UMaine’s Digital Curation program is thrilled to host a free public webinar with “free-range archivist” Jason Scott on Wednesday 5 May at 2pm EDT as part of its regular teleconference series. Anyone interested in attending can register for free.
A dynamic and provocative speaker, Scott has been called “the figurehead of the digital archiving world.” Apart from his day job at the Internet Archive, Scott’s fingerprints can be found on some of most promising initiatives in digital preservation today, from spearheading the effort to emulate vintage platforms in the browser to his boldly proactive approach to rescuing vast swathes of digital culture from oblivion.
Although he’s a leader in emulation and open access, he may be best known as the charismatic frontman for Archive Team, a crowdsourcing initiative that has saved more of digital culture for posterity than most of the world’s museums and libraries combined. This approach has captured the attention of amateurs and professionals alike, as described in articles such as MIT Review’s “Fire in the Library.”
Scott was the featured speaker for a 2014 Digital Curation teleconference, though ironically that recording is no longer available because it was conducted in Adobe Connect, which requires the now-obsolete Flash plugin. Scott’s 2021 appearance will take place as a Zoom webinar, and shared afterwards as a video file. Members of the general public are invited to attend and ask questions via text chat.
You can learn more about Jason Scott’s unparalleled contributions to the field here.
This teleconference is offered in conjunction with DIG 550, a class in preservation that looks at both mainstream and radical strategies for rescuing new media from obsolescence and oblivion. The course is part of an all-online graduate certificate in Digital Curation targeted at librarians, conservators, archivists, and anyone else who has to manage digital files.