August 26th, 2010 Posted in General | No Comments »
A good night’s sleep made a huge difference and I awoke refreshed, hungry and thirsty. Reading through the English bits of the hotel literature I figured out that breakfast could be had one floor down from me in the Garden restaurant and I set off to find it. I managed to enter the restaurant by the wrong door, thereby bypassing the person who was supposed to check that I’m a hotel guest and I set about understanding the variety of foods in the buffet breakfast. Fruit, cereals, a bewildering array of baked goods and a couple of fairly plain hot dishes. Scrambled eggs I’m familiar with, but sliced frankfurt sausages in hot tomato sauce were new to me. The fresh strawberry juice and the coffee were a treat though.
Suitably fortified I returned to my room to dress for my keynote. I pulled out the dress shirt I’d never worn and the suit I’d bought four days ago and hoped everything fit. It pretty well did and with my presentation slides on a memory stick in my pocket and my conference paper in hand, I set off to locate the part of the hotel where the event was set up.
I arrived early enough that the English speaking main organiser hadn’t yet arrived and I used a combination of gesture and fragments of French/English/Portuguese to hand a copy of my slides to the media person for loading to the big screens. So far so good.
While I was standing around looking lost, I was approached by two rather dapper chaps who introduced themselves as the simultaneous translators who would be turning my words into Portuguese and giving me an English translation of the Portuguese via headphones through all the sessions. They implored me to speak slowly but predicted that I almost certainly wouldn’t.
After a little while, my host Lucia Maria Velloso de Oliveira arrived and we met for the first time. She was quick to check that I had all I needed and that the media people had my presentation. As Lucia started to tell me of some of the other foreign guests, Professor Tom Nesmith from the University of Manitoba arrived. We were introduced and immediately launched into a discussion around our individual interests in the world of archives.
While we were chatting, the lights in the main auditorium shifted to highlight the stage and Lucia took the podium to begin introducing keynote speakers. I then realised that when I heard my name I should walk on to the stage and be seated at the big table with the other two international keynotes. Besides a microphone, I had a small radio receiver and a headset that would give me the English translation transmitted from the booth at the rear of the auditorium.
The opening talk was by Francisco Barbedo from Archives Portugal, introducing their RODA software for digital preservation. I am somewhat familiar with RODA and I was keen to know more, but whether it was Francisco’s delivery or the Portuguese to English translation, I found myself more confused than when he started. Several times he alluded to things that he said he either lacked the time or the knowledge to explain, so the best I can tell, RODA is a set of services built on a Fedora Commons platform, with ftp ingest of records, LDAP authentication for users, and an on-the-fly conversion from PDF to flash (?) for viewing. I was itching to ask Francisco why their source code is a 4 gigabyte download, but I got the sense that he wouldn’t understand the question and I didn’t want to embarrass him.
The second keynote was from Claudia Lacomb Rocha from Arcquivo Nacional, Brasil (aka the Brazilian National Archives). The thrust of her talk was that they have just started looking into digital preservation, and Claudia outlined the 13 research projects that they are kicking off in order to understand the whole area. From my perspective, this looks like yet another example of an institution setting out to reinvent the wheel from first principles, but I am somewhat heartened to see that one of the projects involves a trip to Europe to see what the Dutch and the Danes are doing.
Next up was me. I grabbed a copy of my paper, The Benefit of Experience: the first four years of digital archiving at the National Archives of Australia and went to the lectern. Looking out at the audience was somewhat disconcerting. The bright light from the videographer’s camera was aimed at me, making most of the audience invisible. As people realised that I would be speaking English, there was a mad scramble to obtain headsets to hear the simultaneous translation. Mindful of the translators’ wish that I speak slowly, I launched carefully into my talk.
It’s a lot harder presenting when there’s no audience feedback. My slight attempts at humour, even the visual joke or two in my slides, fell pretty flat. Being barely able to see the audience, eye contact was almost impossible, so it felt a bit like being in my own little world and talking to a bright light. I concentrated on keeping the pacing slow and on following the thread of the narrative embodied by my paper without reading directly from the paper - embroidering the story with anecdotal flavour. I know that once I warm to a theme I can easily run over time, but I was watching the clock and I managed to finish with five minutes in hand.
In the panel discussion that followed, I was surprised to find that my Brazilian and Portuguese co-speakers were more than ready to defer audience questions to me, in spite of the resulting clash of languages. Two themes emerged in the questioning - one around the use of digital signatures to authenticate digital records and the other around the acquisition or development by archival institutions of skills in the digital area to complement existing archival skills.
The end of the panel debate heralded lunch and coincided with the arrival of another English speaking presenter, Professor Geoffrey Yeo from University College London.
After lunch I retrieved a translation headset and settled in the auditorium to observe the afternoon session. Physicist Dr Luis Fernando Sayão from the Brazilian Nuclear Commission delivered an enthusiastic and dynamic presentation on the need to rethink the scope and depth of metadata in the digital space as compared with the non-digital space. His theme was that more than just describing a resource, metadata needs to be expanded to encompass structure, IP rights, relationships and rendering technologies.
Dr Luis was followed by Carlos Ditadi from Arquivo Nacional Brazil who introduced his talk on the digitisation of paper records with some wonderful images from an 1895 publication, The End of Books. The illustrations provided some 19th century perspective on the perceived dangers hidden in ‘new technologies’.
With the day’s presentations completed, I began to think of dinner, but there was more to come. First, a string quartet set themselves up and began to play.
Their efforts were followed by the official opening of the Congress with dignitaries, speeches, the National Anthem and video presentations on Santos and on the work of the local archives.
