eArchiving Initiative consortium member, the South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (Xamk) hosted over 400 experts from libraries, archives, and museums at their Digital Archiving Futures conference at the beginning of September. The event was organised by Memory Campus, an information management cluster based in Mikkeli, in association with Digitalia (the Digital Information Management Research Centre). The Memory Campus cluster is owned by the City of Mikkeli and coordinated by Xamk.
The event featured speakers from the library, archive, and museum sectors, but also the field of information management and attracted over a hundred on-site attendees and more than 300 online. The eArchiving initiative was represented by Janet Anderson, who gave the keynote introduction about the initiative. She highlighted the initiative's ten-year history of developing practical solutions for digital archiving that promote interoperability and pointed out future directions. The eArchiving Initiative also hosted a training session for future digital archiving trainers at the event.
Representatives from the National Archives of Finland and Estonia, the Music Archive Finland, the Estonian Academy of Arts, the National Library of Finland, and Xamk presented sessions on a broad spectrum of archive-related subjects. Topics included technical updates for archives, such as the use of AI and the role of information management at National Archives. The conference also included updates on the initiatives Europeana, Time Machine, the European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, and an overview of digitisation training in Finland. These sessions were complemented by contributions on technical Investigations of cultural heritage and an exploration of using historical newspapers to understand local gastronomy.