The carbon footprint of the ICT sector has been stable around 0.7 billion ton CO₂e for nearly a decade. Even as more people than ever use a smartphone or mobile phone (8+ billion), and the Internet (5+ billion). Energy efficiency improvements has countered the growth in number of users. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the aviation sector’s carbon footprint was about 3 times larger, 2.2 billion ton including so called high-altitude effects, for serving only about 10% of all humans a few times per year. That the ICT sector’s carbon footprint is larger than aviation is based on an old erroneous comparison.

During the pandemic, the ICT sector helped the world with working online from home, online education, online shopping for, e.g., food, and with support to the health care system to handle the pandemic. And then with all forms of online entertainment and media during the lockdowns. Total data traffic increased by about 50%, yet the footprint stayed nearly the same.

It has, however, also been claimed in media that streaming video, or downloading digital media, or having videoconferences, consumes a lot of electricity. These claims are not supported by any real measurements. It would have been easy to measure e.g., a Wi-Fi router and a laptop during a video conference or when streaming video and seeing a small power increase. Even downloading a large PC game consumes only a few Watts over Wi-Fi depending on signal quality and significantly less using a network cable.

Netflix and its use of AWS CDN (Content Delivery Network), together with Akamai, represents about 30% of total Internet data traffic. Yet their data centers and CDNs consume only about 1.1 TWh. Meta/Facebook consume over 9 TWh for about 15% of total Internet data traffic, showing the large difference between only storing and sending data, compared to also processing large amounts of data.

Jens Malmodin has 25 years of experience of energy efficient design, LCA (Life Cycle Assessment), environmental assessments in general and environmental data reporting at Ericsson. He has published many papers and articles about LCA of ICT products, systems and services, including studies on the ICT sector level and how ICT can help society reduce its impact on the environment. Jens holds an MSc in material engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden

This talk explores the challenges and opportunities surrounding the design of sustainable infrastructures for the storage of large digital collections. Rather than approaching sustainability from a traditional environmental standpoint, this paper uses the lens of sustainable infrastructures to explore the value of long-lasting, modular, repairable, and extensible digital storage. Using the experience of designing an archival storage system for the ITMA as a case study, the aim is to show that sustainable infrastructures may be a promising approach used to contribute to the goals of sustainability in archives.

Adam Girard is Digital Archivist at the Irish Traditional Music Archive. He holds a PhD in Information and Communication Studies from UCD, and an MLIS from the Dominican University (River Forest IL). Adam’s professional career has primarily focused on culturally significant audio-visual collections in a variety of settings, including audio-visual libraries and internationally known archival institutions. Adam has developed a special interest in the storage and preservation of all types of audio recording media, ranging from antiquated formats to modern born-digital files.

Meemoo manages a large quantity of mainly audiovisual material from more than 170 partners in cultural heritage and media. More than 6 million objects are currently stored, ranging from digitised newspapers, photos, videos, and audio. In addition, a number of access platforms make the digitised content available to specific target groups, including teachers, students, professional re-users, or the public.

Metadata is a key element in all of meemoo’s processes. An important part of our activities is to collect, integrate, manage, and search a large variety of heterogeneous metadata across the archived content. The scale of this has increased enormously, so a good and integrated approach is needed to deal with the amount of metadata, its need for flexibility, and how easy it is to find. One of the specific challenges is modelling and storing data from machine learning algorithms (speech recognition, face detection and entity recognition) for reuse.

In this talk, we will discuss the key points and lessons learned from implementing the new metadata roadmap at Meemoo, which is focused on a Knowledge Graph-based infrastructure. The goal of the roadmap is to establish a better data practice within the organization and offer application-independent, uniform access to (meta)data that is spread across various systems and formats.

Miel Vander Sande is a Data Architect at Meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives. Meemoo manages a large quantity of mainly audio-visual material from more than 160 partners in cultural heritage and media. More than 6 million objects are currently stored, ranging from digitised newspapers, photos, video, and audio. As a Data Architect, Miel is responsible for the organisation, quality, and usability of metadata, both today and tomorrow. Miel has a background in Web technology and a PhD in publishing Linked Data.