Birds of a Feather … Flock Together!

iPRES 2024 is creating some open space in the conference schedule for round-table conversations. The BoF is for people who are interested in a particular topic, find that they will all be at the same event, and want to use their co-location to explore that topic, with a view to using the collective knowledge to flesh out a big problem or seek solutions. 

We are looking forward to host the following 45’ blocks of interaction and discussion based on the main themes of the conference or the hot topics of the moment.

All BoF sessions will be hosted in a dedicated room in the main Bijloke venue on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.

#55  How do you preserve 50 billion photos?

Alex Chan (Flickr Foundation); George Oates (Flickr Foundation)

Flickr has more than 50 billion photos, a vast and growing collection beginning at the first days of photography and continuing to just moments ago. But as we’ve seen, social media platforms can go dark or disappear at short notice, and take with them unique and enormous slices of our cultural heritage. Can we do better?

#175  "Dialogues with the Past: Leveraging Conversational AI in Archives"

Karim Dahdah (VRT); Chaja Libot (VRT)

Archives are treasure troves of historical and cultural information, but they are often inaccessible or unappealing to the general public. How can we use conversational AI to create engaging and immersive experiences that bring the past to life? How can we design narratives that are faithful to the archival sources, but also adaptable to the interests and needs of the users? How can we leverage the rich audiovisual material in the archives, without resorting to long and boring texts?

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

András Török (Fortepan), Bettina  Fabos (Fortepan US), Claude Zurcher (NotreHistoire)

In the past decade, numerous independent initiatives have organically sprung up to preserve the photos from family collections and partners in ten different countries:  Austria (Topotheque), Chile (Enterrano), Estonia (Ajapaik), Hungary (Fortepan), Israel (Dokuforte), Malta (MagnaZmien), Romania (Azopan), Russia (Pastvu), Switzerland (NotreHistoire), and USA (Fortepan US) have created OPAN–the Open Portal Archive Network.
Open discussion with people interested in archival platforms, photo preservation, community engagement with archival photos and historical documents, public history, vernacular photos, the Creative Commons, and web development. We are interested in sharing a number of sophisticated new tools that help people engage in archival photographs and explore local history.

#110  Oops! If only...

YANNICK GRANDCOLAS; Paul Stokes

Karen Colbron (Jisc)

There's been an Oops. Big or small. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that, with the benefit of hindsight, it could have been avoided. And to make it worse, someone just shared the immortal line “I could have told you that would happen.” This discussion is intended to surface as many of those “Oops! If only…” scenarios as possible, and then let the participants decide which of these are the most important to be aware of for those “Starting 2 Preserve”.

#91  From creation to conversation. How to best support records creators.

Mariet Calsius (CEMPER); Elias Feys; Guido Jansen (Podiumkunst.net); Justine Van Gysel (CEMPER); Monique in het Veld (Podiumkunst.net)

WITHDRAWN

#301  Gettin' SIG-y with it: a JHOVE Special Interest Group to enhance documentation and explain error messages

Julie Allen (OPF); Micky Lindlar; Georgia Moppett; Marin Rappard (National Archives of the Netherlands); Lotte Wijsman; Remco van Veenendaal (National Archives of the Netherlands)

This BoF session aims to involve everyone from the community that works with tools or wants to incorporate them into their work. There is room for the more technically inclined individuals, but we are also very aware of involving the people newer to the field/JHOVE and gauging their needs for the Special Interest Group.

#200  “Shared Services” for Values-driven, Community-supported Digital Preservation

Ryan Menefee; Jessica Meyerson (Educopia); Courtney Mumma; Sibyl Schaefer (University of California, San Diego); Nathan Tallman; Lydia Tang (lyrasis); Alicia Wise (CLOCKSS)

Community-supported, values-driven digital preservation services operate in a landscape where the increasing economic, labor, and climate challenges are too big for any one organization to tackle alone. The Educopia Institute and members of the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative want to reaffirm the need for—and to establish a shared vision for—the sustained viability of values-driven, community-supported approaches to distributed digital preservation (DDP).

#273  Emulation Beyond Borders: How Can We Sustain and Scale Emulation and Software Preservation?

Brenna Edwards (Manager for Digital Archives - Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas USA); Claire Fox (Digital Preservation Librarian, Yale University, New Haven, CT USA); Ethan Gates (Software Preservation Analyst, Yale University, New Haven, CT USA); Wendy Hagenmaier (Software Preservation Program Manager - Yale University Library, New Haven, CT USA); Jessica Meyerson (Co-Director, Educopia Institute / Interim Co-Facilitator, Software Preservation Network, USA); Oleg Stobbe (CEO - OpenSLX, Freiburg, Germany); Wendy Chu (Clinical Instructor, Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic)

This interactive session will bring conference participants together to discuss how we can collaborate across institutional and geographic borders to sustain and scale more equitable engagement with emulation and software preservation. Anyone curious about emulation or preserving access to software or born-digital collections is welcome and encouraged to participate. The emerging EaaSI Research Alliance—an international community of libraries, archives, and museums using the Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) software—offers a promising opportunity to bolster international cooperation and expand adoption of emulation as a method of preserving access to software and software-dependent collections. In this session, representatives from the Alliance and the Software Preservation Network will facilitate in-person and remote participants through a series of gently structured conversations designed to foster connections and make space for everyone to contribute.

