Back in September, I got to go iPRES 2024, my first iPRES since taking on my current, more research-oriented role. iPRES is the biggest conference dedicated to digital preservation, so it was a great opportunity to run a workshop to get feedback on the Registries of Good Practice project and launch the Digital Preservation Workbench. I was also down to demonstrate some specific aspects of the workbench as part of the Great Preservation Bake-off, and to chair one of the sessions. Neither of which I’d done before.
I was also nervous about some of the social aspects of attending the conference. Making the most of the time with people here, building up new relationships and re-connecting to this community, while now also representing the Digital Preservation Coalition. This all requires a level of switched-on sociability that does not come easily to me. While there are occasional exceptions, I generally find building such connections to be hard work. I mean, it’s lovely, and I enjoy it, but it’s exhausting!
iPRES is also a chance to leave a permanent record. Not only in the form of the published papers, but also the recordings of the live-streamed sessions, which help open up the more fluid parts of the program like panels, lightning talks and demonstrations.
Which sounds great until you realise that, inevitably, some loose-lipped live glitch is bound to trip off your tongue, leak out of the flow of the moment, beyond the room and be caught, to live on in those persisted streams. I hadn’t really grasped this before, but in contrast to things like IIPC and the DPC Unconference, because of it’s size and outputs, iPRES is much more of a performance. It can feel less like a safe and brave space, more like a highwire act.
All I had to do was get to the other side, without falling or failing too hard.
Monday (16th) #
One of the advantages of arriving the Sunday, beside being fresh-faced for formal functions, was the chance to take advantage of the time and place and go for a dawn run along the river.
One of the disadvantages of arriving the day before was the irresistible temptation of an evening descent into the basement of the excellent Trollekelder. The draw of the draft was strong and the night ended late, which was fine apart from a residual queasy feeling at the end of the morning run. Fortunately, those queasy feelings did not linger, whereas attending the Trollekelder would become a repeating motif of the week.
I had deliberately aimed my run along the river, to the conference venue and back, so I’d know what to expect later in the day (and because it’s hard to get lost when you’re following a river!). But I hadn’t actually managed to approach the venue itself. I wasn’t disappointed.
I particularly appreciated the large, quiet park in front of the venue. A calm green space, bound beneath a week of brilliant blue skies. A peaceful place to sit, to eat, to gather, or to retreat from the clamour of the conference.
My biggest official commitment was on the first day of iPRES, in the form of our two-hour project workshop: Digital Preservation Registries: What We Have & What We Need. The first hour was based on the idea of using the Digital Preservation Publications Index to put iPRES 2024 in context, and the second was based on exploring the Digital Preservation Workbench. We also experimented with using this ‘Padlet’ as a way of gathering feedback, which was a trick I picked up from an excellent presentation at the Dublin DPC Unconference, and it did the job nicely.
The event seemed to go well, and we got some useful feedback. This included a story about how one attendee had used the current format registry aggregator to determine the fate of some pesky .par files, which provided helpful input for the next part of the project. The back-and-forth between my co-presenter Paul Wheatley and I also seemed to work well, using an extended analogy between format identification resources and bird-watching books to explore why so many different approaches are needed. We re-ran that part of the workshop for a DPC event: #DPClinic September – Registries of Good Practice. The recording is available to DPC members via that link, if you’d like to see it.
I also used this conference to experiment with a new approach to public speaking. At the end of the session, I wanted to speak about some of the challenges I’d experienced when it comes to valuing and supporting born-digital history, leading up to a call for people to share the hidden gems of their digital collections. No slides, no script, just a handful of beats I wanted to hit, and a vague desire to try to speak from the heart and the head at once. Before the event, I softly practiced my path from beat to beat, letting it take a different shape on each iteration. Then I let some version of it out on the day. I can’t remember exactly what I said (I rarely can!), and I don’t know if the feeling came through to the room, but it felt good to me. It felt like me.
Actually gathering the hidden gems turned out to be more challenging! Quite a lot of compelling examples came up, but raised in hushed tones. In every case, these were fascinating stories of important digital artifacts but their importance, combined with the challenges involved, meant few were ready to trumpet their success from the rooftops. I still think the Hidden Gems idea has potential, but it’s a longer road that I’d anticipated.
Of course, one of the problems with a big conference like iPRES is the FOMO. There’s always so much good stuff going on, and you can’t be everywhere. Choices must be made, and so reports like this one can only ever be partial slivers of the conference experience. Even having gone back and revisited the papers and recorded streams in the time since then, I can’t get to everything.
