On October 20, Rieger will join other panelists to provide insights from on implementations of current preservation tools and to consider the opportunities in deploying and integrating these tools with local digital content management processes. Please see abstract below:

Abstract

As cultural heritage organizations seek solutions, open source, community-based, and commercial digital preservation systems and tools have proliferated. Nevertheless, given the magnitude of digital content and the requirements of specific file formats, institutions struggle to integrate disparate tools and systems to support their institutional preservation programs. The purpose of the panel discussion is to provide insights from on-the-ground implementations of current preservation tools and to consider the opportunities and challenges in deploying and integrating these tools with local digital content management processes.

On October 21, Rieger will also give the keynote address, titled “Documenting the Pandemic: Archiving the Present for Future Research, Policy, and Practice. Please see abstract below:

Keynote: Documenting the Pandemic: Archiving the Present for Future Research, Policy, and Practice

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, researchers from all around the world have been mobilized to help understand and combat COVID-19. Given the prevalence of information and communication technologies, the communities have been inundated by multimodal information about various aspects of the pandemic, involving text, image, video, and speech.  The sources vary, expanding from governmental agencies to research institutions, from policy makers to advocacy groups. Although “big data” tends to get the most attention due to its scale, prominence, and potential to advance public health strategies, the long tail of research data (aka “small data”) constitutes richly diverse and heterogeneous evidence that captures many sociological, political, economic, historic, and cultural aspects of the pandemic. What are some of the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic about making both big and small data discoverable, accessible, and usable to a range of scholars and the general public? How can we preserve these rich and diverse sources of information not only for future generations but also for those who will be examining various aspects of the pandemic in the near future? What does it take to provide enduring access to trusted, well-documented, and diverse data so that we can learn from the present experiences to design a better future?