#259  Surmounting the barriers to social media archiving with a little help from my friends

Zefi Kávvadia (International Institute of Social History)

Friedel Geeraert (KBR); Ellen Van Keer (meemoo); Katrien Weyns (KADOC KU Leuven)

We aim to engage a diverse group of representative stakeholders, including digital archivists from academic institutions, information managers from government bodies, and professionals from (private) cultural heritage organizations, as well as researchers, legal experts, and technologists. Interested participants from all over the world and every competency level are welcome to engage and share experiences and solutions and/or bring creativity to the table to brainstorm together. Examples of relevant social media platforms are X (Twitter), Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, Wechat, Instagram, Flickr and TikTok.

#294  The next big thing

Karen Colbron (Jisc); Paul Stokes

There’s always something new on the horizon. A new “next big thing”. Some whither and die quite rapidly, but some… Some go on to have a significant impact on the digital preservation community. We’d like to propose a bit of horizon scanning to identify ‘the next big thing’ (or things) and how it (they) might affect the digital preservation community, and what we as a community should be doing about it.

#62  Reach Out I’ll Be There – The Challenges of Working in Digital Preservation and the Impact on Practitioner Mental Health and Wellbeing

Sharon McMeekin (Digital Preservation Coalition); Elizabeth England (NARA)

The Digital Preservation Coalition’s community survey on mental health and wellbeing has illuminated a number of worrying trends. These include 70% of respondents having to work to unrealistic expectations, 63% feeling overwhelmed by the advocacy burden of digital preservation, and 58% feeling unsupported in their work. Linked to these problems and more, 88% reported work related stress, 69% anxiety, 67% fatigue, and 59% burnout, as well as a range of other issues. In this session, to be held under Chatham House Rule, iPRES attendees are invited to discuss the issues we are experiencing as a profession and how we might take steps to address them.

#183  Passing the Baton: discussing the future of the Digital Preservation Storage Criteria

Andrea Goethals (National Library of New Zealand); Jane Mandelbaum; Nancy McGovern (Global Archivist LLC); Sibyl Schaefer (University of California, San Diego); Cynthia Wu (National Library of New Zealand); Eld Zierau (Royal Danish Library)

 The Digital Preservation Storage Criteria Committee has worked on creating and refining the DP Storage Criteria for almost a decade. As members have rotated off and the remaining members face increasing time constraints, we recognize that we need to broaden our approach to stewardship of the Criteria and work with new partners who can help with ongoing revisions and maintenance. But who will best help steer the boat?  Come discuss the possibilities with us and help influence the DP Storage Criteria's future!

#315  Ontologies in the real world: How to make things happen?

Koen Renders (VRT); Miel Vandersande (meemoo)

Astrid Vergauwe (meemoo)

This discussion is tailored for professionals, practitioners, and scholars engaged in the fields of broadcasting, heritage preservation, archival science, and digital curation. Whether you're a seasoned archivist grappling with the digital transformation of heritage materials or a broadcasting executive navigating the complexities of metadata management, this panel offers valuable insights and practical strategies for leveraging ontologies in your respective domains. Basic knowledge about ontologies, knowledge graphs and semantic web are advised in participating in this discussion.

#283  Proactive Digital Preservation at all points in the Chain of Custody

Panagiotis Papageorgiou (University of Portsmouth); Brett Stevens (University of Portsmouth); Claire Bailey-Ross (University of Portsmouth); Tarek Teba (University of Portsmouth)

WITHDRAWN

#244  Francophonie ! Digital Preservation with a French Touch

YANNICK GRANDCOLAS (BnF)

Célia CABANE (BnF)

The "birds of a feather" session presents a singular opportunity to convene the Francophone digital preservation community for face-to-face discussions. This gathering will enable participants to share experiences, address challenges, and exchange best practices in an environment conducive to collaboration and idea-sharing. By bringing together Francophone experts and practitioners in digital preservation, this session aims to strengthen community bonds and identify innovative solutions to overcome linguistic and technical barriers.

#286  PREMIS Digital Preservation Metadata Birds of a Feather

Karin Bredenberg (Kommunalförbundet Sydarkivera); Leslie Johnston (U. S. National Archives and Records Administration); Micky Lindlar; Tracy Meehleib (Library of Congress); Jack O'Sullivan; Eld Zierau (Royal Danish Library)

This BOF conversation will benefit individuals and institutions interested in implementing PREMIS metadata for the long-term management and preservation of their digital information, for both experienced implementers and those who have limited experience in implementation. Participants can be cultural heritage professionals, researchers, technology developers, professional educators, and anyone else involved in management and preservation of digital resources. For a fruitful discussion it is best to have a mixture of familiarity so new users can learn from existing users and vice versa, through a conversation facilitated by PREMIS EC members.

#312  What delineates a Digital Preservation solution?

Karen Colbron (Jisc); Paul Stokes

We at Jisc have recently had the need to specify a base set of requirements for our newly launched Digital Preservation DPS (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/digital-preservation-systems-dynamic-purchasing-system-dps). This core set of requirements was based upon the requirements in the DPC’s procurement toolkit (https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/implement-digipres/core-requirements-for-a-digital-preservation-system). In the course of our discussions, when identifying the requirements, the question of a definition of a digital preservation solution arose. We're interested in the communities take on this. Many people have strong opinions around definitions. This BoF session would be your chance to surface your opinion and “persuade” others to adopt your point of view.