I just attended a session by Dr. Samantha Hastings, formerly of my own UNT and now in North Carolina. She gave an engaging talk about preservation of digital objects, questions we need to think about and strategies we can take to protect the objects we've spent our time, money, and energy creating or harvesting.

She discussed big preservation issues like migration of data, as well as issues such as who's maintaining our hardware, and do the people in charge of our servers really understand the importance of the data that they are protecting? One of the most interesting approaches she discussed was using a universal virtual machine (UVM) that has the ability to simulate any format or operating environment. She also stressed the importance of having a clear mission with good goals, to support your project.

I'm enjoying a little downtime now at the Starbucks kiosk near Ballroom C, which is not only feeding my caffeine habit, but provides free wifi access during its open hours. The connection is great for getting these blog posts and my email done, but word of caution: it's not handling my flickr uploads well, so you may need to wait to get back to your hotel room or home for those memory-hog applications.

Well, I'm about done here, so I'll head off to one of the sessions on gaming in libraries, and then maybe I'll take a quick jog around the exhibits hall.