Even on this first day, with no parallel streams, the lumpen reality of space meant I couldn’t make it to the other conference site and take part in the workshop on Working on a Budget with WANG disks and other obscure formats, led by three of my favourite people in the whole world of digital preservation: @makethecatwise, @Thorsted and @archivist_Liz.
I know I wasn’t the only one frustrated by the constraints of time and geography. I’m glad Tyler wrote up how it went, so we don’t miss out entirely.
After a bit of a break, I dropped in on the Start 2 Preserve: Creating a Skills Development Resource workshop. As well as catching up with the folks there, this was also a chance to see how the low-maintenance website system I’d created for it was working. You can read how that went at the end of that blog post.
I then switched into slightly more formal attire and executed some mild ushing, encouraging folks to attend the ceremony to celebrate the winners of the 2024 DPC Awards. That all seemed to go very smoothly. In particular, the tech team at the venue did an great job during the awards, and indeed were excellent throughout the conference.
Duties over, I was very happy to walk up to the social dinner hosted by the Open Preservation Foundation. It was nice to catch up with them, the food was good (stew and fries, naturally!), and the company was excellent.
One day down. The nervous first few steps over. The tightrope taught, but stable. So far so good.
Tuesday (17th) #
A more leisurely morning, kicking off with a pre-conference catch-up to talk about the Future Nostalgia project, where the DPC is playing a supporting role. We then headed into the keynote presentation: “Atlas of Lost Finds” by Claire Warnier (Info, Stream, Teaser).
A quick note about the archived videos from iPRES 2024. Firstly, the streams cover whole sessions, so each one usually contains multiple presentations.
Secondly, the conference committee have taken care to ensure the videos are hosted on an institutional platform committed to long-term care, the Flanders Archives, hosted by the Flemish Goverment. This is a good thing, but it does mean that it doens’t behave quite how you might expect when you are used to things like YouTube.
After you hit the view (Document raadplegen) or download (Document downloaden) buttons, you then need to click a statement to accept the terms. Then, crucially, be patient! It seems to take a while for the videos to appear, but they do come eventually. (The view mode doesn’t seem reliable in Firefox, but that might just be me.)
To be honest, my feelings about this keynote are mixed. The Atlas of Lost Finds Project is undoubtedly brilliant. An inspirational story of using 3D scanning technology to preserve and even help recreate important objects. The keynote touched on many issues that are important to digital preservation. But it was fundamentally a story about the immediate value and uses of digitisation. The final leap, connecting this compelling story to the conference’s defining essence, never came.
The audience was hungry for it, as it immediately came up in the Q&A. It proved difficult to rapidly bridge the gap, so perhaps this was a miscommunication, but my sense was that the project team hadn’t seen anything to worry about. The works were under open licenses. The formats were familiar. The files were safely stored on the cloud, thanks to Sketchfab.
Ironically, a month later, we heard that files hosted on Sketchfab are now at risk, because it’s been bought up by EPIC Games. If such close kin are exposed to such a familiar risk, it underlines just how much work remains to be done.
At this point, I have to make a confession. I was worried about being tired after two late nights and early mornings, and was stressed about the session I was chairing. Sure, I was dressed for the occasion, but what was I going to say? Just how badly would I mangle those unfamiliar names?! I was worried I wouldn’t have the energy to stay on the ball, so I decided to skip a session and find a quiet spot to rest a while.
Which means I missed the session on Implications of Cloud Adoption for Digital Preservation which included a presentation (File Fixity in the Cloud: Policy, Business, and Technical Considerations) followed by a panel (Digital preservation in the cloud?). I’d seen an earlier iteration of the presentation by the co-author, Gen Schmitt, at the DPC Unconference, and it was brilliant. Exactly the kind of gnarly detail and iterative learning that we need to cope with the shift towards the cloud. The panel session was excellent, and anyone who is interested in digital preservation in the cloud should take the time to watch it.
It’s also worth noting that there is an extremely relevant poster on cloudy preservation called A decoupled Custodial Copy for cloud-based Digital Preservation Systems, which provides more information about some of the ideas that came up during the panel.
Hoping I was suitably recuperated and ready to chair, I grabbed some lunch and headed to make the final preparations for the session I was leading. The competition was strong, particularly from the excellent It could happen to you: Thirty years of digital preservation in an ever-changing organization paper in the parallel Sustaining a Digital Preservation Service over Time session. But surely none could match the two brilliant papers being presented in Preserving the Context that Brings Bytes to Life!
