Trans-Europe Web Archiving Express: The first Global Partners Meeting and beyond
November 7th, 2019
by the Archive-It team
We are excited to have many new institutional partners from across Europe become users of our various services over the last few years. From National Libraries conducting full ccTLD domain harvests to NGOs and heritage organizations using Archive-It, web archiving and research use of archived web data continues to expand in Europe. Our staff has also aimed to be more active in European initiatives, from joining the DPC to presenting at, and participating in, more conferences and meetings in Europe. One thing we have long aimed to do is mirror our long-standing, U.S.-located Archive-It Partner Meeting and host an partner-oriented event outside North America that both reflects the growing international diversity of our users, the growing portfolio of services we provide, and includes the potential for additional collaborators and affiliates to join us. The recent iPRES conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands provided the perfect event and location to launch our first-of-many, and amazingly-titled, Global Partners Meeting (GPM).
Presenting @ iPRES in Amsterdam on recent IA and Archive-It activities . Photo by Gabriella Ivacs.
The October GPM was a resounding success and gave IA staff, partners, and others a chance to share recent technical development, new projects and programs, and ideas for the future of collecting, accessing, and using archived born-digital data. Team staff Jefferson, Kyrie, and Helge hosted the event for 40 attendees representing institutions from across Europe and around the world. You can review the presenter slides to see the range of presentations and organizations participating.
But wait — testing the limits of jet-lag and airport navigation — there’s more!
Staff from the department presented at a number of other European events recently. First, we were honored to be invited to be one of the keynotes in the Time Machine 2019 conference in Dresden, Germany. The Time Machine project is a multinational European project that “aims to develop the Big Data of the Past, creating a huge distributed digital information system mapping the European social, cultural and geographical evolution across times.” The conference featured dozens of fantastic projects from across Europe using digital and digitized heritage collections in computational research and access. Plus, the reception was at the famous Dresden Castle! Not long after, team members Jefferson and Bryan presented at the FORCE11 2019 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, which was held at Murrayfield Rugby Stadium. [Side note that European conference/reception venues put U.S.-based conferences to shame. Get your act together with fewer dreary Hyatts, ‘Murica!]. At FORCE, we were excited to talk about our recent work archiving and providing enhanced access to scholarly outputs published on the web. There’s even video:
FORCE is a great conference for those working in the open scholarship and research space.
Finally, in less continental affairs, regional Archive-It events also brought partners together in Massachusetts and Texas this summer. Keep an eye on our Community Calendar for the next opportunity to catch up with partners and Internet Archive staff. And never hesitate to contact us if we can help to organize a meeting, workshop, hackathon, or more near you!