This blog was co-written by Svenia Pohlkamp (German National Library (Frankfurt)), Yvonne Tunnat (Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (Kiel)) and Monika Zarnitz (Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (Kiel)), members of nestor, an Allied Organisation of the DPC.
One thing we have learned during the pandemic: We can do lots of things online. At the height of the pandemic, nestor has moved its services to online meetings and to the wiki to keep in touch with its members. Thus, nestor managed to keep involved in the development of current best practices in digital preservation (DP):
nestor is the cooperation network for Digital Preservation. nestor supports knowledge transfer and therefore all institutions dealing with DP.
Since 2010, nestor has been organizing an annual conference, the nestor Praktikertag. It usually lasts one day, sometimes there is a workshop the day before or after. Very often, the conference follows a certain topic like migration and emulation (in 2016), format identification (in 2017) and preservation metadata (in 2018).
Within nestor, fourteen different working groups on DP topics engage in working groups on different aspects of DP. Before the pandemic, people active in these groups usually just travelled and met in a partner institution to discuss topics and plan future events and projects. But since the start of the pandemic, all this has moved to the web. Furthermore, training events usually take place online now. Interestingly, this bears some advantages for the German-speaking DP community in general. Not all institutions are granted much money to travel, so more people can participate in nestor’s events and benefit from knowledge exchange and the experience of DP seniors.
That is the reason why nestor is not planning to minimize these kinds of events now. Quite the opposite, there are plans to expand the training events, the YouTube channel, the podcast and irregular blogposts about news within the worldwide community.
Copyright ZBW & nestor, photo by Timo Wilke, nestor Praktikertag 2023 at the ZBW in Kiel
training event examples
nestor organizes online seminars. Depending on the topic, up to a hundred people or more participate. Usually the seminar starts with one or two presentations, afterwards questions are answered. Usually, we record the presentation part and publish it afterwards via the nestor YouTube Channel. The Q & A session is not recorded due to privacy policies.
In 2022, several online seminars took place, like the preservation policies online seminar about guidelines, examples and lessons learned in October, PDF validation with ExifTool in June and an open ask-an-expert-workshop in March. As a reaction to the COVID crisis nestor virtuell started in 2021, also with six online seminars on different topics, two of them were recorded. These web seminars aim at nestor’s core clientele: the German speaking DP professionals, beginners and advanced DP practitioners alike.
YouTube channel and podcast
In 2021, nestor launched a YouTube Channel for its videos. So far, 22 videos have been uploaded, many of them have 100 and one of them has even more than 500 views so far.
The videoclips include presentations from nestor conferences, the nestor Praktikertag, recordings of the aforementioned online seminars or clips about a working group, mainly about the Personal Digital Archiving Group, as this working group sometimes publishes information clips for the general public. We publish podcasts via YouTube as well.
nestor has launched its own podcast in 2022. The nestor podcast episodes consist of interviews. An interviewer invites one or two people to talk about a certain topic. One podcast is conducted with two people mainly responsible for the nestor working group Personal Digital Archiving and one with a specialist for DNA.
nestor blogposts: practical experience and cool iPRES papers
nestor blogposts are well-suited to give information to the German-speaking community, either about practical topics or what’s going on in the international community. That information might not be available to all of us, as not everybody can visit the important and big conferences like iPRES every year.
That’s why there has been a blogpost about DNA as a storage medium. A nestor member heard a session about this topic during the iPRES in Glasgow and was fascinated. Therefore, the nestor member tried to understand the problem and solution and wrote a blogpost. Afterwards, we interviewed a German-speaking specialist for the nestor Podcast.
Furthermore, there is a blogpost about the iPRES best paper Award, “Green goes with everything”, to make sure the German-speaking DP community is able to learn about recent research within the worldwide community.
The blogpost entry at the World Digital Preservation Day, however, was about Preservation watch during the time of COVID-19 and relayed the author's personal experience.
As for technical information, nestor has provided information about DROID from The National Archives.
There is a blogpost about the nestor community survey as well. This blogpost was first published in the blog ZBW Mediatalk for the international library community and re-published in nestor's blog for the German-speaking digital preservation community. The blogpost conveys some background information about the survey and shows a selection of the results with interpretation.
But sometimes, we still need to be in touch
Not everything can be solved online. There are still the kinds of talks that can only take place in a coffee break. An online breakout room is not quite the same.
Copyright ZBW & nestor photo by Timo Wilke, Coffee break during the nestor Praktikertag june 2023
There are quite a few nestor events we conduct preferably in person again: First of all, the nestor Praktikertag. Since 2010, once a year during summer, a one-day conference organised by nestor takes place. This conference usually is in person at a partner’s institution, the only exceptions were online conferences at the height of the COVID pandemic.
The main core of the nestor partners meets three or four times a year. Before the pandemic, this was almost always a meeting in person, during the pandemic the meeting has switched to online meetings. Now, the group plans to meet in person once a year and two to three times online, as the travel budgets of the institutions have shrunken, due to the energy crisis.
Summary and future work
The YouTube Channel, the wiki blogposts and the number of podcast episodes will rise in the near future to expand the knowledge exchange further.
In the almost three years during which we held our conferences and meetings online only, we have learned something about virtual possibilities and what they can and cannot offer. Community building works best if we offer different kinds of possibilities for knowledge- and peer-exchange. For us, meetings in person still are very important for some topics and especially for longer conferences. For presentations with a duration under an hour, virtual exchange can add a lot to everybody’s schedule and learning curve, especially when we divide in presentations and questions afterwards. Articles, blogposts, podcasts and recorded online seminars also contribute to the goal to let as many people as possible participate at current best practice or even work in progress, which is still being discussed within the community. When people share their knowledge which they have gained during international conferences, this also helps.
The target groups differ a lot. Some do not want to travel or do not have the possibility to do so. Some only can travel nationwide. Others only once or twice a year. Therefore, we will not cut any virtual offerings we have established during the pandemic. What has worked during the pandemic will work in the future as well. We will treat these newly made formats as an add-on to our established ones like the nestor Praktikertag to widen our portfolio.
Copyright ZBW & nestor photo by Timo Wilke, nestor Prakikertag 2023: discussions are more fun in person
Nevertheless, we hope we will always have the chance to meet at least once a year also in person, as home-made coffee might be the best, but the best of ideas still can be born during real-life coffee breaks with people.
Links and information
nestor virtuell, URL: www.langzeitarchivierung.de/nestorvirtual
nestor YouTube Channel, URL: //www.youtube.com/@nestorNetzwerk">https://www.youtube.com/@nestorNetzwerk
DNA as a storage medium, URL: https://wiki.dnb.de/x/sb95Dw
iPRES 2022: best paper award for Green Goes with everything, URL: https://wiki.dnb.de/x/SIx5Dw
Blogpost WDPD: Preservation Watch in the Time of COVID-19, URL: https://wiki.dnb.de/x/v3X3D
Blogpost about DROID, URL: https://wiki.dnb.de/x/mXVVCw
Blogpost Community survey, URL: https://wiki.dnb.de/x/nQO6Dw
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