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…
The response to the question is also very much context dependant. I wear many hats. Subject matter expert (Digital Preservation), parent, consultant, cook, creator, spouse, author, photographer, businessperson, performer, responsible human being, resident of a planet circulating a sun way out on a spiral arm of the Milky Way, etc.…
So… …it depends - a response that is never out of vogue within the digital preservation community. The answer varies according to the situation (and to be honest, my mood at the time of asking).
Each “hat” has different drivers. As a parent (and a spouse) I know that my wife will kill me if the literally thousands of pictures and videos we have of our children growing up are lost or become unreadable.
As a small cog in the large research and education supporting machine called Jisc, I preserve because I believe that which we have produced in the past on behalf of the community (and which we continue to produce) has some long-term usefulness to that community.
As a participant in the multitude of process lumped together under the umbrella of “business” I preserve because I want to make sure that my records are comprehensive, up-to date, accurate and above all, available when the time comes to report to the tax man and to other authorities who wield VERY big sticks when it comes to ensuring compliance.
As a human being I preserve because I want to hold the “Powers That Be” to account. I don’t want inconvenient truths to be quietly removed from the record to suit the narrative of whoever is in control at that particular moment. I also don’t want to keep repeating the errors of the past because the record of those errors has been lost.
And so it goes on
So, is there a common thread under-pinning all of the above? I think there might be (and here I’m surprising myself… I hadn’t articulated this internally until I actually wrote all the above down). I select and preserve - I curate - because I believe that some things will have a long term value to someone, somehow, somewhen, somewhere. With few exceptions, I don’t know who that someone will be, nor how they will use whatever it is that, in a fit of hubris, I have attempt to digitally preserve. I also know that, inevitably, some of the decisions and processes I take on now will be wrong. But I just know that it’s worth taking some steps (any steps) now to try to ensure that that worth is there for that unknown future party when the time comes for them to discover and use the “digital stuff” I’ve squirreled away.
Want to hear more?
Watch the vlog Paul created for World Digital Preservation Day 2025 and the Why Preserve campaign!