Spanning the Boundaries of Digital Curation Education was a workshop held on 22-23 September 2010 in Vienna, Austria, in association with the seventh International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, iPRES 2010. The event addressed a problem that remains familiar to preservation professionals: educational programmes were multiplying, but the specialist time and resources required to develop them were still limited.
Contemporary programme material places the workshop at the Austrian National Library, Van Swieten Saal, with sessions on the afternoon of 22 September and morning of 23 September. The event sought to share information across national, institutional and educational boundaries and explore opportunities for future collaboration.
This page is an independent, newly written historical record. It is not the original event programme and should not be cited as if it were authored by the organisers.
Verified event details
- Title: Spanning the Boundaries of Digital Curation Education
- Dates: Wednesday 22 and Thursday 23 September 2010
- Venue: Austrian National Library, Vienna, Austria
- Conference: iPRES 2010
- Focus: Sharing educational content, comparing training activities and identifying collective next steps in digital curation education
The conference programme lists organisers including George Coulbourne, Costis Dallas, Joy Davidson, Wendy Duff, William Kilbride, Christopher (Cal) Lee, Nancy McGovern, Simon Tanner, Manfred Thaller and Helen R. Tibbo. These names identify the event's historical organisers; they do not indicate participation in this modern editorial resource.
What was the workshop trying to solve?
Different sectors needed overlapping skills. Archives were learning to ingest born-digital collections. Researchers needed help organising, describing and preserving data. Libraries were developing training in digital lifecycle management. Cultural heritage organisations had to decide which procedures could be delivered with limited resources.
A fragmented training landscape is expensive to maintain. If every institution creates a separate introduction to file identification, integrity checking or digital preservation planning, scarce expert time is consumed by duplication. Collaboration can free that time for local adaptation, teaching and evaluation.
According to the iPRES programme, the workshop combined concise accounts of existing educational activities with small-group discussion and wider consideration of joint action. That structure is important: the aim was not simply to announce courses, but to identify how teaching materials and expertise might be shared.
Questions that still matter for digital curation education
What is foundational? Everyone handling digital collections should understand provenance, file identification, metadata, data integrity, rights, risk and access. Deeper competencies will differ between a digital archivist, a systems engineer and a research data manager.
How do we teach workflows rather than lists of tools? A person needs to understand not only how to run a format-identification utility, but what to record, how to verify the output and how that evidence will be used in a future preservation decision. Our file formats and fixity guide introduces these practical questions.
Who keeps teaching material current? Software and institutional policy change. Sustainable materials need clear ownership, dates, references and a method for correcting outdated instructions.
How do small organisations participate? Training should include low-resource examples and clearly describe the minimum viable control, the trade-offs and the point at which outside support is justified.
How do national initiatives collaborate? The questions raised by cross-border education also appear in the later Aligning Digital Preservation Across Nations workshop.
Reading the historical record
The surviving iPRES programme is a stronger source for the event's schedule and stated goals than a modern reconstruction. The iPRES 2010 programme PDF contains the workshop description. Christopher (Cal) Lee's UNC profile and a Library of Congress news item on iPRES 2010 provide additional context.
The former Digital Curation Exchange included a page referencing this event. Readers arriving from an old ?q=node/1467 link should use the original sources above for precise historical details and this page for an explanatory overview.
The practical lesson for today's websites
Knowledge sharing depends on reliable publication. A workshop announcement may be cited long after the event; if the event page disappears without a stable record or clear redirect, context becomes harder to recover. For organisations publishing conferences, training libraries or grant-funded research, a preservation plan should cover schedules, proceedings, source documents, metadata and persistent references, not just the main marketing pages.
If your organisation has an at-risk event or research site, website archiving can help create an inventory and capture plan. For already missing sites, website restoration is the relevant starting point.
Sources
- iPRES 2010 workshop programme
- Christopher (Cal) Lee, UNC
- Library of Congress: Digital Preservation Experts Come Together in Austria
- Closing the Digital Curation Gap