iPRES 2024 – highlights for smallish and cash-strapped organisations

Last month Kevin Bolton, a Kazky Director, attended the International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) conference in Ghent in September 2024. This blog outlines his conference highlights for smallish and cash-strapped organisations in the United Kingdom (UK) trying to implement digital preservation.

Context

The majority of our clients in the UK are generally small organisations/services and are under severe financial pressure. In some cases, they may even be volunteer led. This includes local studies libraries, community archives & heritage projects, smallish (or medium-sized) Council & University archive services, local museums and voluntary organisations & businesses wanting to do something with their archives. They usually hold collections or information in a variety of formats, including digital. However, what they lack in resources they often make up for in creativity, innovation and being embedded in their local community.

In addition, in a personal capacity, I am a Trustee of the Manchester Jewish Museum and am involved in a couple of Jewish local history projects. Whilst my business partner, Larysa Bolton, is involved in archive/museum projects with the Association of Ukrainian Women in Great Britain. On occasions, this can help provide a community or client perspective to our professional work.

The worlds of these organisations/services are completely different to the larger well-funded organisations. When we do work for larger organisations, it is often a culture shock for us to be honest – in terms of the resources they have and their structures.

At first glance, the conference programme appeared to be aimed at practitioners working in large institutions (with ££££!). However, I was pleasantly surprised that some sessions were relevant to smaller cash-strapped organisations. These included:

Archiving Social Media for Beginners

This tutorial delivered by Nastasia Vanderperren and Lode Scheers from meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives, was fantastic. I was already familiar with ArchiveWeb.page, a Chrome extension for capturing social media accounts, but they gave practical tips on how to get the best out of the tool. They also talked us through Tartube, a tool for archiving video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, which I was not familiar with. Meemoo has published manuals and workflows (see below – these appear to be in Dutch only at the time of writing, but there are plans to translate them into English). They are aimed at users with little to no IT skills to start archiving social media. I left thinking that a lot of our clients could be using these tools and guidance to archive their project websites or social media etc.

Getting Started with Digital Preservation: Practical Advice and Embracing “Good Enough”

This poster and online presentation by Marcella Lees (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) was one of the highlights of the conference for me. I loved the focus on being pragmatic and practical – particularly the use of Teracopy for copying files and external hard drives in the short term. I hope the presentation is shared more widely – the poster is available online.

Preserving digital news by partnering with newspapers and their platforms

This poster and online presentation by Karen Hanson (Portico) talked about a pilot they delivered to determine if digital news articles could be managed in a similar way that they preserve journal articles (as an alternative to web archiving). Preserving digital news is a challenge for local libraries and archives in the UK. They hold large hardcopy/microfilm newspaper collections but are generally not collecting digital news. For example, where we live, we have The Mill, a terrific newspaper which is delivered as a digital newsletter to subscribers. I know the British Library is archiving some local newspapers (?using a web archive approach), but the presentation & poster have inspired me to think about the preservation of local digital news on a project we are working on with an English local studies library around collecting priorities. Karen also highlighted The State of Digital News Preservation report by the University of Missouri which is a good read.

Filling a Void: New Digital Preservations Initiatives Around the World to Preserve and Share Vernacular and Family Photos

This online panel presentation by Bettina Fabos (Fortepan US), Claude Zurcher (NotreHistoire) and András Török (Fortepan) presented the Open Portal Archive Network whose members digitally preserve thousands of “vernacular historical photographs, audiovisual materials, and other pieces of private history.” I was aware of Historypin which has been used by heritage projects in the UK, but it was great to hear about projects in Hungary (Fortepan) and Switzerland (NotreHistoire).

I enjoyed the fact the speakers were from outside of the digital preservation community and are embedded in their local community. This community or creator voice was often missing from the conference. As Bettina outlined “These initiatives are also refreshingly innovative in terms of user experience and aesthetics, and have much to teach digital preservation communities about increasing and enlivening public engagement with historical photos.” Some type of similar portal for community heritage projects in the UK would be great (although I do really like People’s Collection Wales). I know The National Archives and others have been looking at this for community heritage as part of the Our Heritage, Our Stories project, but for me, the solutions have to come from people (like Fortepan and NotreHistoire) who genuinely understand communities and their needs – they just need the funding to make it happen.

Digital preservation in the Cloud?

This panel discussion between Eld Zierau (Royal Danish Library), Jeffrey van der Hoeven (National Library of the Netherlands), Micky Lindlar (Technische Informationsbibliothek), Andrea Goethals (National Library of New Zealand) and Steve Daly (UK National Archives) was relevant to some of our clients who are looking at Cloud storage or systems because they do not have the funding to set up the infrastructure or the expertise/funding to support and maintain it (although there are some exceptions). In general, there appeared to be no consensus and quite a lot of hesitancy about moving towards full Cloud solutions.

The UK National Archives were interesting as they use a commercial Cloud provider but also have a “custodial copy” of their records on-premise (in “cold/dark storage…vendor agnostic form”). Steve Daly also produced a good poster about this approach at the conference which may be worth sharing more widely with the museum, library and archive sectors in the UK.

Final thoughts

This was my first international conference and overall, I enjoyed it. There was learning we can incorporate into our consultancy work, and it was also good to attend some sessions that took me outside of my comfort zone. It also gave me time to think clearly about my personal development and the direction of our business. However, I also forgot how hard it is to go to a conference where you hardly know anyone!

For most smaller cash-strapped organisations the cost of attending the conference is probably prohibitive (it cost us about £1500 which is a lot for a two-person company) but they do have a good range of bursaries and the cheaper (and greener) online-only option. The fact that most of the sessions are recorded is a major benefit – I have spent the last week catching up on sessions I missed. I plan to attend the conference again in 2025 (online, it is in Wellington, New Zealand) and maybe in 2026 (Copenhagen) in person if I can justify the expense and carbon footprint!

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