As I was crossing the foyer, an old friend from the web archiving world came up congratulated me on my BBC interview. What BBC interview? He said something about it being a decent article, although some of what I’d said seemed a little harsh.
The line goes slack.
I’d forgotten that, weeks earlier, I’d spoken to a journalist writing for the BBC about digital history, web archives and cyberattacks. I’ve often been frustrated that the mainstream press shows very little interest in born-digital history, so when the opportunity arose, I leapt at the chance. But I’ve done very little press work before, and it’s a topic that traces tender scars. Perhaps I was a little too candid. Perhaps. But I’m pretty sure the editorial process shaved off every last ounce of nuance. In particular, one of the quotes in the article implies that I think none of the institutional web archives are doing a decent job, which is not true.
Now, in retrospect, I think the article is probably… fine. I mean, wrong, but fine in the sense that at least they are talking about it. A couple of folks I trust have read We’re losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it? and think it’s not that bad. The DPC team have been very supportive; it seemed like everyone had a horror story about a difficult situation with a journalist! There has been at least one new interview request to the DPC from a different journalist interested in the same topic and who found us via that article, which is positive. I can’t be sure that I haven’t offended anyone that I care about having offended, but so far it hasn’t caused any notable tensions or led to any formal complaints.
But at the time there was no time. No time to properly parse what it said they said I said. No time to predict the possible consequences, or consider the moves needed to intercept them.
Wobble is a graceless word, but maybe that’s what makes it the best one for what this was. A wobble.
The trembling line slips sideways. No time to give in to the falling feeling. Pack the worries away for later. Let the adrenaline take over. Let it take control.
On with the show.
I’ve not dared watch the session stream back. I feel like I was barely there, but judging by the feedback, I think it was also… probably… fine. I’m very grateful for the support I got from my co-chair, Steven Gentry, and for the quality of the two presentations: Macintosh Type/Creator Codes: Improving identification of files from MacOS Classic, and Preserving Users’ Knowledge of Contemporary and Legacy Computer Systems (which later won the Angela Dappert Memorial 2024 conference prize). Those papers are the reason I wanted to chair that session, as they both represent the kind of deep and delicious detail that is crucial to digital preservation, and that you’d likely never find at any other conference. I’m also glad I had the chance to declare Klaus Rechert the King of iPRES, as my research had shown that he has the highest publication count of any conference attendee.
Later, I noticed that the other conference chairs did not insist on bounding up to the lectern to introduce the speakers. They just sat calmly in their chairing chairs, letting the venue techs cut to the right cameras at the right times. Quite how my frenzied energy came across in the recording, I don’t know. I’ll check it one day. Maybe. When the distance is enough that re-living those moments won’t make my soul twist and fold like a Möbius strip before imploding in a singularity of unalloyed cringe.
I take a moment or two to ensure the presenters and co-chair are thanked, and that there a no loose ends to be tied off. Once all is done, I head out of the auditorium, into the thundering hubbub of the crowded coffee foyer. Alone at last.
Bizarrely alone. iPRES is a big conference, but I can usually find a friendly face in any room. But not in this moment. I’m suddenly reminded that iPRES is not just a shared space. It’s also a collection of edges drawn from neighbouring spaces. A kind of Venn diagram of interdisciplinary overlaps.
I go from knowing I’m alone to feeling it. Lost in a sea of white noise and blank looks.
Sometimes, it’s easier to keep your balance if you keep moving.
I push myself through the crowded space, out of the entranceway, and back into the quiet sunshine. Time to take a walk. To let myself calm down and recover. To hope I’ll find comfort in a glance of cobalt brilliance.
During the coffee break, I manage to catch up with William, so he was at least informed about the article ahead of any incoming complaints. One quick, reassuring conversation and it feels like everything is under control. With a calmer mind and a rough plan in place, I can head into the Applying Digital Preservation Best Practice in New Contexts session.
I initially chose this session because I wanted to see and support one of my Yale project colleagues as they presented Using Digital Documents to Preserve Emulation: Lessons Learned from Compiling a 30-Year Emulation Bibliography. I think the Emulation Bibliography Ethan maintains is an awesome resource, and it led me to prioritise integrating Zotero collections as facets of the Digital Preservation Publications Index in the future. And with Future Nostalgia in mind, I appreciated hearing a story of data rescue from sticky disks: The Floppy Disks in the Garage: physical preservation conditions and digital media.
