This year’s edition of the International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPres 2024) was held between Monday 16th and Friday 20th September 2024 in Ghent, Belgium. Hosted by Digital Archives Flanders, Ghent University, Meemo, and VRT, the event saw digital preservation professionals from a wide range of institutions and organisations from across the globe gathering at the Bijlokesite, a historic hospital and abbey located on the banks of the river Lys in the capital of Flanders.
Some of us – Teagan Zoldoske, Olivia Foster and Marco Brunello – had the honour to represent the ADS at this event. After travelling for quite a few hours by train (from York to London, then London to Brussels and Brussels to Ghent), we arrived in Ghent city centre in the evening of Sunday 15th September, and had some rest before our first day at iPres.
Monday 16th September was technically “pre-conference” day, with several workshops to choose from. We attended First Steps into Command Line Tools for Preservation, the OCFL Workshop and What’s in the Box? Container-based File Format Identification, along with the Digital Preservation Awards ceremony.
On Tuesday the conference officially started with the opening ceremony at 9am, when Dries Moreels (General Chair for iPRES 2024) marked the event by striking a giant gong on the main stage with a mallet. This was followed by the first keynote talk by Claire Warnier, who shared her experience with Atlas of Lost Finds – a project by her Antwerp-based design studio Unfold aimed at re-materialising from 3D scans several artifacts that were lost forever during the 2018 fire at the National Museum of Brazil.
The keynote on the second day was equally interesting, with Herbert Van de Sompel showcasing Memento – a framework built to enable access to archived webpages via their original URL regardless of the web archiving service where they are hosted.
During the four days we spent in Ghent we also attended several other talks, round table discussions and workshops, including:
- Implications of Cloud Adoption for Digital Preservation
- Adopting Digital Preservation Systems to Evolving Needs
- New and Innovative Technologies in Digital Preservation
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- This session included Teagan’s lightning talk Keeping users informed: using content advisories and emphasising the person when disseminating archives with human remains
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- Great Preservation Bake-Off (Main Courses)
- Evolving Preservation Strategies by Continuous Learning and Adaptation
- What Delineates a Digital Preservation Solution?
- Moving Away from a Central Archive to More Complex Preservation Environments
We also had a chance to network with other attendees and interact with poster presenters in between the sessions, and to attend two social events as part of this experience: the welcome reception on Tuesday night and the conference dinner on Wednesday. The conference dinner also included an adventurous boat trip from the Bijlokesite to the dinner venue, and what is probably the most unexpected bass brand act we have ever witnessed.
We left Ghent on Thursday afternoon, glad for having had the chance to be part of the most prominent digital preservation event of the year. Thank you to the Digital Preservation Coalition and this year’s hosts for organising such a great conference, which gave us not only the opportunity to learn and keep up with what’s going on in the wider digital preservation community, but also promote the ADS mission and make valuable connections with colleagues – and meet old and new friends – from across the world.
