Around this time, DPC staff are arriving in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA: Home of the 19th International Conference on Digital Preservation this coming week!
Let’s hope they don’t suffer from jetlag, as their presentations start on the first conference day: Tuesday 19th September. Keep reading to see which DPC workshops and presentations (both online and in-person) you want to attend during iPRES 2023. Also: make sure to swing by the DPC stand in the lobby to pick up some amazing stickers and conference swag, and get updated on the latest digipres resources!
Every Day
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12:00 SGT/ 14:00 AEST / 16:00 NZST / 04:00 UTC / 05:00 BST / 23:00 - day before – USA CDT (online) |
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Robin Wright will be hosting iPres radio 2023 in the Australasia and Asia-Pacific time zone. This is a relaxed and welcoming half hour zoom session open to anyone from our region who is attending iPRES 2023. Come along if you would like to chat with like-minded individuals and see some of the conference content in a convenient local time zone. Some of you will have participated in iPres radio last year from Glasgow, so we would like to welcome you back and hear what you’ve been doing this year. For those of you new to the event, please come along and introduce yourself, have a chat and find out more about what’s happening at iPres in Illinois. We’ll discuss upcoming sessions, show some videos of the iPres venue, events and people and exchange notes on the best events to see or re-view as the conference progresses. Please email Robin: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to receive the Zoom invitation. The last radio show will be hosted on Monday 25 September. |
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Tuesday 19th September
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09:00-12:30 (CDT), Capacity and Skills 1 & 2, Heritage Hall 2 and online Digital Preservation Tools for Developing Capacity and Skills (Tutorial) |
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Amy Currie and Sharon McMeekin will be presenting a workshop, developed in collaboration with Jenny Mitcham, that will introduce the benefits of implementing a continuous improvement approach to developing your organization’s digital preservation capabilities. The session includes an introduction to continuous improvement, before focusing on two of the DPC’s tools, the Rapid Assessment Model and the Competency Framework and Audit Toolkit. Participants will get the chance to try out the tools with support from Sharon, Amy, and Jenny. |
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Wednesday 20th September
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11:00-12:30 (CDT), All Together Now 1, Heritage Hall 6 and online Community is We: Modelling Collective Action as a Framework for Digital Preservation (Panel) |
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Sharon McMeekin will be participating in a panel session discussing the importance of participatory networks in helping practitioners advance their digital preservation activities. The panel will discuss their experiences of community-driven initiatives, including the benefits and challenges, before looking to potential areas for future collaborations. |
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13:30-15:00 (CDT), From Theory to Practice 1, Heritage Hall 6 and online |
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Michael Popham will be giving a short paper exploring ideas of “ value” in digital objects, looking beyond the purely economic costs of creation and management, to see what we might learn from the traditional appraisal of analogue sources and thinking about the ways in which digital materials are fundamentally different. Likely to raise more questions than answers, this paper will encourage people to reflect on how they decide what is worth keeping. |
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13:30-15:00 (CDT), Sustainability 2, Heritage Hall 4 and online Approaches to Digital Preservation Product and Service Sustainability: |
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William Kilbride will be chairing a panel on sustainability, originally proposed by Jon Tilbury at Preservica. It’s a diverse panel of vendors and specialists and William’s role is to set the questions and keep discussion focussed. There’s something about the work of the DPC that tends towards having no official view while cheerfully questioning everyone else’s. But, like many topics, there’s a lot more we could be saying and doing about sustainability. So, we’ll be making notes and getting ready for some actions to follow! |
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Thursday 21st September
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09:00-10:30 (CDT), All Together Now 2, Heritage Hall 4 and online Documentation Good Practice: Bringing Order in Disruptive Times (Short Paper) |
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Jenny Mitcham will be giving a virtual short paper on the (sometimes neglected) topic of digital preservation documentation. Over the last year, the DPC and its members have been producing a short guide full of tips and advice on creating documentation for digital preservation activities, processes and workflows. She will talk about why we needed a guide, how the community collaborated to produce it and will share some of the tips and advice that it contains. The guide itself will be launched to the wider community at the iPRES conference. |
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09:00-10:30 (CDT), All Together Now 2, Heritage Hall 4 and online Lessons From The Future: Looking Back On Policy Development (Panel) |
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In the same session as above, Sharon McMeekin and Jenny Mitcham are involved in a panel focusing on the topic of digital preservation policy development. This session looks at policy development at different stages of development, review, and maturity. Prepared questions ask the panellists what lessons they have learnt from working with digital preservation policy over a period of time. We are very much looking forward to the interesting insights with our panellists who all come from DPC Member organizations. |
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13:30-15:00 (CDT), All Together Now 4, Heritage Hall 6 |
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Sharon McMeekin will be presenting a long paper, co-authored with Melinda Haunton of The National Archives (UK), about their organizations’ collaborative work to broaden access to digital preservation training through the “Novice to Know-How” training courses. The content has proved to be incredibly popular, opening the door to digital preservation training for individuals and organizations that previously had not been able or willing to engage with the topic. The paper examines the motivations for the creation of the training content, as well as discussing its development, reception, impact, and future plans. |
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9:00 AM – 10:30 AM (CDT), Immersive Information 1, Heritage Hall 1 and online |
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William Kilbride will be participating in a panel convened by Paul Stokes of Jisc who is also the DPC’s Director for Advocacy and Community Engagement. Paul has challenged panellists to consider a Tipping Point: when does a lot of data become too much data? This is a different, perhaps more direct way to ask about sustainability too. A significant proportion of data growth in the last few years has been associated with the Internet of Things, which is often promoted as a means to derive greater efficiencies and increase value-add to supply chains. The question arises: greater efficiencies for whom? Value-added where? Come along to this panel session and find out! |
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11:00 AM – 12:30 PM (CDT), Posters, Heritage Hall 2 and online Plus Ça Change…? Eight years after the end of the 4C project, |
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Paul Stokes from Jisc and Sarah Middleton will be sharing a poster on some recent considerations made around the Curation Costs Exchange! Launched in 2014, this was one of a great many project outputs from the 4C project (all of which, coincidentally, were great) and helps users understand and compare their digital preservation costs. Since then, much has changed – both in terms of technologies and community concerns – so come along to Heritage Hall 2 to help us decide what we should do next to develop this valuable community tool! |
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11:00-12:30 (CDT), Posters, Heritage Hall 2 and online Procuring IT Systems – Thinking about digital preservation from the start (Poster) |
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The Good Practice team of the DPC (Jen Mitcham, Paul Wheatley, and Michael Popham), will present a poster summarizing one of the final deliverables produced by the DPC’s collaborative project with the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. This was an extension to the DPC’s existing Procurement Toolkit, in the form of six brief statements of requirement which should be considered when procuring an IT system which might hold digital content of value to the organization beyond the lifespan of that new system. Potential users are encouraged to adopt and adapt these statements to suit their own particular situation and needs. |
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Just like in previous years at iPRES, the DPC is once again sponsoring the ‘Best contribution by a First Time Attendee’ Award which encourages and celebrates new entrants into the digital preservation community. Everything is in scope for this prize – lightning talks, posters, papers, questions, tweets, even contributions to the conference organization. The judging will be orderly but it cannot be completed till the last possible moment. That means the DPC team has got an ongoing role throughout the conference, supporting and encouraging and looking out for newcomers!
Have a great iPRES 2023, everyone!