The Biblioteca de Catalunya welcomes world experts in digital preservation

18-11-2013

A hundred representatives coming from the US and Europe will meet in Barcelona in a congress dedicated to design cooperative actions on digital preservation. The Conference “Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation II: An Action Assembly” (ANADP 2013) is taking place from November 18th to 20th at the Biblioteca de Catalunya, where the representatives from 16 countries will discuss about cooperative strategies to ensure permanent access to digital documentation.

The meeting, that will bring together world experts in digital preservation from different points of view (including National libraries, University libraries, research centers, public libraries, science and information managmenet programs, archives, entities and companies, and funding agencies) is going to be useful to settle international coordinated activities to preserve our collective digital memory.

The event is organized by Educopia Institute, an institution from the United States leaded by Dr. Martin Halberg (University of North Texas), and for this edition has the local support of the Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC) and the Biblioteca de Catalunya, and the collaboration of the Universitat de Barcelona.

The last edition of the Congress has received the Preservation Publication Award 2013 from the Society of Americans Archivists (SAA). Current edition will bring together in Barcelona the “fathers” of digital preservation: Clifford A. Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information), Joy Davidson (Digital Curation Centre), Neil Grindley (JISC), Charles J. Henry (Council on Library and Information Resources) and Tyler Walters (Virginia Tech).

The Biblioteca de Catalunya, who hosts the event, has a long career in digital preservation. Member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, in 2005 started a pioneer project, PADICAT (Digital Heritage of Catalonia) destined to the preservation of Catalan web pages, at the same time that, thanks to the digital repositories promoted with CBUC and other institutions, has digitalized much of its collection to be published on the Internet, in projects like ARCA (Arxiu de Revistes Catalanes Antigues), MDC (Memòria Digital de Catalunya), Google Books or Europeana. In 2011 created the repository COFRE (Conservem per al Futur Recursos Electrònics), for the preservation of digital documentation susceptible of being permanently accessed.