I also really enjoyed the detailed analyses presented in Evaluation of Research Data File Errors - First Results and An exploration of the Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file format. The latter highlighted how ‘obsolescence’ is a poor way of framing the practical issues that prevent access, and how IT security issues can block legitimate interventions. It also underlined the importance of open source software support for older formats.
From the parallel Adapting Digital Preservation Systems to Evolving Needs session, I was particularly impressed by Managing the continuous growth of a repository for over 14 years: Problems and Solutions for an Ever Expanding Open Archival Information System by Thomas Ledoux from the National Library of France. The paper contains lots of practically useful lessons learned from managing a large digital preservation system over many years.
A dash of milling about, and then we join the joint walk up to the Handelsbeurs concert hall for the official conference reception. Welcome speeches, thanks and toasts, glasses to raise, Hors d’oeuvres to harvest, and nerdy merch to raid from vendor stalls. A chance to break the ice on wintered networks and break bread with nascent allies.
At first, the BBC article was still on my mind. Particularly the possibility that it might cause some kind of problem with any of the DPC members that have web archiving programmes. So when one of the folks that works at one of those places made a joke about the interview, I took it very badly! Fortunately, a kind soul noticed my discomfort and helped clarify that it was a dryly delivered jest rather than a barb.
Before long, the fine company had washed the worries away.
However, man cannot live on canapes alone. So before calling it a night, I caught up with colleagues already busy amusing the bouche with another famous Belgian delicacy.
Wednesday (18th) #
No morning run, no pre-conference meeting, so no need to rush about. I could take my time on the walk down the river. Take in some of the sights Ghent had to offer.
Suitably inspired, I made my way to the second iPRES 2024 keynote, “Former Farmer Chases Traces” by Herbert Van de Sompel (Info, Slides, Stream, Teaser).
I really enjoyed this presentation. A retrospective of a lifetime leaving digital traces behind, and then trying to gather them together again. Personal, professional and political facets of digital preservation carefully laid out and interlinked. I also appreciated the exploration of how we might be able to empower individuals to gather their own archival slivers, working with them to co-design the tools, practices and protocols we all need. It reminded me of the work I’d tried to do at the UK Web Archive, sharing practices across institutions, individuals and vendors by investing in open source tools and openly available documentation.
Of course, I was also very happy to be thanked for developing the approach the Hiberlink team used to depict link rot and content drift over time.
If anyone wants to dig deeper, my original analysis is available at Ten years of the UK web archive: what have we saved? - UK Web Archive blog and the source code for the analysis still online at ukwa/halflife. Whether it still runs is another matter.
For the next session I headed to the Architecture of Digital Preservation Systems. I thought Simplify to Amplify: Rearchitecting for Preservation in the Cloud and Cloudy Data With a Chance of Transfer: Towards SharePoint Transfer at UK Parliament were particularly well spun yarns on cloudy matters. I loved hearing How the National Library of Norway established autonomous product team organisation, which I think might turn out to be just as important and influential as the deservedly well-received ‘Scaling up’ knowledge of Digital Preservation Risk: From Concept to Reference Model and Risk Assessment with CHARM.
The parallel New and Innovative Technologies in Digital Preservation session was also very good. I particularly liked A common SIP specification for shared digital preservation infrastructure and METS-bag-checker: developing my first python tool to validate METS packages , both of which demonstrate how carefully-designed standards and protocols can massively ease the integration of disparate systems in the hands of capable and empowered practitioners.
At last, my final formal conference commitment.
Laptop hooked up. Apron donned. Wooden spoon in hand. I was ready for the Great Preservation Bake-Off: Dessert (File Format and Other Identification, Characterization, Validation). I’ve not done a live demonstration before, and the nine minutes allocated to Understanding your collections with the DigiPres Workbench rushed by. I think I spoke too quickly, but I think it went… fine. I wasn’t even totally 100% completely thrown by having to refuse a phone call while flailing in the middle of the partially practiced patter.
I enjoyed all the other demonstrations, but I particularly liked the DROID Bake-off demo by Steve Daly. Not only did I learn a few things about DROID’s latest features, I also picked up some handy tricks for working on Windows!
From the parallel world of Evolving Preservation Strategies by Continuous Learning and Adaptation I also loved The BnF data-driven policy for legal deposit of born-digital sound and Utilizing workflows as roadmaps in new digital preservation programs. The former echoed my own experiences from indexing the UK Web Archive and how we needed to iterate and experiment in order to understand the collection, so that policy and possibility could reflect and influence each other. The latter presentation complimented this nicely, by showing how clever forms of documentation can act as a precise communication medium that supports teams as they refine their requirements in the light of reality.
