When slowing down means moving fast: A blog about iPRES 2022 from the IISG

About a month ago, from the 12th to the 16th of September, the international digital preservation conference iPRES 2022 took place in Glasgow, Scotland. We (Caro, Robert, and Zefi) had the pleasure of participating in it, and in this blog post we wanted to share with you a brief overview of the conference’s topics, and highlight our most important take-aways, especially those that we think are most related to our work, and perhaps the work of other cultural heritage digital preservationists.

• This year’s iPRES took as its main theme digital sustainability, nicely expressed in the motto: “Data for all, for good, forever.” Digital sustainability, in the digital archiving context, refers of course to the technical and/or organizational steps we take to make sure that digital materials can remain usable for the long term, but it also may point to something wider than preserving the collections themselves: it is about the way our actions and decisions, as individuals and as organizations in heritage and research, can help ensure that our communities, cultures, and physical environments themselves remain safe and flourishing across time. We found this to be a worthwhile idea which was explored from many different angles at iPRES, for example with the research on the footprint that digital preservation work leaves due to its energy consumption, or on the need to re-think paradigms and expectations of immediate storage and access to digital collections, in the face of environmental and energy crises and social and political unrest. One very poignant moment in the conference was the discussions about cybersecurity and data loss: are we ready as a field to deal with the realities of cyberwar and cybercrime becoming mainstream? How does our desire to collect more and wider, especially from vulnerable groups, relate to our ability to ensure they and their material will be safe?

• It became clear to us that in the wider heritage and information fields, we cannot anymore think of our work in archival and research organizations in strictly disciplinary terms, and still expect to remain relevant: if it actually comes to pass that in the next decade the bulk of digital data which is used globally in government, research, business, and entertainment will reach current storage capacity, how can we as archivists make sure that we use our skills to come up with solutions, rather than contribute to the problems?

• Connected to that realization that it is very important to think of the far-reaching consequences of (digital) archival work in societies, we also found that one of the most useful take-aways from this conference for us was the realization that there are limits in what we can or even should do as archival institutions. While the word “limit” may often have negative connotations of less freedom, less opportunity, etc., it also points to responsibility: sometimes, to take a step back rather than forward is the right decision. The conversations we had with colleagues about environmental sustainability certainly seem to agree that sometimes less is more, but also when it comes to ethical responsibility and connection with communities, there is a possibility that by limiting some of our familiar functions, we might have room for new ones: that was one of the ideas highlighted in Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty’s (Director of Smithsonian Libraries and Archives) keynote, where she explained in very direct and unapologetic terms her involvement with community digital archiving, and the frustration those feel with our (the institutional archives) unwillingness to change long-established practices, even if it means we are losing heritage, and most importantly, people.

• The last keynote, by Steven Gonzalez Monserrate (‘cloud anthropologist’ working at the MIT), about the immense environmental and human impact of hyperscale datacenters, in another way showed the limits of what we can do when it comes to storage and 24/7 availability of digital content. Even though the examples and stories he shared were bleak, he also showed a way forward in alternative ways of storage: storing on crystal, ceramics, living tissue (DNA) and by the use of quantum computing. They seem to come from science fiction but are actually being developed right now. He ended his keynote in – maybe in a very American optimistic fashion – with the message “that the only limits in front of us are the limits of our imagination”.

This is, as much as possible, a compressed record of experiences and thoughts that we brought with us from this year’s iPRES. However, we think that by sharing them we keep the conversation going among us, and we energize ourselves to keep on the great efforts we have already started, and that we can build on: rethinking our collection policies, improving and expanding our relationship with archival creators, ensuring we can keep offering our collections and expertise to our users, and opening up to the world in new, and yet familiar, ways.