DRI Event Videos Collection Published

Like most organisations, DRI had to quickly adapt our education and outreach programme to an online format from March 2020 onwards due to COVID-19 related restrictions. Although adapting to a virtual environment under such challenging circumstances posed some difficulties, it also opened up many opportunities. Virtual events removed barriers to attendance for many people, allowing audience members from all over Ireland and the world to participate without the need to travel. We were delighted to also be able to welcome international speakers from the US, the UK, New Zealand, and diverse parts of Europe. The online format allowed us to tackle timely digital preservation issues with flexibility, and we explored topics such as rapid response web and social media archiving, Ireland’s technical response to COVID-19, archival activism and community archiving, and archiving and research data management, among others.

Some of the events showcased in this collection were originally advertised as physical events but had to be quickly reimagined for an online format due to COVID-19 restrictions. For example, DRI had planned a celebratory event for 12 March 2020 to mark the official launch of the Atlantic Philanthropies project which, unfortunately, had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 'Amplifying Change' launch was redeveloped as an online roundtable discussion which took place on 10 September 2020 and featured a rich line-up of key figures in the advancement of human rights, peace, and social justice from across the island of Ireland. The DRI and Research Data Alliance (RDA), with support from Europeana Research, were due to run a physical event in April on publishing Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, this event was also reimagined – it was launched as a two-part online series which took place on 29 September ('Using FAIR data from the GLAM sector') and 22 October ('Publishing GLAM data as FAIR data'). These webinars, among others, can be found at the DOIs listed at the end of the page.

Webinar highlights throughout the year include our collaborative public lecture series with National Archives Ireland (NAI) focusing on contemporary digital preservation issues. The first DRI-NAI lecture of 2020, 'The Power of a Photograph', explored the value of digital photographs for documenting social change. ‘Archival Activism’, the next webinar in the series, highlighted the important memory work of community archivists who are building freely accessible online collections documenting the stories of their communities and making decisions about how these stories should be collected, organised, and shared. We aimed to open up a conversation about how national memory institutions can offer their digital preservation skills and profession-based knowledge to support community-based archival initiatives and form equitable partnerships to foster more diverse cultural collections. ‘Collecting in a Crisis’, the final DRI-NAI webinar of 2020, focused on the timely topic of rapid response web and social media archiving. The webinar aimed to open up an international conversation on rapid response archiving strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlight the invaluable work of digital archivists in documenting this historical moment, and provide a forum for collaborative learning and knowledge sharing. We hope the recordings from this webinar series will serve as useful resources to anybody interested in learning more about how our digital cultural memory is safeguarded, especially during a time of crisis. 

The full DRI Events Videos Collection can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.3485bx88b Individual recordings are listed below. For information about upcoming 2021 webinars, please visit our events page: https://dri.ie/events
 

• Amplifying change: A history of the Atlantic Philanthropies on the island of Ireland, 10 Sept 2020
• Culture at risk: Digitally preserving the referendum on the 8th Amendment
• The Power of a Photograph: Collecting and Digital Preservation in Times of Social Change, 16 June 2020
• COVID-19 and Contact Tracing Apps - What Should Ireland Do?, 25 June 2020
• Using FAIR data from the GLAM sector, 29 Sept 2020
• Archival Activism: Community-Centred Approaches to Archives, 22 Oct 2020, 
• Publishing GLAM data as FAIR data, 29 Oct 2020 
• Collecting in a Crisis: Rapid Response Web and Social Media Archiving, 2 Dec 2020
• DRI and the Europeana Common Culture Project: Sharing Irish Digital Data in a European Context, 17 Dec 2020