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The Digital Preservation Handbook has long been a familiar companion to many of us working in digital preservation. It’s the kind of resource that we return to again and again—whether we’re new to the field, teaching, or trying to work through a tricky preservation challenge.

Because it’s been so well used (and so well loved), it’s also fair to say that the Handbook is due a refresh. Digital preservation practice is constantly evolving, and we’re excited to finally be getting started on work towards a third edition that reflects where the community is now and where it’s heading next. This was clearly demonstrated during the 2024 Handbook Third Edition Scoping Project, funded by the Welsh Government’s Culture Division, which was designed to ensure that community needs inform the goals and guiding principles of the forthcoming third edition.

With those goals and guiding principles in mind, DPC staff are working collaboratively to revise and write Handbook content. We kicked off with a booksprint during the week of 19–23 January, providing a shared starting point for revising and writing the new edition together.

DPC staff in Glasgow, excited and ready to go!

Laying the Groundwork: A December Mini Booksprint

Before January’s main booksprint, Amy Currie and I ran a small pilot booksprint in December. This was a chance to figure out how we wanted to approach the January booksprint, finalise author guidance, look at different sources of inspiration, and map out the agenda. It helped us think through how we could make the process both productive and enjoyable for everyone involved.

One of the things that really inspired us was The Turing Way project’s approach to community writing—especially their Book Dashes and Collaboration Cafés, a format of co-working sessions designed to support contributors working together on a shared resource.

An Agenda for Different Working Styles

With these ideas in mind, we planned an agenda for the January booksprint that aimed to accommodate a range of working styles and preferences, because we know that everyone finds their flow in different ways. We wanted the week to be as supportive and flexible as possible.

 Booksprint supplies at the ready

Here’s how the week was set up:

• We kicked off with a Welcome & Introduction, which we encouraged everyone to join to start the week together.

• After that, people could choose to participate in online Collaboration Café sessions for shared, focused time working alongside others, or work independently if that felt more productive.

• On Thursday, we held optional in-person days in York and Glasgow, which provided a different way ofworking—with space for sharing ideas, getting feedback, and more spontaneous discussion, as well as a refreshing change of scenery (and a nice lunch)!  

• Between scheduled sessions, time was left open for writing, planning, or just recharging—whatever worked best for each person.

• We also held daily stand-up meetings to kick off the day, check in, reflect on progress, and highlight anything that needed attention.

• Our usual staff coffee breaks were kept free of formal activities too, offering a chance for informal catch-ups and a bit of a break away from the Handbook itself.                                                                                                                                                              

Throughout the week, we kept in touch using a dedicated Slack channel, which was a hub for questions, and for sharing ideas, resources and encouragement—and where we provided daily recap messages so everyone could stay up to date on how things were progressing.

DPC staff in York get together for a day of booksprinting

What We Learned and What’s Next

We were delighted to receive really positive feedback from everyone who took part. Our colleagues told us that:

• The format helped them get started with drafting and planning in a more focused way.

• Having dedicated time together (and apart!) was energising and freeing from the usual day-to-day distractions.

• Working side-by-side with others sparked really productive conversations that helped clarify our shared thinking about the Handbook’s purpose, its audience, and what we want this new edition to achieve.

We also found the booksprint hugely helpful as organisers. Hearing the questions, insights, and ideas from everyone taking part helped us refine our plans for the Handbook and think more clearly about how it fits alongside the rest of the DPC’s resources. It highlighted how valuable concentrated, shared time can be—giving space for discussion, clarification, and alignment while making steady progress on drafting the Handbook itself.

And we’re not stopping there! We’re planning to carry elements of this booksprint approach into our ongoing work throughout the Handbook drafting process. That means we’ll continue scheduling regular Collaboration Café sessions and check-ins to help us maintain momentum, stay aligned as a team, and keep the conversation flowing as the Handbook takes shape.

We’ll be posting updates along the way and are looking forward to sharing the completed 3rd edition with you next year — stay tuned!

Inge Hofsink is Metadata Specialist at the KB National Library of the Netherlands and Trond Teigen is Team Lead of the Digital Preservation Team at the National Library of Norway.

On 18-19 November 2025, three representatives from the Digital Preservation Department of the KB, National Library of the Netherlands (KBNL), visited the Digital Preservation Team at the National Library of Norway (NLN) in Mo i Rana, Norway.

The background for the workshop was related to a serendipitous encounter at iPRES2024, triggered by Inge Hofsink’s (KBNL) presentation at the conference “It could happen to you: Thirty years of digital preservation in an ever-changing organization” and Torbjorn Petersen's (NLN) lightning talk “How the National Library established autonomous product team organization” . This led to a couple of virtual meetings between the institutions, before we found an opportunity to gather in-person.

Over the course of two “freezing cold” November days, we had a tightly packed schedule, starting with a guided tour of the NLN’s magazines and digitizing facilities in Mo i Rana.

Erin Liu is Assistant Archivist at the University of the Arts London. She recently completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Applied Data Science at Birkbeck with support from the DPC Career Development Fund which is funded by DPC Supporters.

