We’re now a couple of weeks out from iPRES Ghent and settled back into the regular swing of things. Almost the entire OPF Team and Board were happy to be present in person (some for the first time, and others for the first time in years). One of our Team was unable to attend in person and joined online for the duration. Reflecting on this successful conference, several have come together here to share their thoughts.
Darren Dignam, Systems Administrator, attended from Switzerland this year. From his perspective, the venue looked awesome and facilities and services were exceptionally well organised. The website and app were excellent and he found the Slack channel to be a great addition, keeping him ‘in the loop’. Sadly, ‘it wasn’t all roses.’ Darren would have liked to have seen more tracks available online, including the Monday workshops. He looks forward to attending future iPres events in person, in order to benefit from as much of the conference as possible, as well as the networking and discussions.
OPF was proud to act as a sponsor, providing some administrative support as well as our ‘secret weapon’, Helena, in the role as Editor-in-Chief of the Newsfeed comms channel on Slack, for the duration of the conference.
The OPF consensus was that the location of this conference was outstanding! Ghent is a beautiful, mediaeval city with incredible architecture and great restaurants. A highlight for all was the guided boat tour through the city on Wednesday, from the Bijloke Music Centre to the Vooruit for the conference dinner. At the Bijloke, the mix of architecture, blending the old with the new, was seen to be very unique.
iPRES 2024 was well attended and the schedule was packed! From the pre-meeting Workshops on Monday to the site visits on Friday, the Team and Board were on the run all week! Sadly, due to scheduling conflicts, many were unable to attend all the different discussions and presentations they would have liked, but thankfully, many of the presentations remain available online through the Floq app.
Board member Micky Lindlar, Community Officer Georgia Moppett, and Tech Lead Carl Wilson presented a workshop on interpreting JHOVE error messages. The workshop was well attended, and the participants seemed to very much enjoy it. Carl also joined Sven Schlarb to assist in presenting the E-ARK validation tools in another workshop. Not one to stand around, Carl then demonstrated the new Arlington PDF Model Checker at the Wednesday Bake-Off and attended the JHOVE user session on Thursday.
Micky noted that ‘the Digital Preservation Bake-Off is dear to my heart as I have been involved with it since it was born at iPRES2019 in Amsterdam.’ Cerabyte took things quite literally this year and actually baked one of their ceramic data carriers in a pizza oven (along with a pizza, which no one wanted to try, unfortunately)! Micky’s personal highlight of this year’s Bake-Off was Vicky Rampin’s presentation of a Workflow to Archive Scholarly Code including docs and discussions. Vicky and her colleagues built a workflow using OCCAM with plugins for Memento Tracer and Memento Damage to allow harvesting and packaging of a git repo, including ephemera such as issue discussions and wiki info. (More information can be found here.)
Julie Allen, our Executive Director, found that the Bake-Off sessions were both informative and entertaining, noting it was standing room only for most of the sessions.
Many interesting posters were located around the main conference hall at the Bijloke, sometimes making it difficult to find them all, as you had to be there at different times. ‘Expert tour guides’ gave their opinions about why they thought a particular poster warranted merit and that helped to fuel some good discussions and offered different perspectives.
The Birds of a Feather sessions were ‘a breath of fresh air,’ according to Julie. ‘No slideshows or laptops, just open and friendly discussion and sharing of ideas.’
Social events throughout the week were seen to be just as important as the conference itself, giving attendees to chat about their work in a relaxed atmosphere, ‘off the record.’ It was great to catch up with colleagues from around the world, be it on a boat ride with colleagues from the US and Scotland, dancing at the reception with colleagues from the UK and Austria or sharing ribs and fries with colleagues from Luxembourg and France.
A personal highlight for Micky was a ‘longer discussion on preservation metadata that I had with the one and only Bertrand Caron on the train back from the social visit in Leuven to Ghent.’
While Amanda Slotboom, Administrative Officer, admits that most of the digital preservation content flies well above her head, she enjoyed the networking and social aspects of the conference, especially the opportunity for OPF to host a social dinner at a great Irish pub. The reception, gifts and giveaways (iPRES beer!) were fantastic, and many memorable photos were taken in the photo booth.
All in all, the conference was a great success and kudos to the organising team! OPF will look back with fond memories and great ideas moving forward.
