Dr Torsten Reimer is Head of Content and Research Services at the British Library. As a member of the BL's leadership team, he is responsible for ensuring that the library's contemporary collections and research services meet the needs of our users online and onsite. This includes the strategic oversight of the digital preservation function and the replacement of the petabyte-scale strategic digital preservation and asset management system. Torsten has many years of experience working with digital research infrastructure, including positions at Jisc and Imperial College London. He combines a long-term interest in digital preservation with a focus on user needs for access, partly informed by his background in digital humanities and scholarly communications (at the University of Munich and King's College London).

KEYNOTE：Does anybody care about digital preservation? Thinking about digital preservation from a perspective of access, collaboration and purpose

Digital preservation can be hard to sell. Outside of the community, it is sometimes confused with disaster recovery and usually considered as an afterthought, as something librarians and archivists do. Even within our organisations, it can be a siloed activity, and the focus is usually on our “own” collections. Thinking more broadly though, it is a global responsibility that is perhaps better described as a collaborative endeavour to ensure persistent access. It should not exist in isolation. In this keynote, I will draw on both my personal experience and our collective work at the British Library to explore the bigger picture of collaborative digital preservation and what it means to ‘do’ digital preservation in practice. This includes the relationships we must build, both internally and externally, the related fields we should be aware of and seek to exchange knowledge with, and the many different lenses through which we can view, implement, and ‘sell’ preservation that all reflect the context and community that surrounds us.