In loving memory
Last week my friend and colleague Angela Dappert died from cancer at the age of 60. Angela is one of the key contributors to digital preservation.
Many will know her of her PREMIS activities. For years she participated in the Editiorial Committee and organized trainings about implementing PREMIS. These activities culminated in 2016 in the very nice book Digital Preservation Metadata for Practitioners, edited together with Rebecca Guenther and Sebastien Peyrard.
But Angela wrote about a range of topics and shared her insights not seldom together with her husband Adam Farquhar. During the Planets project (2007-2011), they wrote a very important article about significant characteristics: Significance is in the eye of the stakeholder. It was during the same project, that they developed a preservation model , paying attention to the fact that preservation is not only a matter of technical issues, but organizational issues as well (remember, in those days we worked hard to convince management of the importance of digital preservation).
Alongside her work at the British Library and participating in European projects, Angela wrote her PhD called DePICT – A Conceptual Model for Digital Preservation in 2013, a further investigation in the domain of digital preservation. Angela worked at the British Library, so knew the cultural heritage environment. Her participation in the TIMBUS project ( 2011-2014), while she was working for DPC, broadened the scope towards the case of digital preservation in business environments. We worked together in the Planets and SCAPE project and I met her again in a different capacity (EU-reviewer) in the European project THOR (Technical and Human Research Infrastructure for Open Research) 2015-2017, where persistent identifiers for people, places and “things” for the long term were the focus.
Angela’s death is a great loss, for me I lost a good friend. But also for the preservation community. Let’s celebrate her contributions by reading them again, re-use her insights and incorporate them in our daily work.