Another parallel world revolved around some of my Yale project partners, in the form of a ‘birds of a feather’ event called Emulation Beyond Borders: How Can We Sustain and Scale Emulation and Software Preservation?. I wasn’t able to join, due to being in the Bake Off and because I have not yet gained the ability to travel through time or span multiverses. So I joined them for a drink afterwards instead. They are a lovely bunch of folks, and it was great to spend time with them face to face rather than over Zoom.
The only downside was that attending this meet-up introduced a concurrent collision in the social calendar, meaning that I skipped the boat trip to the conference dinner. But in a pleasing coincidence, I happened to cross the right bridge at the right time to give the tour boats a wave before joining them as as they stepped off the boat and into the Vooruit Arts Center.
The Vooruit concert hall was a lovely space to mingle in, with two levels to wander between and a massive illuminated #iPRES 2024 sign at the back (which Bertrand Caron has used to great effect in the banner for the current version of his website).
Also, the bar was free. And the queues were short.
The entertainment, Die Verdammte Spielerei, was strangely delightful and delightfully strange. So much so that that any further attempt to describe the experience would seem to diminish it. So I won’t.
There was no sit-down meal, but food eventually appeared. Waiting staff rotated the room, laden with loaded platters. More Hors d’oeuvre to be intercepted. Dainty plates of lone Cannelloni sought and kindly purloined. There are no strangers in sight now, just like-minded souls revelling in the opportunity to form stronger bonds. The tinnitus of second thoughts quietens. The self-doubt dares recede. I relax, and merge with the mesh of lives interlinked, interlinked.
And for a while, I’m sure footed. Stepping lightly, connecting and reconnecting. Finding light in every face, whether long-known or suddenly familiar.
And for a while, I’m gliding the line. Shifting weight with every step, unconsciously and unselfconsciously sensing the rhythms and reciprocations. The chit-chat flows, flexing between waters shallow and deep. Banter bats back and forth, the words served perfectly; both warm and sharp at once.
And for a while, footsteps and feedback anticipate and echo in shimmering equilibrium.
Eventually, inevitably, it ends. I’ve grown mind tired and word clumsy. The rest of the room is doing fine, but with a sinking feeling, I find my heart’s not in it any more.
Cut to me standing outside, alone, lost in a strange city. My phone is dead, my spare battery lying uselessly on the table in the room of the hotel I can’t locate. Along with my glasses. I only have my sunglasses with me and it’s dark, rendering anything much further than my fingertips either too blurred or too dim to see. Stomach sunk, I feel foolish. And old.
Mislead by memory and confused by the crossings and curves of the river, I head off in the wrong direction. My mistaken route keeps on failing to become more familiar.
After a while some calm sense kicks in. Even when the waterways have confounded me, it should not be possible to get lost in a city where so many majestic buildings signpost its heart! I redirect myself towards the lights of Saint Bavo’s cathedral, and almost instantly find myself falling into step with a handful of DPC folks who’d left earlier in the evening to find more substantial sustenance.
Hotel found. Safe and sound. Well, safe, at least.
Stillness (3am) #
Digital preservation is all about the effort it takes to keep things the same. The energy it takes to keep entropy at bay. Fixity. Stillness.
My pinball brain scatters around the quiet of night, and I find myself Googling for clues as to how we learn to balance our selves. Forget the acrobatics of a tightrope act. How does walking work? Do we even understand how we stand?
“The requirement for an anticipatory controller suggests a level of sophistication that is greater than the simple mechanical/reflex ideas that have been commonly proposed.”
So even standing still remains mysterious! But from what we do know, it seems to require constant unconscious anticipation and adjustment. We’re just used to it. Used to balancing. We learned it so early and so deep, it disappeared. It’s become so familiar the learning has been forgotten.
Anticipate. Fall. Feel. Adapt.
Not one by one. Not some kind of looping line. But running concurrently, working together, constantly teaching and tuning each other. And it’s not just ‘simple’ things like posture and balance. Even consciousness itself appears to work in much the same way. Just another shimmering equilibrium too easily taken for granted.
Perhaps this is the physics of it. The only way anything ever gets done. Perhaps the only thing that changes is whether we’re aware of the process. Or whether the practice of practice has pushed the process into the system of systems around and inside us.
