I had a fantastic time at the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s Annual General Meeting this year, held on the beautiful campus of Stanford University (with a day trip down to the Internet Archive in San Francisco). It’s hard to write these sorts of recaps: I had such an amazing time, my head filled with great ideas, that it’s difficult to give everything the justice that they deserve. Many of the presentation slide decks are available on the schedule, and videos will be forthcoming.

My main takeaways: we’re continuing to see the development of sophisticated access tools to these repositories, coupled with increasingly exciting and sophisticated researcher use of them. There’s a recognition that context matters when understanding archived webpages, a phrase that came up a few times throughout the event. Crucially, there was a lot of energy in the room: there’s a real enthusiasm towards making these as accessible as possible and facilitating their use. I wasn’t exaggerating when I noted to one of the organizers that I wish every conference was like this: leaving me on my flight home with lots of fantastic ideas, hope for the future, and excitement about what can be done. As the recent “Conference Manifesto” in the New York Times noted, that’s not the experience at all conferences!

Read one for a short day-by-day breakdown, with apologies for presentations I couldn’t include or didn’t give full justice to: Continue reading IIPC 2015 Recap →