9. On infrastructure
• “Those who cannot learn from history are
doomed to repeat it” - Santayana
• Too much wheel re-invention
• Too much architecture before usecases
• Too much technology push
• But some encouraging signs of a desire to build
on what is there and meet the needs of real users
• And some interesting research ideas
10. On data
• A number of talks about the importance of
data to the scholarly record
• And by implication/explication, the
importance of preserving that data and the
processes that produced it
• Not the same as the existing born-digital
challenge
– see Van de Sompel and Treloar (2014) for why!
• New frontier for preservation community
11. On practice
• Good selection of talks (particularly in the
short papers section)
• Useful reflections on what worked and what
didn’t
• Value of iPres for formal and informal
exchange of stories and experiences
– c.f. Orr JE (1996) Talking About Machines: An
Ethnography of a Modern Job. Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, NY.
12. On theory
• Number of papers focussed on
theory/modelling
• These seemed a bit sterile and divorced from
practice (to me, at least)
• Reminiscent of Enterprise Architectures
• NOTE: But hard to anticipate which theoretical
work will turn into productive practice
13. On pragmatics
• “le mieux est l'ennemi du bien” - Voltaire
• Number of speakers arguing for solutions that
don’t try to be perfect
• And a recognition (in the data domain at least)
that doing it perfectly (or even well?) is
impossible
• Herbert’s idea of starting with a seed, rather
than a collection
15. To conclude
• Digital preservation is too important not to care
about
– AT example
• Much of the work being reported at this
conference will play a vital role in the solutions
that need to be developed
• Thank you for your commitment and energy –
please don’t lose it!
• http://www.slideshare.net/atreloar/closing-comment
Editor's Notes
This isn’t my community, although I have had a bit to do with other communities that overlap (libraries, data, eresearch)
There are many paths through the conference – I could only take one (but I did try to read as many as possible of the other papers)
I see the world through data goggles
Last 24 hours only
The best is the enemy of the good
The best is the enemy of the good
Now frontier in same sense as library