For iPRES 2024, four organizations act as a core consortium: Het Facilitair Bedrijf (Digital Archive Flanders), Ghent University, VRT and meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives. We’re joining forces with more than 20 organizations in different sectors to ensure the conference is a success.
Digital Archives Flanders, a division of the Agency for Facility Operations from the Flemish Government, provides shared services for preservation, management and dissemination of government information, both records and archives. The primary services provide platforms, framework agreements, knowledge sharing and include assistance, analysis and design for specific issues. These shared services are available for all departments and agencies of the Flemish Government, cities, municipalities and other government agencies in Flanders.
At present, 104 government organizations are using the services of Digital Archives Flanders.
The role of the agency and the services are similar to that of various national archives. We actively participate in creating the legal frame- work regarding records and archive management for the region of Flanders, act as a knowledge center, manage the analog records and archives of the Flemish government and bring operations in line with regional, national and European directives or regulations.
>> Visit the Digital Archives Flanders website
Ghent University (UGent) is a pluralistic university open to all, regardless of ideological, political, cultural or social background. Our credo is ‘Dare to Think’. As a top 100 university with more than 47,000 students and 15,000 staff members, it is one of the largest universities in the Dutch language area.
IDLab performs fundamental and applied research on internet technology and data science. In the context of digital preservation, our relevant research areas are machine learning and data mining; semantic intelligence; cloud and big data infrastructures; multimedia processing. IDLab has a unique research infrastructure used in numerous national and international collaborations.
The Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (GhentCDH) engages in the field of ‘Digital Humanities’ at Ghent University, ranging from archaeology and geography to linguistics and cultural studies. It develops DH collaboration and supports research projects, teaching activities and infrastructure projects across the faculties
Ghent University Library has the mission to facilitate open knowledge creation throughout the university and our wider community.
The landmark Book Tower building holds an important heritage collection, with historic documents reaching back 2000 years. The library has a substantial digital archive in house and thousands of these volumes are available online through Google Books. Additionally, the library’s team runs the Institutional Repository with over 300,000 published research results and over 3 million downloads per year (excluding robots & automated harvesting). Ghent University Library runs a Global LOCKSS node and is a founding member of the private network SAFE-PLN.Meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives provides digitization, preservation and dissemination services to partners in Flanders. Founded in 2013 by the Flemish government, meemoo is a non-profit that has quickly grown to a key player in the field. Since that year, we have facilitated the digitization of over 500,000 analog carriers and currently safeguard over 7 million objects in our digital preservation infrastructure. Collaboration and networking are key in meemoo’s model. Meemoo does not own any collection but safeguards digital material from more than 160 partners in media, cultural heritage and government organizations.
Establishing trust is key here and we do this through a clear, open and transparent way of working, which are values that lie at the very heart of our organization.
Next to operational services, meemoo also engages in research and development: in 2019, meemoo merged with PACKED vzw. PACKED vzw started as a platform organization for preservation of media art but evolved into an expertise center for digital heritage.
>> Visit the meemoo website
VRT is the public broadcaster of the Flemish Community in Belgium and presents high-quality and distinctive content in the areas of information, culture, education, entertainment and sports. The VRT archive represents an almost entirely digitized collection from 1930 till now.