Trevor Owens on Digital Preservation in the Digital Humanities

For those of you who couldn't attend the talk Trevor Owens gave at the iSchool yesterday, check out his slides and rough notes on trevorowens.org. Naturally, the discussion of digital preservation and its place in the future of the digital humanities raised several important and intriguing questions among students, staff and faculty in attendance. Although there may be no definitive solution to digital preservation, the talk ended on an optimistic note, with Trevor's statement that:

The future of digital preservation is less about defining a hegemonic set of best practices, than it is about scholars, curators, conservators and archivists working together to define what it is that they value about some kind of digital content and to then go out and collect it and make it available for use to their constituencies. It is about setting definitions that are often at odds with each other but that are coherent toward their own ends.