We like to think (and hope) that our blog The Signal acts as an informative resource from which to learn and engage in conversations of digital preservation work.  We hope that it exposes you to interesting projects and people stewarding digital collections, and that it creates opportunities to expose you to the wider community of libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and other organizations.

Just as the blog is a vehicle to explore challenges and solutions practitioners address managing digital information, we’re coming up on an excellent opportunity to share best practices and lessons learned from our individual and collective work – face-to-face.

Anil Dash speaking at the Digital Preservation 2012 meeting.

That opportunity is Digital Preservation 2013, the annual meeting of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance.  This year’s meeting will be held on July 23-25 in Alexandria, VA. Registration for the meeting is now open.

Once a year, we aim to put together a program that stimulates new thinking and exposes us to innovative ideas across the digital information landscape. It’s a chance to highlight collaborative projects on preserving and accessing digital collections, feature discussions of current tools and services for the management of digital content, and share current approaches to storage and infrastructure challenges.  For the ninth year now, we’ve been fortunate to gather members of the community and other interested professionals in an environment to share information about collecting, preserving, and delivering our cultural heritage, scientific and other valuable digital materials.

This year is no different and the planning committee has been busy crafting a solid, if not packed, agenda featuring speakers who are strong advocates for social and technological innovation. We’ll hear about topics such as managing “big data” at scale, the cultural and scholarly value of public and historical digital content, and the challenges of preserving digital resources and exploring how to provide access to them.

The meeting kicks off on the afternoon of July 23 with keynotes talks by Hilary Mason, chief scientist at bit.ly, and Sarah Werner, undergraduate program director at the Folger Shakespeare Library.  Later in the afternoon, we’ll be hearing from a panel of educators and practitioners including Christopher (Cal) Lee of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Jason Scott of the Archive Team; Anne Wootton of Pop-Up Archive; and Travis May of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on their own innovative approaches to preservation of various types of content.  We will round out the day with a series of lightning talks and a poster session from members of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance community.

On July 24, Lisa Green, executive director at Common Crawl, and Emily Gore, director for content at Digital Public Library of America, will lead off the day with opening talks. Following, there will be a unique dialogue on the emerging topic of digital preservation and environmental sustainability, the “Green Bytes: Sustainable Approaches to Digital Stewardship” panel with David Rosenthal of  Stanford University; Kris Carpenter of the Internet Archive; and Krishna Kant of George Mason University and the National Science Foundation.  The final panel of the day features speakers including Aaron Straup Cope of Cooper-Hewitt Museum Labs; Rodrigo Davies from the MIT Center for Civic Media; and Amy Robinson of the EyeWire project talking about issues at the leading edge of digital stewardship activity.

Day two will also feature a variety of smaller breakout sessions that will enable conversation around topics of digital preservation education and training, demos of digital preservation tools and services, and presentations on digital curation topics.  And there will be special presentations by the NDSA Innovation Award winners, who will be named in the coming weeks.

CurateCamp Processing participants collaborating the day’s agenda.

On July 25, day three, we’re planning to co-host a CURATEcamp, an unconference. Last year we co-hosted CURATEcamp: Processing that focused on the intersection between archival and computational notions of processing.  This year, we wanted to focus more on the digital stewardship community’s perspectives and discuss ideas about the exhibition of digital collections dealing with narratives, storytelling, and context.  Any curators, archivists, librarians, scholars, software developers, computer engineers and others looking to share, demonstrate and refine ideas about exhibition in the digital age are encouraged to attend and contribute to crafting the day’s discussions. More information about the camp will be shared on this blog in the next couple of weeks.

Digital Preservation 2013 will be held at the Westin Alexandria in Old Town Alexandria, VA.  There are two separate registration forms, one of the main meeting and one for CURATEcamp: Exhibition.  If you plan to attend both, please make sure to register using the separate forms.

There is no cost to attend either meeting but seats are limited and available on a first come, first served basis.

If you can’t make it, the first day will be taped and presentations will be posted on our website a few weeks following the meeting.  You can also follow the event on Twitter at #digpres13.

Updated 5/22: fixed typos