Let’s talk about preservation and access!
On November 7, 2024, the New Paths to Information Preservation and Access Meeting was held, organised jointly by Arquivo.pt and the Arquivo de Ciência e Tecnologia, the first located on Avenida do Brasil and the latter on Avenida D. Carlos I, in Lisbon, both services of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).
The aim of this joint FCT team was precisely to bring about the meeting and sharing of experiences between various institutions that inevitably have to manage information, both in traditional formats such as paper and in digital formats.
The meeting had more than 200 participants and 27 interventions throughout the day, 9 of which were submitted for a session called ‘Community Space’.
The Portuguese Association of Librarians, Archivists, Information and Documentation Professionals – APBAD made an important contribution to publicising the event to the community and was present with an information stand.
An international day dedicated to digital preservation
On this day, World Digital Preservation Day was celebrated, an initiative of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) to which Arquivo.pt has been associated since the first edition in 2017. Jane Winters, president of the DPC, sent a video message to join this initiative in Portugal.
Digital information was the main theme of the speeches. At the opening, the Head of the DGLAB – Direção Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas (Directorate for Books, Archives and Libraries), Silvestre Lacerda, recalled that the DGLAB was a pioneer among public organisations in tackling the issue of digital preservation. FCT vice-president Francisco Santos emphasised the economic value of data for scientific research.
Digital preservation is not just about technology, as Henrique São Mamede, Professor at Universidade Aberta, INESC TEC, said at the opening conference. It’s also about people, the human factor, the environment outside organisations and new sensibilities such as sustainability and ecology. Hence the importance of creating bridges, of using Artificial Intelligence, for example, in conjunction with ethics.
Throughout the day, four panels brought together presentations on various preservation contexts such as the digitisation of sound, image and video, research data, regulatory frameworks, management systems for digitised or born-digital information, dissemination and access, and use in academic research.
Know more, see the meeting programme.
Web preservation and the use of Arquivo.pt
The theme of web archiving was in the spotlight at this event, given the number of presentations it received:
- Moisés Rockemback, Associate Professor at the University of Coimbra and co-author of the book Arquivamento da web e preservação digital (Web archiving and digital preservation), addressed the issue of memory. Preserving the web allows us to bring to light events that were broadcast on digital media and, in this sense, postpones the end of history expressed in the metaphor of the ‘Dark Age’, a time of darkness, empty of information.
- Ricardo Basílio, digital curator, presented the online exhibition ‘Memories of 25 April on the Internet’, created in collaboration with the Comissão Comemorativa 50 Anos 25 de Abril, based on preserved web pages.
- Joana Paulino, historian and researcher at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, showed how technologies contribute to the development of studies in areas traditionally far removed from technologies, based on her experience at the Digital Humanities Laboratory.
- António Campos and Hélder Mestre, from the Sines City Council Archive, showed how they have been preserving web content of local interest since 2020 in collaboration with Arquivo.pt. They record web pages with Webrecorder’s ArchiveWeb.page, transcribe images and videos verbatim and also use PDF. The issue of accessibility to content for people with special needs is fundamental to the preservation process.
- António Ramiro and Carmen Fonseca, winners of the Arquivo.pt 2024 Award, presented their work Noticioso.pt. It’s a project that reuses information from Arquivo.pt to challenge citizens’ critical capacity.
- Pedro Gomes, in charge of collections at Arquivo.pt, presented CitationSaver, a service that collects references to web content in scientific literature and preserves them at Arquivo.pt.
To crown the day, Maria Inácia Rezola, Executive Commissioner of the Mission Structure for the Commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution of 25 April 1974, announced the award of the ‘50 Anos 25 de Abril’ Honourable Mention in the Arquivo.pt 2025 Award, to the best work on 25 April using Arquivo.pt.
Image gallery
Encontro Dia Mundial da Preservação Digital 2024 #WDPD2024
Know more
- Official page of the meeting at FCT website
- Programme
- FCT promove Encontro Novos caminhos para a Preservação e o Acesso à Informação (New at the FCT website)