Trevor Owens

The open access version of the Spanish translation of my book The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation is now available online. La teoría y el oficio de la preservación digital was produced by a team of library and information science experts led by Isabel Galina Russell. It was published earlier this year in print by the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Now the digital open access version is freely available online. Below are a few images from the book.

I wanted to take a moment here to both share out about this new publication, the journey that brought it about, and share some gratitude for everyone who made it happen.

I’ve been interested in the idea of seeing The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation translated into other languages, particularly into Spanish since I started working on it. The whole point of the book is to try and make digital preservation more accessible, and this translation makes the book much more accessible to the more than half a billion readers and speakers of Spanish. The fact that this translation has been published open access, freely available for anyone to download and read, makes the book all the more accessible.

The Journey of the Text

The idea for this translation came about as a result of an invitation to speak at a conference. In December of 2019 I gave the Conferencia Magistral at the Simposio Internacional de la Maestría en Conservación de Acervos Documentales hosted by the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía in Mexico City. Below are a few pictures from that visit.

My talk largely focused on the digital preservation axioms that I open the Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation with. Isabel tweeted out about how useful she found those axioms and we went back and forth on Twitter about the possibility of developing a Spanish translation of the book. We ironed out permissions with Johns Hopkins University Press, and then she ran with it. She provides more context, and a screenshot of our exchange on Twitter as part of her introduction to the book. I like that the story of the origin of the translation of the book is contained in her introduction to it.

Gratitude and Thanks

The full team involved in producing the translation includes 15 people, all of whom are experts and thinkers working in library and information science, several of whom I have had the chance to meet and connect with at digital preservation events over the years. I’m including a list of them all below.

• Pedro Ángeles Jiménez
• Fernando Cruz Quintana
• Jimena Escobar Sotomayor
• Isabel Galina Russell
• Maribel González González
• David Alonso Leija Román
• Norma Aída Manzanera Silva
• Ana Cecilia Medina Arias
• Betsabé Miramontes Vidal
• Jo Ana Morfin
• Ana Yuri Ramírez Molina
• Lorena Ramírez López
• José Antonio Salazar Carmona
• Pamela Vizner Oyarce

It is a little bit overwhelming to know that this whole team has engaged deeply with this book. While it might seem like a book about digital preservation would be technical and somewhat dry, the book has a good bit of myself in it. It is the first piece of my professional writing where I feel like I could fully bring in my personal voice and point of view. I’ve come to believe that anything that honestly and genuinely engages with the complexities of and issues present in memory work ends up needing to be tied in with our personal memory and personal journeys. This isn’t a technical book, its actually a very personal one.

I’m particularly honored to have had my book translated by experts in digital preservation and library and information science. The work of translation involves such an in depth engagement with a text, and I am deeply grateful for the in depth work that everyone involved engaged in to produce this.

Book Launch Event

Last March, the print version of the book came out, and the Biblioteca Nacional de M?xico hosted an online book launch event with some of the team involved in the translation of the book. If you are curious, you can see a video recording of that event below.