What I wish I knew about digital preservation: Collaboration and Networking Edition

Dr Anthea Seles (host)

ICA Secretary General

Anthea Seles, as Secretary General, is the senior staff member in the Secretariat, responsible for the line management of all ICA’s paid staff. 

She co-ordinates the work of ICA officers and bodies on the organization’s major initiatives and manages its relations with external partners. Tasked with upholding ICA’s constitution, she organizes the meetings of the Executive Board and the General Assembly and plays a major role in the planning of Quadrennial Congresses and Annual Conferences. She acts as Director of ICA Publications, both printed and electronic.

William Kilbride (moderator) 

Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

William is Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a not-for-profit membership organization providing community engagement, advocacy, workforce development, capacity, good practice and standards in digital preservation.  DPC is a dynamic, sector-making agency which is rapidly scaling to a global challenge. 

William started his career in archaeology in the 1990s with an unusual mix of qualifications in computing and archaeology. At this time, the discipline’s enthusiasm for new technology outstripped its capacity to manage the resulting data.  He worked in the Archaeology Department at Glasgow University lecturing and consulting on IT issues while completing a PhD which explored the social construction of literacy within the archaeological record.  He then moved to the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York where he became Assistant Director of a small but rapidly expanding digital repository.  He worked for several years as Research Manager responsible for the ‘Human History’ curatorial group at Glasgow Museums with significant management roles in a series of capital building projects including the Riverside Museum, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre as well as a leading a wide range of research and curatorial based projects.  He joined the DPC in 2009 and since then has guided its transformation to a critical, cross-sector global community. 

In 2020 he was jointly named ‘Information Manager of the Year’ by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. 

Dr Mirerza González-Vélez 

 Associated Academic Dean of the College of Humanities, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedra

Mirerza González-Vélez, Ph.D. is the Associated Academic Dean of the College of Humanities, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. Co-founder of The Diaspora Project, and lead researcher of the Puerto Rico’s branch of RIPDASA (Red Iberoamericana de Preservación Digital de Archivos Sonoros y Audiovisuales) she has contributed to Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities teaching and research. At the present time she collaborates as co-director of the Advisory Board of the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and is one of the project leaders of the Archivo de Respuestas a Emergencias de Puerto Rico (AREPR) a freely available Omeka S site that depicts and describes the innovative knowledge production of grassroots community organizations in Puerto Rico in the wake of both natural and man-made disasters funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project involves collaboration between the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, Michigan State University, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean. 

Tibaut (Tebow) Houzanme

Principal Document & Records Management Officer within the Office of the Secretary General and General Secretariat of the African Development Bank Group (AfDB)

Tibaut Houzanme is Principal Document & Records Management Officer within the Office of the Secretary General and General Secretariat of the African Development Bank Group (AfDB); he collaborates on documents & records systems implementation, records management, disclosure and access to information and provides guidance and trainings.  

Prior to joining the AfDB, Tibaut primarily worked on audiovisual records metadata at the United Nations’ Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT)’s Archives & Records Section (MARS). As a former Digital Records Archivist of the Indiana Archives and Records Administration (IARA) in the US, Tibaut also co-animated webinars on Digital Preservation for the US Council of State Archivists (CoSA)’s State Electronic Records Initiative (SERI). 

As an active member of the International Council on Archives (ICA)’s Managing Digital & Physical Records Expert Group (MPDR-EG), Tibaut collaborates on curating a body of knowledge to serve implementation of lifecycle records management in systems. His areas of interest are records in digital environments, digital preservation, access to information and Informetrics. He can be reached at www.linkedin.com/in/houzanme  

Alina Karlos

Assistant Archivist at the University of Namibia 

Alina Karlos is an Assistant Archivist at the University of Namibia and she also teaches a course on web archiving. Her research interests include Electronic Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS), cloud computing, digitisation and digital preservation. 

Dr Mónica Maronna

Universidad de la República de Uruguay

Courtney Mumma 

Deputy Director of the Texas Digital Library consortium 

Courtney Mumma grew up on Ft. Sam Houston Army base in San Antonio, TX, and made her way to Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she became an archivist and librarian working in open-source software and specializing in digital preservation, ultimately contributing to the development and expansion of Archivematica. She came back to San Antonio, after a stint at the Internet Archive working on web archiving, to be closer to her family and is currently the Deputy Director of the Texas Digital Library consortium, a collective of university libraries working towards open, sustainable, and secure digital heritage and scholarly communications via shared infrastructure and resources. 

Marcel Ras 

Manager of the Research Data Support Network at the VU University in Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit) 

Marcel is the Manager of the Research Data Support Network at the VU University in Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit), where he is responsible for the coordination of the Research Support activities within the University. Within the RDS Network the various decentralized research support activities will be combined to create an active institutional environment to stimulate open science, creation of FAIR data and good research data management practice. 

Until April 2021 Marcel was the Program Manager for the activities related to Digital Preservation at the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (DDHN). This network was established in 2015 with the aim to improve the visibility, usability and sustainability of Dutch digital heritage collections; this is essential to ensure the long-term accessibility of digital information through the establishment of a national network of facilities. The DDHN is the successor of the Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation (NCDD), a network to foster exchange of knowledge and national collaboration in digital preservation. Of which Marcel also was the Program Manager. 

Dr Perla Olivia Rodriguez

Researcher, Institute of Library and Information Research, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 

Pamela Vizner Oyarce

Adjunct Instructor NYU