Thursday (19th) #
After two days off, it’s time for another early run. Much the same route as before, but magically renewed in the still air and dawn light.
Today’s parallel sessions presented a feast of streaming FOMO.
I chose to attend Meet the STG, a Townhall Meeting with the iPRES Steering Group. The primary reason was that I want to understand how we can all make the most of the work I’ve been doing on iPRES publications. It was great to hear about the forthcoming Continuity Subgroup, which is being set up to look at which aspects of iPRES should be standardised and how, and which are better left to open to allow innovation and individuality from year to year. I’m looking forward to working with them.
It was also good to be there to talk about how the social media landscape has change, and that while I’m keen to continue actively supporting the growth of the Mastodon community and digipres.club, it cannot and should not play the role that Twitter once played. Mastodon seemed to work pretty well for iPRES 2024 , but it’s federated nature means it will always tend to work best as a gathering place for those who already know they want to be part of the digital preservation community. To grow that community, we need to reach out to other spaces, clearing the pathways and adding the signposts to invite them in.
Later, I was able to catch up with the sister stream, Working with Legacy Systems or Data. I loved When Software was Sound: Exploring the forensic materiality and evidence of manufacture of microcomputer software recorded on cassette. I was aware of audio-level archiving of data tapes, and that it analogous to the flux-level digitisation of floppy disks. What I didn’t realise is that, as well as allowing easy experimentation with different analogue-to-digital conversions, these sound files can also reveal traces of the manufacturing process that can deepen the links between the tapes and the social context they came from. The default position of migrating to digital formats like TAP and TXZ will lose this information.
Given the harsh forces of standardisation and industrialisation will always erode that kind of individuality, it seems unlikely that mass-produced media will display as many interesting details. But in smaller communities, or when individuals are developing the protocols that will one day evolve into those industrial standards, this attention to fine detail could be very revealing.
Sitting slightly askew in this session was The flux and rhythm of community: A case study on building and maintaining a community of practice, a thoughtful reflection on the ebb and flow of the Australasia Preserves community group. As my project work proceeds, it becomes ever clearer that the most important thing I can work on is finding ways to understand, support and grow the communities of practice digital preservation requires. To avoid repeating the chequered history of top-down “build it and they will come” projects, we need to encourage growth from the ground up.
For me, the strongest message from Jaye’s presentation was that these small groups are critically dependent on the time and energy the members can contribute, and that relying on volunteers or ‘free-time’ effort is extremely brittle. To be just, this work must be paid, which requires the direct support of the institutions involved so that people’s time can be spent this way. But if this dedicated effort is narrowly distributed, the loss of a single person in a single institutional role can cause outsized consequences.
It made me wonder if there were other ways to get some community support activities made into a part of practitioners’ regular roles. With so much to be done by so few, getting staff time explicitly dedicated to the broad notion of community support is always going to be challenging. But are there other ways in?
For example, the The DPC Competency Framework has been very popular, and this is in part because almost every employer supports some notion of professional development as part of their staff appraisal process, and those people are keen to find appropriate development activities. The Competency Framework can also influence the way new roles are defined and described.
We know that our communities of practice are absolutely critical to the work of digital preservation acting as they do, as knowledge pools and safety nets for when our shared problems are too large or too varied for individual institutions to attack, and too emergent and contextual for any single vendor to solve. Can we stamp this more clearly into the competency framework, move professional development beyond traditional training, and capture community work more explicitly? Perhaps even binding this kind of thing into the Rapid Assessment Model as well?
It possible to break the work of community maintenance down into helpful, meaningful, concrete byte-sized strands that are easier to integrate into a performance review? Can the DPC support not just it’s members, but the wider communities of practice of digital preservation by helping us all weave these shared needs and actions into the fabric of our professional lives?
For the second session of the morning, the most relevant match to my current role looked to be Learning about Web Archiving and Preserving Digital Born Documents. For me, both Archiving Digital Marketing: Examining Preservation of Dynamic Content on the Web Through the Lens of Online Advertisements and Archiving Strategies For Texts And Instant Messages By Politicians In Office. A Belgian Case Study made it clear just how distressingly difficult this work can be sometimes! But I was buoyed up by the thoughtful analysis and possibilities for positive action presented in Web Archives for All? Towards Equitable Access to UK Public Sector Web Archives.
That said, I would have loved to have been there for excellent panel and discussion “You oughta be in pictures”: Insights to Digital Moving Image Preservation from the BFI, EYE, and LOC in the parallel Strategies for Preserving Moving Image Content session. The whole thing was fascinating, but I was particularly struck by the discussions about the adoption of Apple ProRes format as a preservation standard.
