November 1, 2010 -- The 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2010) (external link), held September 19-24, in Vienna, Austria, created a space for digital preservation professionals to hear and learn about recent preservation and access projects.

iPRES is an annual conference that brings together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations and practices in preserving our digital heritage. A major theme of this year’s conference revolved around further aligning the preservation and access research activities of cultural heritage and scientific data centers.

Staff from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program were well-represented on the conference program.  Martha Anderson and Leslie Johnston participated in a discussion with the international stakeholders of the Unified Digital Formats Registry (external link). Anderson also spoke at the "Preserving Web Data" session covering the recent developments with the Twitter Archive while touching on its importance as a resource for historical purposes.

Johnston also presented her paper, "Transfer Inventory Services in Support of Preservation at the Library of Congress." Johnston noted, "The audience was very receptive, and the response demonstrated the growing use of the BagIt specification in the community."

At the poster session, Abbey Potter presented a Personal Digital Memories poster (PDF, 4.6MB) and discussed NDIIPP’s Personal Archiving activities, highlighting it as a public outreach effort to educate non-professionals about the importance of personal digital preservation. She commented, "NDIIPP is providing a unique and valuable service through this program. Many iPRES participants were already aware of the Personal Archiving section on digitalpreservation.gov and were using it at their own institutions."

The conference also provided organizers of related projects and initiatives to hold workshops and other meetings during the same week.

Anderson and Potter represented NDIIPP’s perspective at the workshop, "Greater than the Sums of Our Parts?: Collaboration, Cooperation and Grand Challenges in Digital Preservation." Anderson spoke about NDIIPP's leadership of collaborative projects and lessons learned.

At the International Web Archiving Workshop (external link), Library of Congress Web Archiving Specialists Gina Jones and Abbie Grotke spoke about Digiboard, the Library’s web archiving tool. Grotke also presented information about the tool during the International Internet Preservation Consortium meetings on how the Library trains its web archiving nominators, and Jones represented the Library as a member of the Preservation Working Group of the IIPC.

George Coulbourne, executive program officer in the Library’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, presented at the two-day workshop Spanning the Boundaries of Digital Curation Education (external link) where he provided an update on the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education initiative.

iPRES2011 (external link) will be held November 1-4, 2011, Tsukuba, Japan.