A story of a decade of iPres’ conferences: From Fonts and new friends in San Francisco to a frenetic family in Amseterdam 

Welcome to the iPRES 2021 Why I iPres series： We have invited members of the digital preservation community to publish their experience and thoughts related to iPRES. This post is written by Euan Cochrane,  digital preservation manager at Yale University Library, who is also the Papers and Panels Co-Chair for iPRES 2021. 

Euan Cochrane

Euan Cochrane is the digital preservation manager at Yale University Library. In this role he leads a team that provides comprehensive digital preservation services across the libraries, archives, and museums at Yale University. Euan is also passionate about emulation and software preservation and has been awarded a number of grants for projects and programs of work that are seeking to expand access to emulation infrastructure.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/euanc/

The iPres conferences and iPres community provide different experiences for everyone that attends and participates. Two of the things I like most about iPres conferences is the opportunities for meeting people and traveling to interesting locations. The following are my reflections on my favourite aspects of the iPres conferences that’ I’ve been attending since 2009. Part travelogue, part academic highlights, hopefully these reflections give you an idea of the wonderful and varied experiences you might find when participating in an iPres conference.

iPres 2009 San Francisco

iPres 2009 was my first iPres conference. I cam out from New Zealand where I was working at Archives New Zealand in the Digital Continuity team there. As a first time iPres attendee from a small country in the South Pacific it was quite daunting. But I had a great time and met many people that I would end up collaborating with years later (I have a -possibly false- recollection of meeting Kam Woods from the BitCurator team there). It was also a great introduction to the iPres and global digital preservation communities.

By far my favourite paper presented in 2009 year was co-authored by the aforementioned Kam Woods: Brown, G., & Woods, K. (2009). Born Broken: Fonts and Information Loss in Legacy Digital Documents. UC Office of the President: California Digital Library. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53z897zb. It thoroughly explained the significance of ensuring you preserve fonts in order to ensure you are preserving the information content of your objects.

iPres 2010 Vienna

iPres 2010 was my second iPres conference. This was a special one for me as it was my first time ever visiting Europe and the first time I met Dirk von Suchodoletz. Dirk was due to come to New Zealand later that year to work with me at Archives New Zealand while doing research related to his PhD which had been about Emulation. He collaborated on the Rendering Matters project I was researching, and I eventually brought this collaboration with the University of Freiburg (and later OpenSLX) with me to Yale University Library and it blossomed into the EaaSI program of work.

My favourite paper that year was Jeffrey van der Hoeven, Sophie Sepetjan, and Marcus Dindorf. Legal aspects of emulation. In Andreas Rauber, Max Kaiser, Rebecca Guenther, and Panos Constantopoulos, editors, 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES2010) September 19 - 24, 2010, Vienna, Austria, volume 262, pages 113–120. Austrian Computer Society, 2010. Seeing as I was already a proponent of emulation and just about to begin research using it, I was excited to read about how we might address the legal challenges to using emulation at scale.

iPres 2011 Singapore

iPres 2011 was my last conference while working at Archives New Zealand. This conference had had to be quickly moved to Singapore due to the Earthquake and Tsunami in Japanwhere it had been scheduled to be held.  The Singapore iPres was an incredible experience, it was my first time in Singapore and I brought my partner who was delighted by the kindness of the Singaporeans who multiple times offered her umbrellas during the short but dense monsoon rains in the afternoons. The 2011 iPres was also the first time I met Klaus Rechert whom I now collaborate with on the EaaSI Program of work.  

My favourite paper presented in 2011 was probably Alex Thirifays, Barbara Dokkedal, Anders Bo Nielsen: Evaluation of a Large Migration Project. iPRES 2011. It was both a rare example of an public evaluation of a “large” migration project and an interesting approach in general. I also really liked Geoffrey’s paper that later was published in the IJDC: Brown, Geoffrey. (2012). Developing Virtual CD-ROM Collections: The Voyager Company Publications. International Journal of Digital Curation. 7. 3-20. 10.2218/ijdc.v7i2.226. In this paper Geoffrey outlined an approach to preserving access to CD-ROMs via emulation that is quite different technically to that which we are now taking with the EaaSI program of work but quite similar in principle and was certainly inspiring.