The acceptance of ProRes was raised deliberately. A ‘guilty’ secret being carefully shared. Some of the panellists had found that it hard to convince people that this was an acceptable decision. The proprietary nature of the format rendered it controversial, despite the fact that open source tools and available documentation mean there were no real barriers to future access.
From the stream it seems the room was on the same side as the panel. M’colleague Paul Wheatley commented: “where is the risk?” Another attendee argued that Apple wants out of the codec maintenance business now that it is opening up it’s specifications through SMTPE.
I would go further. I think we’ve forgotten how natural this state of affairs is. Often one player comes to dominate a field and their formats and software become the de facto standards for that domain. In time, as their market position is secured, it becomes beneficial to open up just enough that the ecosystem they profit from can continue to grow. This level of control is actually beneficial to the business of digital preservation, as it helps prevent the creation of conflicting implementations of the same thing.
After all, that’s what happened to our ‘beloved’ Portable Document Format. Adobe PDF went from 1.0 to 1.6 and came to rule the roost while remaining wholly proprietary. Eventually, in 2008, PDF 1.7 became an ISO standard, but Adobe still adds proprietary extensions. If anything, involving ISO might make the format more complicated by allowing edge-case extensions to leak in from niche application domains.
Most amusingly of all (to me at least) is the fact that our most holy format artifact, the venerable and sacrosanct TIFF 6.0, remains proprietary to this day. Since 1992 it has been solely owned and governed by Aldus and then Adobe, with ISO variants only appearing in 2001. Variants which remain, as far as I know, largely irrelevant to our collections.
ProRes isn’t problematic, it’s simply unfamiliar.
“We often mistake familiarity for truth. Just because we’re used to thinking or feeling in a certain way, it doesn’t mean it’s right.”
– Philippa Perry, The Book You Want Everyone You Love* To Read.
Next I headed to the Flickr Foundation birds-of-a-feather event, because how can I resist a title like How do you preserve 50 billion photos?! The Flickr Foundation team is very impressive and I enjoyed the interesting and thoughtful discussion on the challenges of mitigating against the failure of a large social media platform. Their notion of a Data Lifeboat and the core idea of empowering individuals to identify and extract their own archival slivers for safe-keeping reminded me of Herbert’s trace-chasing keynote. At first, the Lifeboat looks simpler, because it only looks at Flickr. But then you realise there is a much more delicate network of social and ethical relationships and expectations to navigate, which the prototypes Herbert demonstrated largely elide.
But attending this did mean I missed the handheld media migration tutorial From Floppy to Future: Converting Legacy Media into Digital Archives. Judging by the excellent documentation they’ve made available about the Digital Repair Cafe and their migration workflows, this will be something we’ll return to in future projects like Future Nostalgia.
I also missed out on the The Constraints When Scaling Up Preservation Efforts session. Of the lightning talks, I particularly liked the Migrating data without original checksums (The National Library of Norway DP team again, who also later published this this fantastic digital preservation explanation poster that didn’t make it into iPRES) and Reach for the (cloudy) Sky! Exploring cloud-to-cloud archiving of digital records .
The first paper in this session, Energy, Digital Preservation, and the Climate: Proactively Planning for an Uncertain Future, firmly placed digital preservation issues in the wider context of the climate crisis. An important and powerful presentation on a distressing topic, somewhat offset by the inclusion of potential coping mechanisms like Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty and other strategy tools that go beyond the more familiar risk management models.
As I’ve implied in the past, I remain sceptical that the environment footprint of actual long-term digital preservation work matters much in a world where, for example, billions of dollars are being poured into data centres to prop up a future vision of artificial intelligence that only a tiny minority seem to actually want. So I’m not convinced winnowing our collections down in size will be enough of a benefit to justify the processing power and development effort needed to make it possible to do that confidently, quickly and efficiently.
However, watching the presentation, it became clear that any future crunch arising from the climate crisis will only serve to further starve digital memory work of the resources it does justifiably need. As such, I suspect the scenario planning techniques introduced here will prove to be a critical contribution to the field of digital preservation. That they might be a foundation stone for our community as we work together to anticipate and mitigate future threats.
