On the 30th and 31st July, Alice Lubbock, Archives and Repository Manager, and Eman Shahin, CBRL Amman Library and Archives Officer, attended the ‘DCDC25 – Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities’ hybrid conference at Durham University.

The BIRI Digital Coordination and Strategy project supported Alice and Eman to attend the conference, with an in-person place for Alice funded by a DCDC bursary to cover travel and accommodation.

Eman and Alice were involved in the ‘Environmental efficiency and sustainable futures’ panel Chaired by James Baker, Professor of Digital Humanities at Southampton University. Eren Delaney, Digital Preservation Specialist at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, spoke about digital decluttering, and Henry Melki, a lecturer in Animation and VFX at Ulster University, spoke about his work on tackling the effects of over-tourism and poor local education on Rathlin island in Ireland. Alice and Eman shared their outcomes from the British Library-funded Endangered Archives Programme grant. This initiative resulted in the digitisation of over 33,000 items—including rare books, photographs, negatives, and administrative records—from the archive of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ). These materials, once fragmented and at risk due to environmental and political pressures, are now available through the British Library’s website and in CBRL’s own digital archives.  

Alice and Eman also highlighted the project’s technical and organisational achievements: acquiring scanning equipment, training colleagues in Amman and Jerusalem to produce high-quality digital files, developing metadata based on Dublin Core and MARC21 standards, and establishing secure backup protocols. All activities follow the FAIR principles—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. There was strong engagement from the audience about sensitive materials and biases inherent in colonial collections during the Panel’s Q&A.

Alice was able to attend other conference activities including a tour of ‘Shakespeare Recovered’, a display of his first folio, originally purchased by Bishop John Cosin in the 1620s and added to the Palace Green Library in Durham in 1669. In 1998 it was stolen and then missing for 10 years – it was found very badly damaged so the exhibition explained what conservation efforts had been made to preserve it.

Another highlight was a panel on digital interventions, where an archivist at Newcastle University was speaking about their project ‘Beyond the Margins – Mapping Gertrude Bell’, an interesting and similar project to the cross-BIRI/ CBRL StoryMap project ‘Women transcending boundaries’, about women archaeologists’ work and travel, including Bell.