Australasia Preserves Monthly Meetup – June 2019

Since the beginning of Australasia Preserves in February 2018, the Digital Scholarship team in Scholarly Services at the University of Melbourne has been running monthly meetups for the community, featuring wonderful practitioners and academics working in the field of digital preservation in the Australasian region.

The June monthly meetup for 2019 is a rather special occasion: it has been organised in collaboration with the National and State Libraries Australia (NSLA) digital preservation community of practice. This meetup will be held on Friday 7 June, 9.30am-12pm (AEST), and we’ll be welcoming guest speakers Micky Lindlar  and  Melanie Swalwell.

Micky (Michelle) Lindlar leads the Digital Preservation Team at TIB, the German National Library of Science and Technology. Responsibilities of that role include the oversight of a digital preservation system which is used for TIB’s own holdings as well as for a Digital-Preservation-as-a-Service solution. Micky’s main research interest revolves around file formats in the evolving preservation context and how we as a community can better identify, monitor and mitigate risks and changes associated with formats. Micky has been serving on the Board of Directors of the Open Preservation Foundation since 2012, leads the Rosetta Digital Preservation Working group and is involved with various other national and international digital preservation working groups and initiatives.

Drawing on experiences made in different digital preservation roles, Micky’s talk, A decade in digital preservation – a personal, institutional, national and community view, will give a brief overview of the past 10 years of digital preservation from four perspectives: a personal, an institutional, a national and a community perspective. It will highlight what TIB’s digital preservation approach looks like, give an insight into the German digital preservation landscape and show how the OPF as a leading community within the domain has evolved over the years. The talk will conclude with thoughts on current and future challenges in digital preservation.

Melanie Swalwell is a scholar of digital media arts, cultures, and histories and an advocate for born digital heritage. Her research is concerned with complex digital artefacts such as videogames and media artworks: their creation, use, preservation, and legacy. Melanie assembled and lead the multi-disciplinary “Play It Again” team, an ARC Linkage Project focused on game history and preservation of Australian and New Zealand game titles for 1980s microcomputers. Melanie is the author of many chapters and articles on the histories of digital games, and co-editor of The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on cultural history, theory and aesthetics (McFarland, 2008), and Fans and Videogames: Histories, fandom, archives (Routledge, 2017). She is currently completing a monograph, Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (MIT Press) and editing another collection, Game History and the Local. Melanie is Professor of Digital Media Heritage in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University in Melbourne.

In this talk, Melanie will outline the participants in two recently-funded ARC Linkage projects: “Play It Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s”, and “Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a best practice method and national collection”, discussing the directions in which the teams are planning to head.

Please note: Tea and coffee will be available at the meetup from 9am. This is a meetup organised in collaboration with National and State Libraries of Australia (NSLA), main event hosted off-campus with limited capacity.

If you’re interested but cannot make it on the day, please register for the webinar.