Arkivum UK User Group sparks great discussions across our user base - Arkivum

Archiving & Preservation / 19 Dec, 2018

Arkivum UK User Group sparks great discussions across our user base

I was delighted to attend our UK User group in November along with our VP of Product, Sinéad McKeown, to spend the day sharing client stories and garnering feedback for the next phase of our product roadmap.

Take a look at our short snippet video of the day:

Music: www.bensound.com

The amazing team at The University of Westminster archives hosted us and we were treated to user presentations from the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA), Birmingham City University (BCU) and London School of Economics (LSE). We were even joined by a delegate from one of our users in Texas, USA, though this was our UK Arkivum User Group.

Maeve Gebruers from ITMA, kicked us off with a review of their digital preservation story so far. Maeve was candid, helpful and inspirational in her and her team’s approach to preserving rare digitised scores, recordings of performances and many other special collection items at ITMA. She’s keen to keep up momentum on their work and – as ever! – metadata plays a vital role. A number of attendees were keen to see the work Arkivum are planning on making metadata management even more useful and automated when moving from legacy systems.

We packed in another extremely interesting talk from Neil Stewart at the London School of Economics. Neil and his team are in the process of defining their preservation strategy and had recently gone out to tender for a solution as part of this initiative. It was great to see his newest member of the team at the User Group too, who has overall responsibility for the Arkivum solution and has just started getting their head into – you guessed it – metadata workflows!

It’s always important to make sure User Groups are as much a discussion forum and ideas sharing event than anything else.

While we are always excited about sharing our latest and greatest features and modules, I was glad to see so much of the day dedicated to real-world examples of preservation and digital data management, driving lots of great discussions amongst our users.

Towards the end of the sessions, Sinéad hosted a round table roadmap workshop, where delegates had the opportunity to vote on the features they wanted to see soonest – bring on the sticky stars! This was received extremely well by those who attended.

From this quick and weirdly fun exercise, we saw clear common themes as to what are top of our customers’ priorities and they would like to see delivered next. Really useful feedback that will help us to prioritise what our next product releases focus on.

If you would like any further information about Arkivum or our services, please get in touch. 

 

Paula Keogh

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