International experts meet to tackle global digital memory loss
British Library to host iPres digital preservation conference, 29-30 September 2008
The British Library will this month host a major international conference to address threats to information created or held in digital formats. Over 250 experts, practioners and decision makers from 33 countries and four continents will assemble at the British Library, St Pancras, on 29-30 September for the Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPres 2008).
iPres is the world's longest-running series of international conferences dedicated to long-term preservation of digital material. Previously, iPres has been held by the National Library of Science, Beijing; Cornell University, New York; and the State and University Library, Goettingen, Germany.
Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, said: “For more than two decades the world has been amassing huge volumes of content online, with little thought as to how it will be used or accessed in future. Loss or deterioration of archived digital information has a real-world cost – to citizens and to digital society and the economy.
“The iPres Conference is bringing together expertise from across the world. The depth and breadth of the agenda, the quality and spread of the expertise of the contributors, and the range of the audience will certainly make for an invaluable and fascinating two days.”
According to recent projections by global market research company, the International Data Corporation, the digital universe will expand ten-fold from 116 exabytes (one exabyte = a billion gigabytes) in 2006 to 1,800 exabytes in 2011 - the equivalent of 120 piles of books stretching from the Earth to the Sun. Production of digital content now outstrips the world's capacity to retain it. By 2011, half of content created online will be sleeping on the digital pavement.
And while well-cared for manuscripts survive from ancient times, the lifespan of magnetic and video tape, floppy discs, CDs and DVDs may range from just one to 75 years. Preservation of digital media has been hindered by the complexity and manual nature of the process, the cost and time incurred by the need to repeat preservation activity; the absence of common standards or guidelines and issues relating to the integrity of material and copyright.
Horst Forster, Director of Digital Content and Cognitive Systems in the European Commission – Europe's biggest investor into research on digital preservation - said: “The scale of the task is beyond the capability of one institution or sector. It requires concerted and orchestrated efforts across the information supply chain. It also requires the coming together of ideas, technology and practice across disciplines, organisations and boundaries. In 2006, EU Member States endorsed a European Commission Recommendation by which they agreed to reinforce their national strategies and targets for digital preservation and to improve the national framework conditions.”
The theme for iPres 2008 is Joined Up and Working: tools and methods for digital preservation. It will bring together seventy speakers representing almost 120 authors; 14 national and state libraries and archives; 17 national and state universities; two US and European government institutions; eight technology and supercomputing centres and eight digital preservation projects.
Paper presentations and panels will outline advancements to digital storage; software systems; preservation of objects from manuscripts to video games; models enabling organisations to target activity; web-archiving, skills training, national and international projects and the creation and capture of descriptive data.
Adam Farquhar, Head of Digital Technology at the British Library, and Programme Chair said: “iPres is one of the most important events in progressing our understanding and ability to preserve digital content. iPres 2008 will showcase some of the most significant current developments. California Digital Libraries, San Francisco, will take that work forward, with iPres 2009 which will focus on how organisations embed preservation into mainstream activity.”
The British Library is well-placed to host iPres 2008. A world-leader in digital preservation initiatives, it has a team of 14 staff devoted to preserving the Library's digital and digitised collections. The Library is the coordinator of the Planets project, co-funded by the European Union, which brings together 16 leading institutions across Europe, to develop software and tools that will substantially automate the digital preservation process.
For more information, please contact the British Library Press Office: Ben Sanderson, tel: +44 (0)1937 546126, email: ben.sanderson@bl.uk or Suvi Kankainen, tel: +44 (0)20 7412 7105, email: suvi.kankainen@bl.uk
Notes for Editors
1. iPres was initiated by the Chinese Academy of Science and Electronic Information for Libraries, in Beijing, in 2003, to exchange ideas and expertise in digital preservation between Europe and China. It now attracts over 250 participants who include librarians, archivists, curators, software and repository developers, vendors, researchers, consultants, publishers and trainers plus representatives of digital preservation organisations. For more information, see: http://www.bl.uk/ipres2008/.
2. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It provides world-class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. Further information is available on the Library's website at www.bl.uk, which receives almost two million hits per month.
The Library's Digital Library Programme manages and makes accessible under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 the Library's digital collection. The British Library is the founding member of UK Web Archiving Consortium and focal point for web-archiving in the UK, founding member of the International Internet Preservation Coalition, the Digital Preservation Coalition in the UK and a member of Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) group. It has recently concluded the second phase of its JISC-funded project LIFE2 to model the lifecycle and costs to preserve digital content.
Abstracts (PDF format) 104KB
Speaker Biographies (PDF format) 120KB