The climate crisis is at hand. Our generation will likely know the success or failure of our efforts to address human impacts on the environment. The next generation will look back on what we have done: a future that we can make but not yet fully know; a past they will know but not any more change. This keynote will discuss the prospects for digital remembering of a time before the crisis for the generations that come after it. Their perspectives will depend on the records and the archives which we create, curate and hand on to them. Standing in the way are the numerous challenges which we face in developing economically and environmentally sustainable preservation of digital materials. The presentation will end with a call to action, to secure the inheritance of our digital collections. The preservation community has never not cared for the generations that will follow, but there’s never been more important time to take our stand with the future.

William is the Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a dynamic sector-making charity that provides community engagement, advocacy, workforce development, capacity, good practice and standards in digital preservation. William started his career in archaeology in the 1990s with an unusual mix of qualifications in computing and archaeology when the discipline’s enthusiasm for new technology outstripped its capacity to manage the resulting data. In 2020 he was jointly named ‘Information Manager of the Year’ by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and in 2022 made Honorary Professor in the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow.

Transforming and researching the news: the National Corpus of Irish project – The National Corpus of Ireland project is an initiative to develop a large national corpus of contemporary Irish encompassing both written and spoken sources. Various subcorpora and related specialised corpora will also be created in what will become a hub for corpus-based research on the Irish language. In this talk, the need for such a resource will be explained, the steps in the project will be set out, and we will look at some examples of research that might result from it. We will focus on the capture and reuse of news archives (RTÉ, Irish Times, Tuairisc, TG4 and others) and the possibilities afforded by audiovisual archives for corpus development. Compilation of this corpus is being undertaken by the Gaois research group, Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, DCU, with funding for the period 2022-2024 from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

Dr Úna Bhreathnach (DCU) is Editorial Manager of www.corpas.ie, www.tearma.ie, www.logainm.ie, www.ainm.ie, www.duchas.ie, www.gaois.ie and several other terminology and related projects. She is principal Investigator (PI) on the Dúchas and National Corpus of Irish projects. Her research interests include terminology (the subject of her PhD), language planning, sociolinguistics, the Irish language, digital humanities, placenames, and corpus-based research.

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Dr Brian Ó Raghallaigh is an Assistant Professor at Dublin City University, where he is a member of the Gaois research group. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) on the Logainm Placenames Database of Ireland project and Co-PI on the Decoding Hidden Heritages (AHRC–IRC) project. He is a member of the Historical Dictionary of Irish (RIA) management committee and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) Expert Advisory Group. His background is in computer science, linguistics and Irish. His research is focused on the creation of digital Irish-language resources for language technology and other applications.