SHAMAN team members participated and performed presentations in the sixth annual international Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2009) at Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on October 5th and 6th, 2009.

Under the theme "Moving into the mainstream, enabling our digital future," this conference brought together researchers and practitioners from around the world working to preserve the world's cultural and scholarly digital heritage, to present the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage (Conference Program: http://www.cdlib.org/iPres/confsched.html ).

The following were the main topics of the conference:

- Re-positioning preservation awareness and services further upstream in the digital lifecycle

- Re-emphasizing that digital preservation problems and solutions encompass legal, economic, and social as well as technological dimensions

- Re-asserting the need for comprehensive integration of preservation analysis and activities into the organizational planning and operations of institutions that produce, manage, or exploit digital resources

- Bringing preservation issues to the attention of the broader public in order to change minds, policies, and expectations

- Stressing the importance of seeing digital preservation as an outcome resulting in usability

Reinhard Altenhöner, as Head of the IT Department of Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB), the national library of Germany, presented “E-infrastructure and Digital Preservation: Challenges and Outlook “ (http://www.cdlib.org/iPres/presentations/Altenhoener.pdf).

He presented the reasons and strategic aspects which might illuminate the prohibiting factors for the unassertive progress of Digital Preservation, based on the the German situation and their practical experiences. DNB is a SHAMAN partner, and also participates in several National and European projects.

Wolfgang Wilkes, representing Fern Universitat of Hagen and InConTec, partners of the Shaman project, presented “Towards Support for Long-Term Digital Preservation in Product Life Cycle Management “(http://www.cdlib.org/iPres/presentations/Wilkes.pdf). He presented a real-life engineering archive use case scenarios linking the Product Lifecycle Management systems and the Digital Preservation Systems.

The presentation highlighted the importance of legal and economic motivations for the design and engineering domain to address and integrate digital long-term preservation into the product life cycle management (PLM). Different phases of a product’s life generate diverse and very complex, structured data, often in proprietary data format which is necessary during long-lasting products (i.e. airplanes) for contractual and economic requirements as well as for legal compliance.

SHAMAN, CASPAR, KEEP and PLANETS projects represented the DigiCult projects; which are EU co-funded projects comprised under the ICT programme in FP7, that research on cultural heritage, digital libraries and digital preservation.