Commericial Supporters.

Thanks to a DPC Leadership Program scholarship (made possible by Commercial Supporters Arkivum, Preservica and Mirror Web) I attended iPres 2017 in Kyoto. This blog post focusses on the three presentations in the “Acquisition & Appraisal” session (Wednesday 27th September, 1410-1510). Each of the three presentations in this group focused on very different areas, from legacy media to augmented reality games, and also featured email analysis software. Each presentation had at its core the desire to provide answers to some digital preservation challenges, while also generating avenues and ideas for future research. I’ve gone with a descriptive style for my report on these sessions, with a wee bit of personal reflection.

The three presentations were:

1. A Case Study on Retrieval of Data from 8 inch Disks ‒ Of the Importance of Hardware Repositories for Digital Preservation
2. ePADD: Computational analysis software enabling screening, browsing, and access for email collections
3. Challenges in Preserving Augmented Reality Games: A Case Study of Ingress and Pokémon GO

I am writing this blog in the departure lounge at Montreal Airport whilst waiting for my flight back from the RDA Plenary meeting. RDA, the Research Data Alliance, is an international initiative that aims to build the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data. The RDA Plenaries, held each 6 months, attract about 500 people and provide an opportunity for people to come together to work on topics of common interest that they define themselves.

Having been to all ten Plenaries, I consider myself to be a bit of an old hand, but yet again I found this meeting as invigorating as it was exhausting.  Every session, whether it was a Birds of a Feather getting together for the first time to look for areas of common interest around a broad theme, or an Interest Group setting a research agenda for a particular topic, or a Working Group focused on a specific task, was filled with energy and enthusiasm as the participants dived into a discussion on their favorite subject.

I had initially conceived this blog as a meditation on the science (or art) of appraisal. Since July I’ve had the opportunity to attend conference and events (DPASSH, DPC events, PASIG to name a few). Throughout these events, through conversation and reflection, my thoughts on archival appraisal continued to be, well, reappraised. However, William Kilbride’s blog on ‘The Data Vanishes’ has really, really got me thinking about what it is we are preserving and who should be involved. Therefore, I decided to write about the development of my shifting thoughts about ‘digital stuff’ and precisely what it is that we are trying to preserve. Between the project plans, meetings and implementations, there’s been a bit of reflective thinking here.

Hull – City of Culture
In November 2013 Hull was announced as UK City of Culture for 2017. The scheme, echoing that of European City of Culture, seeks to use culture as the focus for regeneration. City of Culture represents a tremendous opportunity to do so much more than normal; not only in terms of our audience engagement activities but also to develop partnerships and contribute to initiatives across the city.

I’ve been thinking about interoperability a bit recently and wondered if it might help us frame a wider discussion on how digital preservation might integrate with the wider technology landscape. My basic thesis is that digital preservation remains a niche topic and this is bad news. For all the reasons we’ve discussed before, it’s hard to get chief technology officers, let alone finance directors to invest for the sake of the long term , but if we can build digital preservation capability for inclusion in other systems then everyone will be a winner. There are two messages here: that digital preservation vendors and their clients need to be alert to interoperability (as many already are) so that DP capacity can be deeply embedded within diverse systems; but also that digital preservation is a special case of interoperability and as such has something to offer the rest of the technology sector.

Read Louise Lawson's account of sessions on Emulation and Software Preservation at iPRES 2017. Louise is attending iPRES 2017 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by our Commericial Supporters.

Read Louise Lawson's account of Ingrid Dillo's key note session on FAIR and Open Data at iPRES 2017. Louise is attending iPRES 2017 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by our Commericial Supporters.