Carey Garvie is Senior Digital Preservation Specialist at State Library Victoria.

November is rolling around again, bringing with it World Digital Preservation Day. While most of my colleagues are planning how they are going to celebrate the Melbourne Cup, which falls two days before, I’m pondering this year’s World Digital Preservation Day theme: ‘Why Preserve’. In some ways, the Melbourne Cup is an interesting example of this for State Library Victoria. It is said to be the race that stops a nation, certainly for Victoria where public holidays tend to be based on significant sporting events, it is a day off for most people. Running since 1861, even back then public servants and bank officials got a half day to celebrate the occasion.

So, what is it about the Melbourne Cup that makes it so famous? For the serious punters, it’s all about the horses, trainers and jockeys and there are many a story to be told about these. When I think about the Cup, though, I think about the people. The Melbourne Cup is held as part of the Spring Racing Carnival which has become a social event in the Melbourne calendar. People travel from all over with tickets so highly sought after that some only make it to the members’ carpark which itself has become an iconic venue for celebrating the day. Not to mention the now-famous Birdcage where you might spot a celebrity or even a Royal!

But what about us ordinary folk? Even if you aren’t into racing, having a bet on the Melbourne Cup has become a tradition, as has dressing up to attend the event. When I first moved to Melbourne I lived not far from the famous Flemington racecourse, home of the Cup. I have fond memories of the racegoers making their way to the event in all their finery and then departing somewhat worse for wear. Fashions both on and off the field are a large part of Cup day, and State Library Victoria has many images of these within our general collection and that of noted photographer Rennie Ellis, who documented the Spring Carnival from the 1960s-1990s. Ranging from the highbrow members in their respectable outfits and magnificent hats to the general public who are also fond of dressing up, some even in costume!

If you peruse these images, you find a rich and fascinating story of how fashion, behaviour and the popularity of the event have changed over the decades. What has all this got to do with digital preservation? SLV LAB, State Library Victoria’s prototyping and innovation lab released ManIIIFestor this year, a browser extension that randomly adds IIIF-powered images from State Library Victoria’s copyright-free image pool. I watch the delight of staff as funny images of family portraits and advertising campaigns from over 50 years ago pop up in their browser, generating comments and memes in group chats. Amongst these images, you may get a glimpse of the Melbourne Cup goers in their finery from the early 1900’s, a stark contrast to those of the later decades.

This is all possible because the analogue records still exist today, but what about their born-digital counterparts? Most of us have smart phones and take images on them without too much thought as to their future. I wonder about all the images that the general racegoers take today: where are they, will they survive, will they pop up one day in a collection we acquire, and will future generations be able to look back on them the same way we do our digitised analogue collections? Many, I suspect, will be lost to time, caught by the quickly changing nature of technology.

What will this mean for our understanding of such iconic social events like the Melbourne Cup in Australia? What of future researchers? Will they be frustrated by a huge gap in images? What insights will be lost? What stories will be missed. I don’t know what the future of searching and engaging with collections will look like, what tools, if any, will replace ManIIIFestor but I hope that future generations will be able to get as much joy out of our born-digital collections as we do now with our digitised ones.

In the last few months, we have been fortunate enough to rediscover work undertaken by Experimedia – predecessors to our SLV LAB – who created a 3D virtual tour of the Library in the early 2000’s. This is somewhat timely as our Creative Studio team are undertaking a similar project today. Being able to see the old against the new provides us not only with an interesting insight into what the library looked like then, but how these types of technologies have advanced over time. My colleague Susannah Bourke has been working on preserving and making this accessible using emulation. If you check at our SLV LAB site on World Digital Preservation Day you’ll see an article about what we’ve been doing – or if you’re in Melbourne on the day, pop into the Library and check it out for yourself.