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 William Kilbride is the Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition and writes this blog to officially close World Digital Preservation Day 2025

The sun has set on Hawaii and Rarotonga and so it’s time to bring the curtain down on World Digital Preservation Day 2025.  It’s also time to draw a close to the week of the iPRES Conference which has been hosted this year in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. 

World Digital Preservation Day was introduced in 2017 to enable our widely dispersed but highly fragmented community to connect with each other and to raise awareness about our work.  There are more and more new entrants into this growing and increasingly diverse network - more than 50% of the attendees at iPRES this year were first time attendees. Our colleagues work on every continent and in all manner of organizations and sectors: in medical and humanitarian agencies, law enforcement and finance, in public institutions and independent regulators.  Universities are well represented as are memory institutions. Although many of the institutions are large, the teams are small and in many cases the team is one or less.

Alison L. Joseph is Director of Digital Scholarship at Gratz College

As a library professional and academic, I love books! I think my husband of 18 years is still shocked by the number of books I brought into our marriage. Currently, we share a home office with bookshelves lining the walls. His books fill one set of shelves, while my books overflow the remaining shelves. There’s nothing quite like holding a physical book or browsing a shelf for a well-known volume by the colors and style of its cover. While it often feels like there is unnecessary tension created between the physical and digital, this doesn’t need to be the case. I can have an affinity for books and still be an ardent (perhaps, even militant) advocate for digitization.

As the Director of Digital Scholarship at Gratz College, I oversee the development and collections of our new Grayzel Digital Platform, formally launching today on World Digital Preservation Day.

Nance McGovern is Associate for Digital Preservation Practice and Instruction at Global Archivist LLC and a DPC Fellow

Happy World Digital Preservation Day 2025! The most wonderful day of the year for the digital preservation  community. And this year WDPD coincides with iPres – even better.

This year’s topic: “Why Preserve?” is making me nostalgic – conjuring up relevant experiences as a practicing archivist over more than four decades.

Kelly Stewart is Chief Archivist at Artefactual Systems, a DPC Supporter

For World Digital Preservation Day 2025, we invited DPC Members and Supporters to share their reflections on this year’s theme, “Why Preserve?”. As part of this series, Kelly Stewart of Artefactual Systems offers her perspective on the importance of safeguarding our digital heritage. Watch Kelly's vlog below to hear her thoughts!

This year World Digital Preservation Day, November 6, 2025, coincides with the final day of iPRES 2025, the international digital preservation conference. The prompt for WDPD 2025, “Why preserve?” For The Ohio State University Libraries, we preserve the history of the University along with specialized collecting areas that enhance the mission and educational programs of the University.

This year, as I draft this between sessions at iPRES in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, I would like to reflect on the success of our Gray Digital Preservation Repository, launched nearly two years ago, as a repository ostensibly for born digital materials at scale.

Stephen Abrams, PhD, is Head of Digital Preservation at Harvard Library

World Digital Preservation Day is an annual event sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition to bring international attention to the critical challenges and opportunities of digital preservation stewardship.  The theme of this year’s celebration is Why Preserve?  This question has particular relevance right now given the sea change so many of us are experiencing in our institutional environments.  We find ourselves unexpectedly buffeted with new constraints on requisite programmatic resources arising from external actions and scrutiny that seemingly calls into question our fundamental mission and ethos.  Preservation is a demanding undertaking at the best of times; why do we affirmatively choose this hard path in uncertain times?

We do so because to do otherwise would repudiate our very identity as stewards, those who undertake the complementary functions of maintaining and advancing; that is, ensuring the continuity of shared experience over time, and leaving things better off than we found them.  These imperative goals themselves arise from a deep instinctual human need to remember and reconnect.  The indomitable human impulse to tell stories about the past is how individuals, institutions, and cultures bring order and illumination into the world, imparting meaningful sense to our present condition and shaping aspirations for the future.

This blog post was co-authored by James Mortlock, Jennifer Febles, Jennifer Pearson, Katie Kettle: the Digital Archives team at HSBC

HSBC's archive is a well-established global department within the Group Brand function. Founded in Hong Kong in 1865, our bank’s collections go back as far as the late 18th century and include many predecessor organisations. While we have physical archival storage vaults in London, Hong Kong, and Paris, our expanding digital collections are housed in a global digital archive repository. This repository safeguards both born-digital and digitised records from our rich history.

Paul Stokes is Jisc - Subject Matter Expert (Digital Preservation), Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition; Chair of the DPC Advocacy and Community Engagement sub-committee; Director of the Open Preservation Foundation; Director of OPF NL.

Why do I preserve…? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer (especially when you take into account that my day job is 100% digital preservation focused). There are all sorts of glib, business casey type answers to that question, but why do I personally preserve “digital stuff”?

It’s complex…

Ellie Burnage works for publisher Exact Editions based in the UK

The theme of World Digital Preservation Day 2025 asks ‘Why Preserve?’

It’s a big question, with numerous and far-reaching answers. Preservation, as its core, safeguards cultural memory by ensuring that stories, ideas and knowledge remain accessible to future generations. But there are other benefits too, from ensuring digital resilience in an era defined by ever-changing technological developments to opening up new potential markets for publishers to increase revenues.

A recent project in which Exact Editions digitised a collection of historical illustrated periodicals embodies all of these goals  -  we’ll explore how in the rest of this blog post to celebrate #WDPD2025. 

Helen Dafter is Archivist at The Postal Museum

Why Preserve? That’s a big question and there are as many answers as there are organisations carrying out preservation activities. My answer is we preserve for future use. How far into the future and who will be using the material may vary, but there is no point in preserving anything unless there is a reasonable expectation of it being used.

I’ve been considering our existing digital collections and how these have been or may be used. This should give some more tangible reasons for preservation, than just ‘Access’.