The fall 2016 meeting of the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) was held October 26-28, 2016 in New York City, where our own Research Data Management Librarian Vicky Steeves of NYU Data Services served on the program committee. The conference regularly brings together digital preservationists of all types for lively discussions on the topics of archiving, storage, workflows, and preservation.

Here are five things we learned at PASIG 2016:

1. From Matthew Addis of Arkivum, a reminder that everything we need to know about why we have backups can be learned from the fable of the making of Toy Story 2.
2. More than a few preservation and research workflow systems are making use of ownCloud, the open-source self-hosted file syncing system.
3. From a few speakers, mention of blockchain verification in science…
4. A startling reminder from Peter Burnhill of the University of Edinburgh: libraries usually don’t have actual e-holdings of their e-serials, but rather e-access to digital holdings (usually by a content vendor). Who assigns responsibility for backing those up? Turns out, we all do: thekeepers.org
5. And from Jeff Spies of the Center for Open Science, a reminder to dust off the Parchive protocol.