Panel discussions

Curious about different perspectives on issues such as challenges or emerging trends within digital preservation? Engage in conversation during a panel discussion. Panels bring together complementary or conflicting perspectives on a topic of importance to digital preservation.

#56  Digital preservation in the cloud?

Eld Zierau (Royal Danish Library); Jeffrey van der Hoeven

With cloud-based storage architectures and cloud-based preservation management services, the spectrum of how things are kept safe has become more diverse than ever. This panel consists of representatives from organisations or projects researching and evaluating preservation solutions or using commercial solutions either on-premise or in the cloud. The discussion will focus on the cloud questions independent of commercial solutions used by the organisations.

#61  “You oughta be in pictures”: Insights to Digital Moving Image Preservation from the BFI, EYE, and LOC

Laura Drake Davis (Library of Congress); Anne Gant (Eye Filmmuseum); Lucy Wales (British Film Institute National Archive)

Panel participants will share current workflows for moving image content, including use of scripted workflows, open source tools, specialized hardware, and a combination of approaches to ensure the preservation of our moving image heritage. The discussion will also include formats and the necessity to be flexible on accepted formats while retaining a focus long-term preservation. Participants will also discuss current challenges working with high volumes of content, and the increasingly large digital moving image files and file sets, as well as the entertainment industry’s drive to produce higher quality content and the impact on cultural heritage institution resources. Participants will have time to ask questions and engage in meaningful discussion with the panel members.

#89  Save As: The past, present and future of post-custodial approaches to community generated, community owned digital content

Lorna Hughes (University of Glasgow); William Kilbride (Digital Preservation Coalition); Valerie Love; Sonia Ranade (The National Archives UK); Karyn Williamson; Rebecca Barnott-Clement (Art Gallery New South Wales); Ruby Martinez (UIUC)

In a dramatic intervention in 2022, Tamar Evangelista Dougherty challenged iPres to recognize community leaders as legitimate and necessary collaborators in digital preservation. That call was given fresh impetus in 2023 by Sherry Williams and Ricky Punzalan who further articulated the barriers and benefits of community-engaged preservation. This panel progresses that discussion through the lens of ‘post-custodial’ approaches to digital preservation for ‘community-generated digital content’, i.e. efforts that empower community centered data creators to preserve their own content when traditional memory institutions are not available or appropriate. This lively panel will introduce and review post-custodial models of digital preservation and set them in a global perspective. It will provoke comment from practitioners from different contexts, including from Aotearoa / New Zealand where data sovereignty principles have been impactful in the protection of land, culture and knowledge.

#97  Changing the way e-books are created and published to increase preservability and preservation

Neil Jefferies (University of Oxford); James Philpotts (Oxford University Press); Alicia Wise (CLOCKSS) 

In this panel discussion, we will share the experiences and outputs from a working group of libraries, publishers, and intermediaries convened by CLOCKSS in 2023. The group identified several barriers that prevent more books from being deposited in digital archives. We then focused on finding or building ways to overcome these challenges, engaging a wide array of key stakeholders along the way. We'll have a mixed panel of librarians, preservationists, publishers, and intermediaries to share why they got engaged and what worked and didn't. There were some fascinating learning points for all, made possible by listening and engaging respectfully from a wide variety of perspectives.

#142  Everybody in the TARDIS (Teams of Archival Research Data Information Specialists): Collaborative Efforts to Save Historical Data

Bethany Anderson (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Sandi Caldrone (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Shannon Farrell (University of Minnesota); Sarah Fox (Edge Hill University); Poppy Townsend (Centre for Environmental Data Analysis); Mikala Narlock

Discovering usable, historical data in an archives can feel as delightful and magical as the best episodes of Doctor Who. It can also be as tedious and frustrating as the worst episodes, but like all good science fiction, even the worst bits pose illuminating questions. How do current concepts of data and scholarship compare to historical ones? How do we find data that wasn’t labeled as data? How do we find data that wasn’t thought of as data? Once we find archival data, how do we transform it for reuse and analysis? What can historical data teach us about current best practices for documentation and vice versa? This panel discussion will bring together archivists, librarians, and data service specialists to share their experiences finding, stewarding, and using data in archives - the successes, frustrations, discoveries, pitfalls, and unanswered questions.