Events Calendar

DPC Members Forum and Networking Event - Americas

24 Apr 2025 at 10:00am - 25 Apr 2025 at 4:00pm UTC-5

Vanderbilt University’s Special Collections and University Archives

General

We are delighted to invite DPC Members and members of the digital preservation community to attend our first DPC Members Forum and Networking Event in the USA!

This two-day event offers programming for the entire digital preservation community. Starting with a full day event which is open to all, we will explore some practical ways to get started and make progress with digital preservation from making the case for investment, through to maturity modelling and identifying the skills and activities required to carry out effective digital preservation in your organisations.

Day two is exclusively for DPC Members and in addition to meeting and networking with other members of the Coalition, we will have an exciting program of fast-paced member led talks and discussions, providing the opportunity to take the floor and exchange ideas, showcase work and discuss key themes.

Livestreaming and hybrid options are available for DPC Members only.

This event will offer:

Keynote sessions and practical skills workshops
Opportunities to connect with the regional digital preservation community
Exclusive member-only networking time
Hybrid option for DPC Members unable to travel in person
Professional visit

Who is the event for?

This is a practical set of events which are designed to privilege operational staff working directly on digital preservation. We are particularly keen for the following groups to attend:

Junior staff recently appointed and looking for opportunities to build their professional networks;
New entrants to digital preservation seeking to apply professional know-how to this new field;
Experienced practitioners who have clear insights into the challenges of digital preservation in their own institutions.
Senior staff, researchers and students are also welcome, though it is practical knowledge exchange that will be most prominent.

Program*

Day 1: Open Networking Event and Introduction to Digital Preservation

Thursday 24 April, 10:00 – 17:00 CST (UTC-6) (click for local time)

Registration for the open Networking Event and Introduction to Digital Preservation is open to all. Event streaming and online attendance is available for DPC Members only.

*Timings (local)*	*Activity*
10:00 – 10:45	Registration open, refreshments served Please come early to meet your fellow delegates
10:45 – 11:00	A welcome from our host** John Shaw, Vanderbilt University
11:00 – 11:40	Getting Started with Digital Preservation** Andy Jackson and Anna Perricci, DPC ‘Getting Started with Digital Preservation' will introduce participants to common digital preservation concepts and issues before walking through the firsts steps they can take to manage their digital assets. This includes how to start building simple workflows, bitstream preservation and providing access, before exploring other DPC resources which may help with the next steps of their digital preservation journey.
11:40 – 11:50	Q&A
12:00 – 12:20	Advocating for Digital Preservation** Sarah Middleton, DPC Like digital preservation itself, advocacy in our field is a continuous process and requires relies the co-ordination of a range of skills and services from within and/or outside our organizations. This presentation provides attendees with skills and ideas for identifying stakeholders and champions required to affect change, ways to showcase digital preservation as an indispensable service for their organisation, and resources to help support their organisational advocacy activities.
12:20 – 12:30	Q&A
12:30 – 12:45	Lightning talks from our sponsors** Libnova
12:45 – 13:30	Lunch and networking
13:30 – 14:15	Keynote session: A Vision for Trustworthy Web Archiving** Michael Nelson, Old Dominion University A record of contemporary history would be highly incomplete without representation of materials available via the internet. Making functional and accurate copies of web pages for use in archives is challenging to say the least. With web archives there are multiple specific types of errors or nuances that arise regularly. For example, the locations (web addresses) of resources online can change frequently making the information on those web pages unavailable (also known as link rot). The subject matter or salient points on a web page can change, which alters the significance or meaning of that information (also known as content drift). Link rot and content drift have always been a part of the web experience: as we share links and create bookmarks, the content at those links often disappears or changes so much that it no longer reflects our original intent. Currently, we see this with increasing frequency with entire government websites disappearing or radically altering their content to reflect changing priorities and narratives. In the absence of a unified and consistent strategy, alternate archives and data rescue efforts have arisen to replace the content lost. But how do we know the new pages faithfully maintain the content of the pages they purport to replace? In this talk, we explore how a network of accessible, publicly available, independent, interoperable, robust, auditable, cooperating web archives can be used to preserve the web.
14:15 – 14:30	Q&A/Discussion
14:30 – 14:45	Break
14:45 – 16:45	Continuous Improvement Workshop: DPC Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) Andy Jackson, DPC The DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM) is a digital preservation maturity modelling tool that has been designed to enable rapid benchmarking of an organization’s digital preservation capability and facilitate continuous improvement over time. This workshop explains the key concepts which make up the DPC RAM and helps users get started in establishing thire base line for digital preservation. OR Continuous Improvement Workshop: the Competency Audit Toolkit (CAT) Sarah Middleton, DPC Applying a carefully considered approach to continuous improvement of digital preservation capabilities can greatly benefit practitioners when looking to set and achieve objectives, sharing and embedding this responsibility across whole organizations. The DPC has created the DPC Competency Framework with accompanying audit toolkit (DPC CAT) and example role descriptions, to help facilitate this process. This workshop aims to provide attendees with the skills and tools to develop and implement a methodology for continuous improvement in digital preservation skills at their organization.
16:45 - 17:00	Regroup and recap
17:00	Thanks, close formal program
19:00 +	Option to attend a social dinner and continue networking

About our Keynote Speaker

Michael L. Nelson is a Professor and Eminent Scholar at Old Dominion University (ODU), with a dual appointment in the Computer Science Department and the Virginia Modeling, Simulation and Analysis Center (VMASC). He is the Deputy Director for the ODU School of Data Science, the Chief Scientist for the Office of Enterprise Research Initiatives, and the co-director of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group. His research interests include the technology, security, and social impact of web archiving. Prior to joining ODU, he worked at NASA Langley Research Center from 1991-2002, where he developed the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS). He has been (Co-)PI on over $13M in external funding, (co-)authored over 300 technical publications, and is a co-editor of the specifications for OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, Memento, ResourceSync, and Signposting.

