Oops! If only...
Paul Stokes
We’ve all been there once. A newbie. A beginner. Thrown in at the deep end and left to get on with it. How hard can it be? You’ve just got to look after the digital ”stuff”… 

and keep it usable… 

and not lose it… 

and describe it… 

and make sure what you’re doing is legal… 

and… 

and… 

and…

Hmmm. Perhaps not so easy.


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![Some time later][1]

 There's been an Oops. Big or small. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that, with the benefit of hindsight, it could have been avoided. And to make it worse, someone just shared the immortal line “I could have told you that would happen.”

This panel session is intended to surface as many of those “Oops! If only…” scenarios as possible, and then let the panel/audience decide which of these are the most important to be aware of for those **Starting 2 Preserve** .

We see this as an interactive panel session utilising the expertise of up to 7 authorities from the field of Digital Preservation and related disciplines. Each will be asked to briefly put forward an anecdote / point of view / opinion relating to most important nugget of Digital Preservation wisdom they wish they’d known before they started. The statements will be followed by a series of questions designed to explore those scenarios further. 

The audience will be invited to participate (and contribute their own “if only...” scenarios) through a series of questions/observations from the floor (both those in attendance and those attending virtually). In particular, the audience will be polled at the end of the session to see what they think is(are) the most important thing(s) the past can warn future Digital Preservation practitioners about.

This is the third in a series of panel discussions that have taken place it iPres over the past two years. Although presented in a light hearted fashion, we see this as a particularly useful way of surfacing the common pitfalls experienced by those taking their first steps into Digital Preservation that could have been avoided… if only someone had told them.


  [1]: https://78.media.tumblr.com/13765181be5a9e444a7b4e4bc8ed19b4/tumblr_pc4rqoskHi1u6nopoo2_1280.jpg
approaches to preservation start 2 preserve