Annertech attends the launch of the Digital Repository of Ireland

Last week I had the privilege of attending the Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DPASSH) conference in Dublin. There were two full days of all manner of topics related to digital preservation as well as the highlight of the conference - the official launch of the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI).

There were a wide variety of topics from archiving the web to social media preservation and archiving our cultural heritage. I found the session by Helen Hockx-Yu from the British Library on "Meeting the Challenges of Preserving the UK Web" particulary interesting, as well as the session from the Internet Archive on "Rethinking Access and Extent for Web Archives". They both outlined the problem of the sheer size of the task of archiving the web and how backing up the Internet is a "best effort" for which they don't have the necessary resources to be comprehensive. The web archive track closed off with a quite entertaining session by Raelene Casey from the Irish Film Archive on their transitition to digital and the "story of Seán".

Another key session for me was one of the social media preservation sessions by Natalie Harrower (Royal Irish Academy) and Bahareh Heravi (Insight Centre at NUI Galway) on "How to Archive an Event" which went into some detail on the technical and curatorial decisions required when digitally preserving social media, including how to select what to preserve, access, context and legal or ethical considerations. It also presented some interesting stats on the number of new social media posts each minute. Apparently per minute, there are 270,000 tweets, 648,478 facebook posts, 3,125 flickr images and 100 hours of youTube videos. It's pretty amazing really and illustrates just how daunting a task it is to attempt to archive social media data.

Of course the main highlight of the event was the official launch of the Digital Repository of Ireland's repository of Ireland's humanities, social sciences and cultural heritage data. It truly is a fantastic resource and includes collections such as the "Letters of 1916" by Maynooth University and "Irish Orchestral Music" by the Contemporary Music Centre and is well worth a browse around. It's the culmination of four years of hard work by the DRI research consortium partners - Trinity College Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, Maynooth University, Dublin Institute of Technology, NUI Galway and NCAD. It's also the repository that drives the award-winning Inspiring Ireland website that we built last year.

This was the first annual conference on Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities and something that I look forward to attending again in future years. I also want to say thanks to everyone in the DRI for first putting on such an interesting and insightful event, but also for all their work over the last few years in building the repository. Hopefully it will continue to grow as a resource and preserve even more of Ireland's cultural heritage for the long term.