*Subject to change

**Livestream available for DPC Members only

Our sponsors

We are very grateful to the following organisations for their sponsorship of the DPC Open Networking Event:

For more information about sponsorship opportunities for this event, please contact sarah.middleton@dpconline.org.

Day 2: DPC Members Forum and Networking Event

Friday 25 April, 08:30 – 16:00 CST (UTC-6) (click for local time)

Registration for the DPC Members Forum and Networking Event is available for DPC Members only. A hybrid option is available for both streams for DPC Members who register to attend.

Download the program containing descriptions and details of all sessions

*Timings (local)*	*Activity*
09:30 – 10:00	Registration open, tea and coffee provided
10:00 – 10:15	Welcome and introduction to the DPC Members Forum
10:15 – 10:20	Move into groups
10:20 – 11:00 (40 mins)	Stream 1	Stream 2 Stephen Abrams, Harvard University DP Success Metrics Share/discuss
11:00 – 11:05	Change groups
11:05 – 11:45 (40 mins)	Stream 1 Sarah Barsness (online) and Carol Kussman (in-person), University of Minnesota Python Show and Tell Share/discuss	Stream 2 Grayson Murphy, APTrust/University of Alabama at Birmingham Identifying Common Challenges Encountered by New Digital Preservation Practitioners and Exploring Strategies to Address Them: Preliminary Research Findings Share
11:45 – 11:55	Change groups
11:55 – 12:35 (40 mins)	Stream 1 Ariel Segal, Library of Congress (online) Digitizing the LOC Hebrew Manuscripts Share	Stream 2 Nathan Tallman, APTrust Digital Archivist Routing Tool (DART) Workshop Share
12:35 – 13:30	Break for Lunch
13:30 – 14:10 (40 mins)	Stream 1 Heather Tompkins, Library and Archives Canada (online) Service Level – how much effort is enough? Share/discuss	Stream 2 David Cirella, Yale University Library Digital Preservation as a dependency Share
14:10 – 14:15	Change groups
14:15 – 14:55 (40 mins)	Stream 1 Amanda Tomé, Digital Research Alliance of Canada (online) Getting Creative: Exploring ways to communicate dp to others Share/discuss	Stream 2 (on-site only) DPC team Digital Preservationists Anonymous Closed group for in-person attendees
14:55 – 15:00	Break (no group change)
15:00 – 15:40 (40 mins)	Stream 1 Lisa Lawlis, Western Libraries (online) Storing local copies as AIPs Share/discuss	Stream 2 (on-site only) DPC team Digital Preservationists Anonymous ...continued. Closed group for in-person attendees
15:40 – 16:00	Feedback, wrap up and close

*Subject to change.

In-person participants, please log-in to access the Session Sign-up Sheet

Registration

This event is open to DPC Members and non-members alike, with programming designed to optimise opportunities for networking and information exchange.

Full Members are invited to send up to 5 representatives, and Associate Members are invited to send 3 representatives to attend day 2 of this event.

Registration will close on Wednesday 16 April.

Please note: This event is only available online for DPC Members. If you are not a DPC Member and you register to attend this event but do not attend in person, a $50 cancellation fee will be applicable. However, we do understand that plans often change for reasons outside your control. Therefore, if you register for the event and find that you are no longer able to attend, please let us know as soon as possible and no later than 72 hours before the event start - otherwise the cancellation fee will also apply.

Register to attend in-person for Day 1 (NON MEMBERS)

BOOK NOW - DAY 1

DPC Members log-in to register for Days 1 and/or 2 (MEMBERS ONLY)

If you have any queries about this event, please contact sarah.middleton@dpconline.org

We look forward to connecting with you all soon!

DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy

The DPC Community is guided by the values set out in our Strategic Plan and aims to be respectful, welcoming, inclusive and transparent. We encourage diversity in all its forms and are committed to being accessible to everyone who wishes to engage with the topic of digital preservation, whilst remaining technology and vendor neutral. We ask all those who are part of this community to be positive, accepting, and sensitive to the needs and feelings of others in alignment with our DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy.

Planning your visit to Nashville

Hotels near the venue: https://bit.ly/hotels_Vanderbilt

For parking arrangments, scroll to the foot of this page (no appointment necessary): https://bit.ly/Parking_Vanderbilt

Event Location: Vanderbilt University’s Special Collections and University Archives

1101 19th Ave. S.
Nashville
TN
TN 37235
US