iPres 2024: Bake offs, awards and more

Now the dust has settled on iPres 2024, I wanted to share some of Arkivum’s highlights from this year’s version of conference.

For those of you who don’t know what iPres is, it’s the premier global digital preservation conference, bringing together many of the leading thinkers of the digital preservation community.

This year’s version took place in Ghent, Belgium and I think a big thanks must be given to the organisers from the Digital Archives Flanders, Ghent University, Meemoo (the Flemish Institute for Archives) and public broadcaster VRT. They put on a great event, and were thoroughly rewarded by a stellar turnout both in person and online.

Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Awards

The event started with the biennial DPC awards. Featuring eight categories, the awards seek to showcase the most impressive and impactful digital preservation projects from the last two years.

Having attended previous awards I think one of the major developments has been the increased geographical diversity amongst the nominations and finalists. It was an absolute pleasure to see the broad range of projects taking place across the digital preservation community, and a huge congratulations must go to all the finalists and winners. You can find the full list of winners here.

I wanted to make a special and final mention to Arkivum customer NHS Barts Trust who won the award for the Most Outstanding Digital Preservation Initiative in Commerce, Industry and the Third Sector. Going up against HSBC and Guinness, it is a great testament to the work the team at Barts are doing. We featured the award win in more detail in a recent news article.

Arkivum Get Baking

A stalwart inclusion of iPres is the Bake Off. This session features a range of solution providers and practitioners demoing their system or tool using a selection of donated data from various institutes. This year’s event saw perhaps the broadest selection of bakers, across starter, main and dessert courses.

Arkivum solutions consultant Jack Leitch, donned his brand-new (and branded!) apron as part of the main course and took attendees through an end-to-end demo of our system in just 9 minutes.

You can see what he covered in our guided demo, here.

Hot Topic: Environmental Sustainability and Digital Preservation

Understanding, measuring and managing the environmental impact of digital preservation efforts has been a topic of growing importance of the last couple of years. This was reflected in growing about of content presented on the topic at iPres this year.

To further this discussion, Arkivum CTO Matthew Addis submitted and presented a poster on the topic titled ‘Measuring and Managing the Carbon Footprint of Digital Preservation’.

The poster explored areas such as emission sources, green energy, the embodied footprint of ICT equipment and how to measure it, preservation use cases and strategies to reduce organisations’ carbon footprint.

You can access a copy of the poster here.

Summary

iPres 2024 was an absolutely fantastic event to be a part of. Both myself and Jack thoroughly enjoyed the discussions we had with attendees on the stand, from hearing about current preservation challenges through to opinions on the latest good practice approaches.

This is but a brief summary of some of the highlights from an Arkivum perspective, and I would thoroughly recommend diving into the iPres website to access some of the content from the show.

We look forward to supporting the event in future, and hope to see you at an upcoming iPres conference!