The Preservations and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) is holding its annual meeting this week at the El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. This is the first time this international event has been held in Central America, and it promises to be an excellent conference.
PASIG is dedicated to advancing the practice of digital preservation. It differentiates itself by bringing together experts who have a common goal of putting digital archiving theory into practice – including practitioners, academics, and industry leaders.
PASIG was started by Sun Microsystems, but has always been vendor-neutral, and highly collaborative. Over the years it has become an engaging place to share ideas, successes and failures. Leadership has changed a number of times since its inception, but the common goals and themes have remained true to the initial concepts. It has proved to be an excellent forum for those that are looking to get started or push the edges of the digital preservation boundary.
El Colegio de Mexico, site for PASIG 2019
I have been attending PASIG on a regular basis since my first conference in 2008 which was held in San Francisco and had about 50 attendees. When I look back to those early meetings, it is clear that the digital preservation landscape has evolved tremendously. Back in 2008 the focus was on local infrastructure and on premise solutions mostly constructed from open source tools. Fast forward to 2019 and digital preservation has now transferred mainly to the cloud. Today there are plenty of options for comprehensive and robust solutions and there is an emerging adoption of artificial intelligence to enrich the digital content that is being preserved.
I am very much excited to be attending this year’s meeting. The three day program is packed full of compelling papers, panels and workshops. I’m also fortunate to be invited to participate in a post conference panel that is considering the question “What will digital preservation look like in 2030”. I’m looking forward to hearing the thoughts of other panelist to see how well our thinking is aligned.
Throughout the conference I will be posting daily updates and takeaways from the event, so if you are not attending the conference, please stop by the blog to hear the latest news and thoughts from the Digital Preservation Community.
