Report on iPRES 2024: International Conference on Digital Preservation

This was iPRES 2024

Get a feel for the event with photos photosfrom iPRES and the aftermovie made by VRT

On the programme

The iPRES five-day event kicked off on 16 September with a day full of workshops, followed by the Digital Preservation Awards ceremony by the Digital Preservation Coalition. This award ceremony highlighted individuals and organisations that have made significant contributions to a sustainable future for digital collections. See the winners here.

From Tuesday to Thursday, the main conference took place at De Bijloke in Ghent, featuring over 250 speakers presenting their work. Keynotes were delivered by Herbert Van de Sompel ("Former Farmer Chases Traces"), Claire Warnier ("Atlas of Lost Finds") and Aaron Perzanowski ("Ownership, Preservation & Control").

What else was on the agenda? Numerous paper and poster presentations, short lightning talks, and interactive formats like games and the ‘Great Preservation Bake-Off’, where developers playfully demonstrated their tools to the audience. Dive into the programme overview.

The Start2Preserve meeting took place on Tuesday for organisations just starting their preservation journey. This new Flemish-Dutch Practice Network was launched on the sidelines of iPRES – bringing together people who work in heritage organisations and want to gain expertise and exchange experiences on making their digital content sustainably accessible. Read the report (link in Dutch)

To conclude, professional visits were organised across Flanders on Friday – allowing participants to discover inspiring places in Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Ypres and Leuven. Here’s what was on the programme.

Knowledge sharing

Couldn’t make it? Or did you attend and want to have another look? The recordings will be shared soon. Keep an eye on iPRES2024.be. You can already browse many of the papers here. Some exceptional contributions were highlighted in the closing session of iPRES. Discover the best paper, poster and lightning talk of the conference. Discover the best paper, poster and lightning talk of the conference.

Meemoo at iPRES 2024

Several meemoo colleagues’ work was selected for iPRES 2024. They presented the following topics:

• Intake of heterogeneous digital archival collections at meemoo: the challenges (lightning talk by Lobke Vanden Eynden)
• XDCAM digital transfer project (lightning talk by Laura Ulens)
• Artificial Intelligence and audiovisual archives: lessons learned (lightning talk by Matthias Priem)
• Enhancing Metadata Management through Linked Data Models ( poster by Miel Vander Sande, Milan Valadou and Lennert Van de Velde)
• Ontologies in the real world: How to make things happen? (Birds of a Feather-session by Miel Vander Sande and Astrid Vergauwe with Koen Renders van VRT)
• Surmounting the barriers to social media archiving with a little help from my friends (Birds of a Feather session by Ellen Van Keer with Zefi Kávvadia from International Institute of Social History; Friedel Geeraert from KBR; Katrien Weyns from KADOC KU Leuven)
• Start 2 Preserve: Building a Local Community of Practice (Workshop by Rony Vissers with Sharon McMeekin from DPC and Tamara van Zwol from NDE). Read the report (link in Dutch).
• The European Commission’s eArchiving Initiative: E-ARK Specifications and Tools (Workshop by Miel Vander Sande, Milan Valadou and Mattias Poppe with Sven Schlarb from Austrian Institute of Technology and Carl Wilson from OPF)
• First steps into command line tools for preservation (Workshop by Nastasia Vanderperren and Lode Scheers)
• From Floppy to Future: Converting Legacy Media into Digital Archives (tutorial by Nastasia Vanderperren and Lode Scheers with Jelle Kleevens from Archiefpunt / AIDA)
• Archiving social media for beginners (tutorial by Nastasia Vanderperren and Lode Scheers)
• The AIDA Network in Flanders (paper by Rony Vissers with Wim Lowet from VAi and Maarten Savels from Amsab-ISG). Read the paper here.
• Meemoo's Metadata Bake-Off: How AI Bakes Metadata into Digital Collections (Bake Off Tool Demo by Matthias Priem with Alec Hantson and Peter Vanden Berghe from Sopra Steria)

Some higlights

You will soon be able to watch the recordings (again). Here, we share some insights and sessions that stood out to us:

Inspiration galore!

The iPRES programme was packed with sessions that can inspire your own work. For instance, we discovered that digital preservation doesn’t have to be a dry subject during the workshop Game On: Learning Digital Skills Through Collaborative Game Development (by Francesca Mackenzie, Sharon McMeekin, Ellie O'Leary, Lotte Wijsman and Susanne Van den Eijkel). Participants worked in groups on a game about digital preservation while picking up the basics of programming – a skill that is becoming increasingly important for digital preservation. Fascinating to view the topic through a playful lens!

With our own archive infrastructure in mind, we attended The Future of Preservation: Reinventing the Repository at Harvard (by Miriam Leigh, Michelle Gallinger, Vitaly Zakuta, Julianna Barrera-Gomez and Stephen Abrams). They presented the process of completely renewing the preservation environment at Harvard Library, focusing on extensive functionalities, reliability and sustainability. You can read the paper here.

The place to be for ideas was, of course, 'Great Preservation Bake-Off', where 21 digital preservation tools were demonstrated live in a competitive setting. Colleague Lobke Vanden Eynden left inspired for the renewal of our work on digital intake, as several ingest tools and SIP creators were featured. She also gave the iPRES audience insight into the challenges of ingesting heterogeneous collections during her five-minute lightning talk, 'Intake of heterogeneous digital archival collections at meemoo: the challenges'

Accessibility works

First steps into command line tools for preservation

With a command line interface (link in Dutch) you enter text commands to tell a computer what to do. It’s the fastest way to manage your computer, automate repetitive tasks and process files in batches. The command line has many advantages for digital preservation and is a powerful tool in every computer user’s toolbox. At iPRES 2024, meemoo colleagues Nastasia Vanderperren and Lode Scheers showed that you can get started with it even without a technical background. And this accessibility was greatly appreciated by the participants. Curious to learn more? Meemoo regularly organises command line workshops. Keep an eye on our training calendar (trainings mostly in Dutch).

From Floppy to Future: Converting Legacy Media into Digital Archives

How do you preserve the content of carriers that can no longer be read by modern equipment – like floppy disks – for the future? Together with Jelle Kleevens (Archiefpunt / AIDA), in this tutorial, colleagues Lode Scheers and Nastasia Vanderperren showed participants how to read data from their outdated carriers. Tip: you can also find the accessible workflows and guides here.

Stronger together

The Birds of a Feather sessions brought together participants with a particular interest to delve into a topic and seek solutions. Meemoo colleague Ellen Van Keer brainstormed with archivists, information professionals, cultural heritage workers, researchers and more – about the challenges that arise in archiving social media. Some takeaways:

Social media changes rapidly, making it difficult to archive. And the fact that legislation varies from country to country further complicates the establishment of a network. The former Twitter is missed. And what happens if social media implodes? What will we archive, and what will we say about it in 100 years? A healing session, as expressed by the group sentiment.

Colleagues Nastasia Vanderperren and Lode Scheers also helped participants get started with social media archiving during the tutorial Archiving social media for beginners. Want to get started too? Together with KADOC-KU Leuven, we compile accessible guides and workflows in this practical guide (link in Dutch).