With my thoughts increasingly turning reflective about the year gone by, one thing I am grateful for has been moving into the world of long-term thinking, specifically through my work on the University of Melbourne’s digital preservation strategy.

If you’re interested in reading more about the University of Melbourne project, I recently wrote a blog post version of a presentation for the Library Forum.

One of the biggest highlights for this year (and an excellent opportunity for personal growth) was presenting the university’s strategy at the iPres 2016 conference.

Being surrounded by the intelligence and passion springing out of the melting pot of minds that is the international digital preservation community at iPres was truly inspiring.

It was an exciting achievement to be voted in the top three poster presentations at the conference. The poster winners (Matthias Töwe, Franziska Geisser, and Roland Suri from ETH-Bibliothek, Switzerland) had an excellent contribution, To Act or Not to Act – Handling File Format Identification and Validation Issues in Practice.

And I was most impressed by the poster from my fellow runner-up Susan Braxton and her colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose project Should we keep everything forever? Determining long-term value of research data is one I’ll be following with much interest over the next few years.