Climate change, archives, and digital preservation

Date/time: Friday April 21, 1:30-4:00 PM Eastern Time (2.5 hours), via Zoom

Workshop description:
Climate change poses enormous challenges to archives and archivists. In the short term, climate change presents issues such as unpredictable weather and the potential for more frequent and severe disasters. In the long-term, climate change may reshape decisions around the geographic location, appraisal, and use of archives. In this workshop, archivists and cultural heritage professionals, regardless of their location, will learn about how climate change impacts our work and cultural heritage institutions.

Instructor bio:
Eira Tansey is an archivist, researcher, and consultant based in Cincinnati/the Ohio River watershed. Her active areas of research include the effects of climate change on archives and archivists, the role of records within environmental regulation, and the enforcement of recordkeeping laws. Her research has been profiled in Nature, VICE, Pacific Standard, and Yale Climate Connections. She has written for a wide variety of archives, history, and environmental policy journals, and is currently working on a publication for CLIR titled A Green New Deal for Archives.

This workshop will not be recorded, but slides will be made available.

Suggested Pre-readings:

Tansey, Eira. “Archival adaptation to climate change.” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 11, no. 2 (2015): 45-56. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2015.11908146

Goldman, Benjamin Matthew. “It’s Not Easy Being Green (e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change.” (2018). https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/381e68bf-c199-4786-ae61-671aede4e041

Pendergrass, Keith L., Walker Sampson, Tim Walsh, and Laura Alagna. “Toward environmentally sustainable digital preservation.” The American Archivist 82, no. 1 (2019): 165-206. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165