In April 2017 Living Computers: Museum + Labs held our first annual PreserveIT! event in honor of Preservation Week. The event featured three days of speakers and demos. Since our first launch, Living Computers has continued to hold an annual multi-day event of speakers and demos around the Preservation theme - PreserveIT! 2018: Analog vs. Digital, and PreserveIT! 2019: Disasters.

For PreserveIT! 2020, we have reimagined the Preservation Week honorary event into a series with monthly speakers between May and October. This year’s theme is Preservation & Access: Digital Legacy. We will explore the role of technology in providing access to your digital story, with topics around migration and digitization. 

Preservation Week was launched by the American Library Association as a response to the need for public preservation awareness. A 2005 national survey revealed that many libraries and cultural institutions had collections in need of preservation and limited staff to conduct collection care. Preservation Week has become an annual campaign held during the last week of April, and it is celebrating its tenth year in promoting preservation activities through libraries and other institutions.

Preservation is an underlying goal of our work at Living Computers. We are working to preserve the history of the machine itself through our collection efforts. We are preserving historical computer systems by restoring them to working condition, and we preserve the user experience by offering our restored computers to our visitors to use, play with, and explore.

The overall theme of Digital Legacy this year is to address the concerns in preserving our digital life. Our digital life--from our photos and documents to our social postings--are all at risk of their formats becoming obsolete. Key concepts that will be covered during the series will be migration of formats, providing access, and using digitization. The topics will cover preservation concerns with digital art, providing access to architectural files, and other topics that share the key concepts enumerated above.

Stay tuned to Living Computers’ website and social channels for more information about PreserveIT! 2020!