The last paper of this session, The Future of Preservation: Reinventing the Repository at Harvard, complemented the earlier papers from the BNF and the KB, adding an immensely useful and informative deconstruction of what it takes to replace a large-scale digital preservation service. It illustrated how standards and infrastructure can disappear from the view of end users, victims of their own success. It clarified the range of roles needed to build an implementation process that can fully engage with the context and adapt to it. Echoing so many other thoughts and presentations this week, it emphasised the need to:
Listen, Question. Act. Repeat.
I was also excited by the possibility of Harvard pulling off a large-scale system migration without actually moving a single byte of content. Properly decoupling long-term data storage from the system that monitors and manages it would be a huge win, and a fascinating story for a future conference.
The only nagging doubt I had was the dependence on short-term project funding. Three years of money to perform the design and initial migration is good, but I’m curious what the long-term resource needs might be. As the presentation makes clear, much of the technical work when adopting a digital preservation system revolves around carefully integrating it into the services and systems of the wider organisation. This wider landscape is constantly evolving, and new data formats and odd edge cases will keep on coming in. Add in the emerging need for sophisticated scenario planning and mitigation (as argued by the previous speaker) and the dangers of ceasing proactive development seem severe.
I can only hope the lessons from the National Library of Norway’s product team lightning talk have the impact they deserve. All the effort that has gone into forging that powerful Harvard project team should not be discarded just because of a lack of vision at the administrative level.
The conference multiverse collapses, bringing us all to the final keynote: “Ownership, Preservation & Control” by Aaron Perzanowski (Info, Stream, Teaser). Aaron delivered an excruciatingly lucid analysis of some of the damage done by the digital shift from a form of property you can own towards licensed media you can only consume. The last few slides tried to present some hopeful ways forward, but there are no easy wins.
Many of the suggested mitigations have been attempted in other legislative domains, with mixed results. The UK’s Non–Print Legal Deposit framework and the Public Lending Right system address some of his concerns, but their promise is undercut by the lack of available funds. Aaron and his co-author are currently researching the affect that content licensing has on libraries and archives, so perhaps there is an opportunity for some collaboration on these issues in the future.
And then, the end. The closing ceremony. The prizes and the thanks and the handover to New Zealand for iPRES 2025.
| Tuia Karakia in te reo Māori | English translation |
|---|---|
| Kia whakarongo ake au ki te tangi a te manu nei a te mātūī Tui! Tuituia! Tuia ki runga, tuia ki raro Tuia ki roto, tuia ki waho Tuia te here tangata Tūturu o whiti Whakamaua kia tina Haumi e, hui e! Tāiki e! |
I’m drawn to the call of the tuī bird telling us to unite, to bind, to come together as one. To be woven above, To be woven below To be woven within, To be woven without Bind the kinship strands of humanity Permanent, consistent are the fibres of light Draw these matters to a single point and give them substance The wisdom is bound, it collects It is held! |
We all shuffle from the hall, and our conference murmuration begins to disintegrate.
A fragment of the flock regroups for a final meal, and kindly accommodates me. Then we divide and reform one last time, for one last visit to the Trollekelder.
Friday (20th) #
The conference had ended, but my iPRES was not quite over. I had a professional visit in Brussels to get to.
But first, when travelling, I like to bring a few nice treats home. Ideally, rather than going for the ‘obscene Toblerone from the airport’ approach, I like to go to the kind of place that the people who actually live there might go if they wanted to treat themselves. Like a gourmet market or a fancy deli. The more bourgeois the better!
On the iPRES 2024 Slack, one of the conference committee had recommended CRU as a ‘premium supermarket’, which sounded like just the kind of thing I wanted. I went there on my way to the train station, expecting a kind of Flemish M&S. But while the range was comparatively modest, the quality far exceeded what that comparison would imply. I loaded up with waffles and chocolates and a sponge cake I only partially understood, and headed to the Flemish Parliament.
Some mild public transit system difficulties, and a bit of entrance confusion, but with the help of another professional visitor we manage to get into the right place at the right time. A nice lunch and an nice tour, chatting with a nice group of folks who I hadn’t managed to spend much time with in the preceding week.
The visit ends, and we go our separate ways.
A misread map means another transit mishap on the way back. No big deal, but it does mean I’m tired from dragging my wheeled suitcase behind me on the overlong walk required to correct the error.
My erratic baggage and I grumble our way to the Eurostar station and grind through the formalities of international travel. Departure boards relay changeless data at 60Hz as we await further announcements. We all lose ourselves in thought and screens. When the time comes, a synthetic voice softly barks the masked commands of the only connections left to make.
I step off the tightrope and onto the train.
Homeward bound. Safe and sound. Well, safe, at least.