Chair of the DPASSH organising committee and DRI’s Training and Engagement Manager Lorraine Marrey gives us an overview of this year’s Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities (DPASSH) conference. This is the first in a series of blog posts about DPASSH conference 2024.
The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) has been running DPASSH since 2015, and it has become a stalwart in the Irish digital preservation calendar since then – bringing together researchers, practitioners, and those with an eye on the ever changing landscape of digital preservation, both nationally and internationally.
This year it was an honour for DRI to host DPASSH in Limerick and team up with our partners, and DRI members the University of Limerick Glucksman Library and The Hunt Museum. Running over the course of 2 days from 27-28 June, over 80 delegates from Ireland, the UK, Europe, and North America enjoyed a conference programme packed full of inspiring talks, informative presentations, and engaging workshops, held between the bright airy setting of the reading room in The Glucksman Library and the esteemed walls of the Hunt Museum for an evening reception and keynote speech.
Conference Theme: Collections as Data / Data as Collections
Researchers and the general public are interacting with cultural memory collections in new ways, accessing and reusing both digital objects and collections descriptions in large scale inquiries which demand new perspectives, and utilise computer-driven methodologies, which may prove difficult to openly share and preserve. The work that collections professionals are doing to deliver and safeguard cultural heritage resources is also changing, prompting a reassessment of the workflows of digitisation and the development of digital tools that allow researchers to visualise and study collections at scale. As a result, we are building a new collaborative digital culture that will fundamentally re-shape both collections work and research practice. How might we envision the roles, opportunities, and challenges in delivering and preserving collections as data alongside the research outputs that are generated from them?
The conference programme was developed to explore this theme through a variety of topics, including Preservation, Challenges and Opportunities, Data and Communities, and Heritage & Open Research, the first evening was finished off with an evening reception and keynote by Dr. Coen Wilders of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on Enabling Access to Cultural Heritage Data by Advancing FAIR Principles at the Rijksmuseum. There were also some hands-on workshops such as Digitisation at the University of Limerick, Collections-as-training-data: Generative AI, data protection and intellectual property in digital cultural heritage, and a DPASSH reading club. The Glucksman Library and the Hunt Museum also had physical exhibitions to browse to complement those digital resources in the Repository.
The final day was rounded off with a passionate and engaging talk from DRI member Clare Memories who closed out with a talk entitled Clare Memories: Working with the Digital Repository of Ireland to digitally preserve the oral history, heritage and folklore of County Clare.
We are sincerely grateful to our sponsors: the Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA), WorldFAIR, the National Open Research Forum (NORF), and Specialist AV without whom we couldn’t have provided such a wide programme. We’ll see you for DPASSH 2026!
