AVPreserve At PASIG 2013

AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak and Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen have been invited to speak at this week’s meeting of the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) May 22-24 in Washington DC. PASIG is self-described as an “independent, community-led meeting providing a forum for practitioners, researchers, industry experts and vendors in the field of digital preservation, long-term information retention, and archiving to exchange ideas, identify trends, and forge new connections.” The PASIG meetings are critical to the future of preservation because, though the archival and tech worlds frequently work on parallel tracks concerning the same issues, there is a distinct lack of opportunities for conversation and sharing between them. Over the past few years the group has also taken an increased interest in dealing with the complexities of audiovisual materials.

At the meeting Kara will be a part of the Digital Preservation Bootcamp Panel speaking about Best Practices in Preserving Common Content Types for Media, along with a stellar group of digital preservation experts from Stanford University, Library of Congress, California Digital Library, and more. On Day 2 Chris will be a part of the Audiovisual Media Preservation Deep Dive panel discussing our new Cost of Inaction calculator. This analytical tool compares the money invested in reformatting magnetic media and the resulting extension of the media’s life against the cost of managing that media without making it accessible and, ultimately, losing it to decay or obsolesce within the next 10-15 years. Chris’ co-panelists will be Richard Wright (AudioVisual Trends), Dave Rice (City University of New York), and Mark Leggott (Islandora/University of Prince Edward Island).

As always there are a number of great panels and speakers planned, and we hope you’re able to make it this year or put the meeting on your radar for the next one. Chris and Kara are excited to attend PASIG to contribute and learn from others, so say howdy to them while you’re there.