Welcome to the iPRES 2019 WhyPres series: testimonials and reflection from members of the digital preservation community regarding their iPRES participation. This blog was written for you by Jesse de Vos, productmanager at The Netherlands Institute for Sound and member of the iPRES 2019 Programme Committee.
I’ve been working at Sound and Vision for about seven years now. Working on a wide variety of projects, I always seem to return to the same general topic: the preservation of dynamic digital content. This has been games, websites, interactive documentaries… but might very well expand into the areas of VR, social media and who knows what else in the near future.
Rookie Archivist
My first and, so far, only iPRES was in 2015 in beautiful Chapel Hill where the leafs were turning. Some fellow colleagues of Sound and Vision were not able to attend and I was next in line to represent the team. There was interest in the work that we had done implementing PREMIS in our own Preservation Metadata Dictionary in the context of an audio-visual archive, which I was asked to present. The workshop was titled PREMIS Implementation Fair. Being a rookie archivist I felt somewhat intimidated by the level of expertise present in the room. But I remember a warm welcome and lots of interest despite my occasional lack of answers. iPRES 2015 for me was a bit of a crash course to preservation within different domains: university libraries, museums, national archives, company archives, etc.
Inspiration
It’s interesting that now in my work a lot of the individuals and projects that I got introduced to at iPRES 2015 are still an inspiration. Being on the Programme Committee for iPRES 2019, responsible for the Workshops and Tutorials, I get to play a (small) part in creating the context in which we facilitate such collaboration and inspiration.
Looking forward to iPRES 2019
I am obviously really looking forward to the Workshops and Tutorials. It will be great to see people walk away with new hands-on skills and increased confidence to apply to their work back home. Also, really hoping to meet some young(er) archivists. Preservation is also very much about teaching the next generation how to do it.
Jesse de Vos
Productmanager working on various new and interactive media collections
at The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision and Workshops & Tutorials Co-Chair for iPRES 2019