Tutorials

Tutorials are 1,5h deep dives into an area of expertise you want to learn more about.

Tuesday September 17th

#37  Preserving data and documents with the Vitam software

Marion Ville (Vitam Program); Alice Grippon (Ministère de la Culture)

The Program Vitam is a French cross-ministerial project, whose main goal is to develop an open source recordkeeping software (back-office and front-office). The project has been drawn up since 2011 and organized using an innovative approach in France, for archives and recordkeeping sectors, but also for public services in general, involving records managers, archivists and IT professionals. In addition to its funding ministries (Culture, Foreign Affairs, Defense), it now has more than seventy partners from the public and the private sectors. In spring 2024, the Vitam 7.1 will be released.

During this tutorial, the Vitam team will present the organization of the program, and give an overview of the concepts, functionalities and roadmap of the Vitam software. There will also be a hands-on exercises, allowing attendees to familiarize themselves with the Vitam software, from records acquisition to access, archives lifecycle management and preservation.

#41  Archiving social media for beginners

Lode Scheers (meemoo, Flemish institute for archives); Nastasia Vanderperren (meemoo, Flemish institute for archives)

Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. Moreover, social media play a very important role in communicating about various social topics and do so by a wide range of actors. As such, the channels serve as a valuable source for (scientific) research, but, because of the volatile nature of the content, they are still rarely archived.

We collaborated with KADOC-KU Leuven in the project Best Practices for the Archiving of Social Media in Flanders and Brussels, to research how to capture and archive this specific online information and make it future-proof. During the project, we tested a large number of tools, developed workflows and wrote manuals for archiving social media, and published them on our knowledge base. The manuals are written to facilitate users with little to no IT skills to start archiving social media with different tools.

This hands-on tutorial aims to give the participants an easy way to start archiving social media accounts. The tools introduced during the workshop are selected to be user-friendly and will be jointly configured and used to capture social media content during the workshop.

Thursday September 19th

#66  From Floppy to Future: Converting Legacy Media into Digital Archives

Jelle Kleevens (Archiefpunt / AIDA); Lode Scheers (meemoo, Flemish institute for archives); Nastasia Vanderperren (meemoo, Flemish institute for archives)

This is a tutorial by AIDA, a consortium of heritage institutions focused on preserving and providing access to digital private archives. Through collaboration and resource sharing, AIDA develops strategies and solutions for this purpose. Since the rise of personal computers in the 1980s, vast amounts of data have been stored on digital media like floppy disks, zip disks, and jaz disks. Modern workstations often cannot read them. This threatens data loss for every heritage organisation, from national archives to local historical societies. In this tutorial, we will illustrate how to retrieve data from outdated digital media and package it into SIPs. We encourage active participation by having the audience bring their legacy media to retrieve and package data into a SIP alongside us.

#133  Analyzing Large Web Archive Collections Using Parquet Files

Sawood Alam (Internet Archive); Mark Phillips (University of North Texas)

With the increase of archived web resources, additional methods of analyzing large amounts of data are needed to understand the complexity of these collections and help make accurate preservation decisions about the content. The Parquet format is an open source, column-oriented data file format designed for efficient data storage and retrieval. It excels in the storage of tabular data with repeated values that are often queried to identify counts, sums, and unique sets of values.

To demonstrate the potential for Parquet files to be used in analyzing web archives, we will use the End of Term (EOT) Web Archive as a data testbed for this tutorial. In this tutorial we will bring a hands-on experience for the participants to analyze a substantial web archive collection. The tutorial will include introduction to some existing archival collection summarization tools like CDX Summary and Archived Unleashed Toolkit, the process of converting CDX(J) files to Parquet files, numerous SQL queries to analyze those Parquet files for practical and common use-cases, and visualization of generated reports.