Purpose
When looking for a migration, archives are too often held hostage by opaque export processes, hidden fees, and misaligned formats that break metadata links and lose PREMIS event trails. Every migration becomes a ticket queue, format-mapping nightmare, and cleanup sprint. In this BoF, we’ll create a trusting space for practitioners to air real-world frustrations with vendor-mediated exports and explore how true self-service access—whether via the platform UI or direct storage-layer retrieval—reclaims control of raw bitstreams, full metadata, and open-format exports exactly as you organized them.

What to Expect
In this session we’ll gather in a round-table format—no slides or pre-set agenda—to share stories of ticket queues, “export.zip” surprises, and costly cleanup efforts. Together, we’ll map out architecture patterns and governance models that enable on-demand, transparent retrieval, and jointly draft a community checklist of best practices for UI-based and storage-layer access. Come ready to exchange hard-won lessons, co-create practical guidance, and leave with a roadmap for building archives that truly belong to you.

Preserving data long-term faces physical threats like thermal erasure and damage, and social risks such as intentional alteration. Even durable media can become obsolete. Data migration adds costs and risks losing information. Improved preservation practices are essential to ensure future readability. The Digital Vellum Project aims to foster discussions with standards bodies and stakeholders to tackle these challenges collaboratively.

DIGITAL VELLUM (www.digitalvellum.org) is a project that seeks to address and mitigate the potential risk society faces of not being able to access our history. The project seeks to support the development of digital preservation solutions that enable access to this history far into the future. Digital vellum is meant to become a shared project, through conversation with startups and open standards organizations. There is a sense of urgency in this work as data can be easily lost over time and the rapid evolution of AI and cybersecurity risks threatens the integrity of digital information. This is a universal issue that can impact industries, individuals and society as a whole.

In this BoF, the audience will receive a brief introduction to the initiative and its progress and be invited to share feedback. Participants can learn about similar existing efforts and explore how to align them toward developing a new ISO standard for long-term media—a framework defining what future IT experts need to independently access and preserve digital information.
Vint Cerf (Father of the Internet, Author of Digital Vellum) and Tom Coughlin (Former IEEE president) will take part and present online.