I missed the next two conferences while I was working in Melbourne, Australia which were in Toronto, Lisbon. I also missed the Melbourne conference in 2014 by which time I’d moved to America. I nearly made the Melbourne conference but the timing didn’t quite work as it started the day after the ISO 16363 training course I was attending in London which was also very enlightening.  

2015 Chapel Hill

This year was a revelation for me as a relatively new-to-America transplant (I immigrated in late 2013). Being able to attend an iPres in the same time zone and not having jetlag to deal with was incredible.  I also had the novel experience of meeting and swapping stories with some Americans who had emigrated to New Zealand to work my old team at Archives New Zealand and at the National Library of New Zealand. The conference itself was really well run and the food was delicious.

My favourite “publication” out of this conference was probably Nichole Contaxis’s Poster on Preserving In-House Developed Software at the National Library of Medicine. And while I disagree with the practice in principle I also appreciated Beyond the Binary: Pre-Ingest Preservation of Metadata. Jessica Moran, Jay Gattuso. iPres 2015. Nov. 2015

2016 Bern

Bern was an incredible city to visit. The history there was evident everywhere and the scenery really beautiful. I remember a great meal overlooking the city and seeing bears in a park within walking distance of the city centre.  The conference itself was a triumph for emulation, with many papers presented about it and a panel on software preservation. A paper from the University of Freiburg on emulation won best paper that year also.

My personal academic highlight that year was the panel discussion I participated in: Software Sustainability and Preservation: Implications for the Long-Term Access to Digital Heritage. My favourite part was disagreeing with David Rosenthal about the practicality of reviving and preserving historic versions of sites like Facebook. I still believe it could be possible in some form with appropriate collaboration with the system administrators there.

2017 Kyoto

Kyoto was one of my favourite iPres conferences. Japan is an amazing country and the hosts planned a great set of experiences. I also speak a little Japanese and have family there so I always love visiting.  Kyoto was also the first time I recall meeting Joshua Ng who joined a number of us for Karaoke one night and later went on to work in the same team at Archives New Zealand where I had previously worked.

While relatively recent, it was difficult for me to remember the academic highlights of this conference for me so I found the proceedings and started going through them. There are so many good papers in these proceedings, from work with 5.25 inch disks, to a model for digital artworks to an early paper from the https://www.softwareheritage.org  team to a great paper discussing the problems of PDF-A, to a paper on a PDF-based test corpus and it goes on! I heartily recommend giving them a read.

2018 Boston

This was the first iPres I was able to take a train to which was again a novel and welcome experience. The Boston iPres seemed to me to mark a bit of a turning point for the community. There were some of the first significant discussions that I recall about what the structure of both the conference and the community should be and I believe this was the first with a formal code of conduct. Boston was a great city to hold it in and while I missed the baseball game I’d planned on going to with some folks (I think it got rescheduled) the events the team organized there were superb. I enjoyed that the conference’s website was hosted at osf.io and while space was tight this year the organizers did a great job providing a very full program. I even found time to play a digital preservation board game and I think that was the first year they were available.

While I missed it, I heard great things about and subsequently read the paper Sampson, W. W., Abigail Adams and Austin D. Roche. “Data Recovery and Investigation from 8-inch Floppy Disk Media: Three Use Cases.” iPRES (2018). I

2019 Amsterdam

Last year’s iPres in Amsterdam was the first where I felt like I didn’t have enough time. Being my eighth iPres I think I’d reached a point where the people were more important than the presentations. I tried to make it to as many presentations as I could, but I ended up missing many due to catching up with various folks I’d met over the years (or for the first time in Amsterdam).

Academically my favourite presentation was the keynote from Bellingcat:  Bellingcat and Beyond - The Future for Bellingcat and Online Open Source Investigation. I also really appreciated that each paper was available on the program website and the conference did it’s best to minimize our carbon footprint – not providing extensive conference bags and instead providing each attendee with a refillable water bottle which I treasured until it was subsequently taken from me by the TSA.

I’ll definitely miss attending the iPres conference this year but I look forward to what 2021 might bring. Beijing is sure to bring new and interesting experiences and I look forward to hopefully seeing many of you there.