ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres :: blog
Digital preservation analyst, researcher, and software developer
Just released on the No Time to Wait (NTTW) YouTube channel is my presentation from NTTW8 in Karlsruhe, Germany. (Slides also available here).
The presentation follows up on my proposal for iPRES 2024 and allowed me to present parts of what was, in the end, a pretty significant paper (in terms of word count).
Some of my reflections on the presentation are below.
In March I was invited by the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group to talk about my experiences using Wikibase with Siegfried, the file format identification tool. I don’t think I’ve talked about that work on here before but you can find links to my iPRES talk on my ORCID page.
Let’s look at the abstract and the content of the talk below.
It was back in May, yes, way back when, that Jordan Hale of the Information Maintainers group put the following to me:
I write today to ask if you’d be interested in being our special guest on the next Information Maintainers call … we thought your perspective on working within and maintaining decentralized, small-group systems and development infrastructures would be really rad to hear about. What do you think?
I am a big fan of the Information Maintainers and so I was pretty stoked to be asked. Of course, I jumped at the chance and wrote about “Something something twenty years open source…”
Last Wednesday and in another life, pre-COVID pandemic, I would have been visiting Vienna again. I visited for the digital preservation conference iPRES for the first time in 2010, and lived there for a short period of time last year.
Now, we’re in the midst of a pandemic and the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) 10th Anniversary Event could not happen in person but the OPF found a way anyway, and so 9-10 June 2020 became the online event OPFCON.
Fortunate enough have an abstract of mine be considered worthy of a panel towards the end of the event I was able to reflect on the last 10 years. My notes on those and the panel can be found below.
The last Friday of March this year, I was invited by Elizabeth Kata at the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to give a presentation at the Vienna Institute for Historical Research (Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung). I don’t have a transcript for that day or a complete set of notes that I followed, but here is the essence of the talk. In it, Reflecting on community and self-development in digital preservation; I touch upon, among other things, community, recognizing privilege, and finding value and meaning in digital records.
I began and ended the talk by singing two Waiata, an important part of my previous role at Archives New Zealand.
Te Manaaki taonga
E whakarauika ana I te tini e
E ranga ana I te tira
Hei huruhuru moo te manu ka rere
Hei Poutuumaaro mo te kainga
Tuituinga koorero tuituinga tangata
Manaaki taaonga manaaki tangata
(Tane chant: Tuituinga koorero tuituinga tangata.
Manaaki taaonga manaki tangata – Hi!)
(Last time Wahine join chant: manaaki tangata – Hi!)
The value/prestige in protecting treasures
They gather/connect the people like the gathering of fish
They weave the party/masses
To be like feathers of a bird that takes flight
To be a strong pillar for our home
The sewing of stories, the sewing of people
The protection of treasures the protection of people