With the support of a Member Self-Identified grant from the DPC Career Development Fund, I completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Applied Data Science at Birkbeck, University of London last autumn. I was motivated to pursue the course by experiences working with digitised and born-digital material across various roles held at the University of Arts London (UAL) Archives and Special Collections Centre (ASCC). In both my substantive role as Assistant Archivist and on part-time secondment through 2024 as Digital Preservation and Access Manager, I’d come across tasks and workflows that could potentially be optimised if our service was afforded the opportunity to deepen our in-house computational knowledge. The UAL ASCC has always had a strong practical sense of what we require computational processes to do. However, there was the possibility of benefitting from further training in practically developing, testing and applying scripts to directly improve our workflows, particularly at the pre-ingest stage.

Angela Puggioni is Community Engagement Manager at the Digital Preservation Coalition

With the end of the year in sight, I'd like to unwrap the final gift in our DPC December Knowledge Wrap, a four-week series sharing small reflections, resources, and highlights from across the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) as the year comes to an end. For this last post, let's turn to advocacy: making the case for digital preservation, helping others understand why it matters, and giving practitioners the confidence and tools to speak up for their work.

Advocacy at the DPC isn’t about slogans or soundbites. It’s about helping people explain the value of digital preservation in ways that resonate with colleagues, senior decision makers, funders, and wider audiences, and about amplifying the voices of our community as a whole.

In what is in danger of becoming a new Christmas tradition, here's a festive message to celebrate the upcoming relaunch of the COPTR tool discovery wiki.

I'm dreaming of a byte Christmas
With all the files I used to know
Where the JPEGs glisten and WAVs to listen
To hear that voice from long ago

I'm dreaming of a byte Christmas
With every replica I write
May your GIFs be merry and bright
And may all your checksums be right

I'm dreaming of a byte Christmas
With all the memories we've made
Formats slowly changing, bits rearranging
To be sure the meaning doesn't fade

I'm dreaming of a byte Christmas
No digital risks left to fight
May your ingest backlog be light
And may all your checksums still be right

And please remember, bytes are for life, not just for Christmas... If you care about tools that help you take care of your digital collections, please come along to the relaunch webinar and please consider joining the Preservation Registries Special Interest Group.

Sally O’Callaghan is Senior Project Officer, Digital Archives Preservation Research, at National Archives of Australia. She recently attended the 2025 iPRES Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

This year, I was fortunate to receive a DPC Career Development Fund grant, which allowed me to attend iPRES 2025 in Wellington, New Zealand. This was an incredible experience that resulted in career highlights for me and tangible learning to take back to National Archives of Australia.

Craig McCarthy is Digital Archive Manager at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW)

When we launched the ICAEW Digital Archive in early 2020, we did what many small teams do with a new system and limited staff: we prioritised preservation over description. We pushed thousands of digital objects into Preservica (our chosen digital preservation system) with only minimal metadata – and sometimes none at all. Our assumption was that most users would arrive via our traditional library catalogue, and would simply follow links through to the digital objects.

A few years on, it was clear that this approach had reached its limits, and so we began exploring how we could use AI as an assistive tool in metadata creation – both for tackling our metadata backlog, and for future ingests.

Angela Puggioni is DPC's Community Engagement Manager

As December continues, our DPC Festive Knowledge Wrap turns to another gift that sits at the heart of the Coalition: good practice. Not as something fixed or prescribed, but as something that is shared, tested, refined, and strengthened through the work and insight of our community.

Throughout the year, knowledge is shaped through the combined experience of the DPC community and the work that happens across the Coalition. The guidance, tools, and services that emerge are grounded in real-world practice and continue to evolve over time. This December, we’re unwrapping some of that knowledge and making it visible for all to explore.

Maryna Chernyavska is the Digital Archivist at the University of Alberta Archives. In October 2025, she attended the No Time To Wait 9 conference in Dublin, Ireland, with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I first learned about the No Time To Wait conferences from colleagues at the Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) Archivum, where I taught in the Archival Summer School for Ukraine in 2023 and 2024. Zsuzsa Zadori and Csaba Szilágyi both spoke highly of this event. I have immense respect for the work they do at OSA, especially considering how emotionally difficult working with records in their holdings can be. The OSA Archivum is a human rights archive, and a large part of its holdings is audiovisual. What I heard about the NTTW appealed to me also because I spent over a decade of my career in the archival field working with audiovisual archives, and in my role as a digital archivist at the University of Alberta Archives, I was in the midst of rethinking access to audiovisual records in our holdings and developing workflows for their long-term preservation. So, when I saw a call for applications for the DPC Career Development Fund to attend the NTTW9 in Dublin, I knew I had to be there.

Giorgia Gakas is Digitisation Lead, Neil Campbell Digitisation Centre, at Monash University Library. They recently attended the 2025 ASA Annual Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Monash University Library Clayton campus rests on the traditional lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Custodians and owners of the lands where our teams work, facilities are located and the Digitisation Centre operates.

I support Monash University Library’s commitment to Indigenous self-determination and well-being by working to improve cultural safety for First Nations researchers, community members and colleagues. The Library is dedicated to decolonising collections, showcasing First Nations voices, and providing respectful, safe access to resources.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and all First Nations peoples, should be aware that this blog may contain names, stories, themes and references of deceased persons and cultural knowledges that may be potentially sensitive.