Vale Carl Wilson, Digital Preservation’s Indie Rockstar
Just a quick note wishing Carl peace wherever he is now and to send my best wishes to Becky and his family, and of course his colleagues at the OPF and everyone else who worked closely with him.
Can I remember where I first met Carl? He’s just always been around hasn’t he?
I suspect it was the AQuA hack-a-thon at the British Library in 2011. Carl was maybe working on an image duplication engine with his team, while simultaneously helping everyone else out in the room.
Which I think was maybe the only introduction you needed to this guy — a selfless, talented individual, who made you feel instantly at ease, treating you like a pal even if you were newly acquainted.
Since then we’ve seen Carl steward projects such as PAR, Wikidata for Digital Preservation, VeraPDF, FIDO, and JHOVE, including an amazing effort wrangling all the digital preservation cats on multiple OPF hack-a-thons — fielding questions, organizing work efforts, probably fixing half of all the fixes we were all working on!
And I just opened COPTR and I think to myself, oh yeah, he was working on this stuff too. Single-handedly, for a while, keeping the service running, battling SPAM bots at his standing desk, while probably having, what I imagine, was 12 screens (at least!) on his desk, while working on the rest of his TODO list!
I was fortunate to take a number of conference calls with Carl when I was far from British soils. I always laughed at the end of these calls. Any sense someone needed a hand with something, or something else needed looking at, before anyone else could say anything, Carl had placed it in his backlog, and you know he was going to get back you about it having looked at it.
I am sure someone somewhere, maybe multiple people were tearing their hair out when Carl gave himself more work to do, but I don’t think anyone would have wanted it any other way — his way just seemed to be selfless generosity with his time and his efforts.
Carl committed a lot to digital preservation. Of course, he talked the talk, but more than that, he walked the walk. He made his impact by doing, and in that regard, among many amazing character traits, he’s a hero to people like me and others out there who try to live by the same principles.
6 years after AQuA I saw Carl again in Sheffield at an event hosted by ExLibris. 6 years had gone by and he greets you with such ease, with shining smile that I feel like I might have just seen him down the pub the previous week. We chatted football and gigs, and I’m sorry I can’t remember better all the chat, because I think we had a few free beverages from the paid bar before saying goodbye.
Another seven years, and I saw Carl at iPRES in Belgium. Same thing—only five minutes may have passed since we last spoke, and we chatted in the courtyard about some of his health issues and taking it easy. We also talked about gigs again; I feel like he might have just been to see, maybe, Wet Leg…? If I don’t remember correctly, I do remember thinking, cool band nonetheless.
And here we are today. I open up COPTR and I just realize, we’re not going to see him again. That smile, that welcoming affect, his generosity of spirit, and willingness to help us all out.
I open up COPTR and I realize though, Carl touched so much in the field of digital preservation that we’ll continue to see his influence for a long long time to come. We’ll see his name on a piece of code, or in a commit history, or a paper, and it will be impossible not to think warmly of him and what he’s up to now, or how quickly his new backlog is growing.
Thank you for being an amazing role model Carl, and thank you for all your help, and efforts, and everything else you have done for us.
I am sad people new to the field won’t get to meet him, but I am also reasonably sure there aren’t many of us in the field at present who hadn’t met or engaged with him anyway, and that’s quite a lot of us, and I am sure he treated us all to the same warmth, and I think that’s quite the legacy.
Vale Carl Wilson, one of the coolest, nicest guys in digital preservation, we’ll miss you.
Via the OPF’s recent update: If you would like to remember Carl in a tangible way, please consider donating to Kidney Cancer Action UK through his memorial page: https://carlwilson.muchloved.com/
