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It is always good to be able to release new resources on World Digital Preservation Day and this year is no exception. The resource I’m going to talk about isn’t exactly a ‘new’ resource, it was originally published and promoted by the Archives and Records Council Wales (ARCW) back in August, but they generously agreed that the work could be repackaged and re-released on the DPC website to ensure that a wider and more international audience could also benefit from it.

Why am I so excited to get this particular resource out on World Digital Preservation Day? Well the theme of World Digital Preservation Day this year is particularly inclusive - ‘Data For All, For Good, Forever’. Much of the work that I do at the DPC tends to have a focus on working with people who are already part of our community, and are already sold on the idea that digital preservation is ‘A Good Thing’. This is all good, but sometimes I am aware of the echo chamber within which I tend to reside.

Natalie Baur is Program Director for DPOE-N

Happy World Digital Preservation Day from your colleagues at the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N)! We are excited to celebrate this important day with you, and we wanted to share some of our resources and funding opportunities that are available to the community. 

DPOE-N was created by the Library of Congress in 2010 to provide digital preservation training across the U.S. The program transitioned to Pratt Institute School of Information and New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program in 2018 to further develop it and support it into the future. In 2020, DPOE-N received a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its operations. In 2022, DPOE-N received two more years of grant funding from the Mellon Foundation.

Andy Jackson (@anjacks0n/@anj@digipres.club) & Paul Wheatley (@prwheatley) have shared this post on behalf of all the digipres.org contributors.

Calling All Digital Preservers!

The digital preservation community is small and under resourced. This means we must work together if we want to make the biggest impact. To this end, a small group of us have been attempting to help the members of the digital preservation community better support each other. On World Digital Preservation Day, we'd like to encourage you all to (re)discover what we've built so far:

Martin Gengenbach is Digital Preservation Policy and Outreach Specialist, National Library of New Zealand

There are many resources to help an organisation draft its first digital preservation policy, including the excellent guide provided by the DPC. There is less information about reviewing and revising policy documentation - though most policy guides recommend a regular process for doing so. Announcing an existing policy revision probably doesn’t sound as exciting as promoting a new digital preservation policy. Once completed, should policy review simply become an unheralded act, subsumed into business as usual?

Libor Coufal is Assistant Director for Digital Preservation at the National Library of Australia

We are very mindful that it has been (not quite all, but mostly) quiet on the NLA communication front in the last several years, while we have busily worked on implementing our digital preservation program. Our attendance at this year’s iPres (our first since 2014) was a great opportunity to pause and reflect on the progress we have made. We would like to update the community on what we have been up to and the things we have achieved.

World Digital Preservation Day 2022 has arrived.

You might be looking at your watch and thinking it’s still only Wednesday 2^nd and not even close to midnight wher you are, but World Digital Preservation Day is a global event.  So as the working day begins across the Pacific Ocean, so it's time to get this show on the road.

The theme of World Digital Preservation Day 2022 is ‘Data for all, for good, forever.  I am looking forward to a global outpouring of blogs and presentations and tweets and songs and cakes which celebrate and interpret this theme.  Almost anyone working in or thinking about digital preservation can have something to say about a theme as open as this.  The day has two broad purposes: to raise awareness about the digital preservation challenge; and to help a growing but widely distributed community connect with each other.

Brendan Power is Born-Digital Archive Preservation Librarian at Trinity College Library Dublin.

iPres 2022 was my first in-person attendance at the conference. My first role in digital preservation began a couple of months before the outbreak of COVID-19 so it was great to meet and interact with colleagues at an in-person event. The first thing that struck me when reflecting on iPres 2022 was that being an in-person event really helped to make manifest that community is really at the heart of what iPres and the Digital Preservation Coalition does.

The atmosphere at iPres was welcoming, friendly, supportive. The delegates I interacted with were generous with their time and knowledge and so willing to share their experiences with others. It was clear that as a community there was an acknowledgement that everyone is at different stages of their digital preservation journey. Those further along the journey were open to sharing their experiences, honest about the challenges they faced, and generous with offering their learnings. The attendees I met also highlighted to me that digital preservation is a global concern that impacts upon any industry or sector you can think of. I met delegates from national libraries and archives, universities, businesses, banks, charities, government departments and agencies, and many more. We all face the same challenges, and it was heartening to be surrounded by so many like-minded people working towards a common aim.

In October 2022 I was privileged to join colleagues virtually for an event organized by UNISA in Pretoria, South Africa. The event marked International Open Access Week 2022 and had the title 'Open for Climate Justice'. This blog is a version of the paper that I presented.  (Added 1/11/2022: The slides are available from UnisaIR at https://hdl.handle.net/10500/29530)

 Thankyou very much for the invitation to join you today to share some thoughts about the relationship between digital preservation and climate justice.  Ansie’s invitation was very timely, not just because it’s International Open Access Week. This time last year I was invited to share some thoughts on this very topic on the fringes of the COP 26 summit here in Glasgow so it’s an opportunity to share how my thinking has progressed since then. Also, environment was a main theme of the iPres conference in September so it’s an opportunity to reflect on some of the emerging thinking presented there. 

I’m going to cover a lot of ground in the next 30 minutes or so but it will all be published later today on the DPC blog so you can listen along or make notes as you please.

I aim to develop eight ideas.

Firstly, I need to define the digital preservation problem then make explicit the link to the main theme of climate justice. 

Then I want to talk a little about openness in climate science.  In my head this links to core themes of authenticity which are central to the mission of most archives; but you won’t fail to notice a wider issue about accountability and the challenges to climate justice that arise from vested interests. A spoiler: openness is going to emerge as a requirement.

I will then turn my attention back to more familiar themes in digital preservation, the relationship between preservation and disposal, and consider the opportunities that digital preservation creates to manage and reduce the amount of data we retain. 

Digital preservation is more than storage.  We can track energy consumption right across digital preservation workflows, and that has implications for how we might structure preservation. 

We also need to recognise that energy consumption is not the only way in which digital technologies impact the environment.  The virtual world is physical.  The manufacture and disposal of computing equipment has a real and unsustainable environmental cost.  I will explore some of these issues.

Towards the end I will take a brief detour into the history of digital preservation.  This might seem indulgent, but it is not irrelevant to the climate crisis and demands for climate justice.  Changes which will disrupt the digital economy will also disrupt our understanding of digital preservation. 

Finally, I want to reflect on the DPC and how we’re beginning to make changes in our own work.

Natalie Anderson is Project Officer, Digital Archives Innovation and Research, at National Archives of Australia. She attended ASA 2022 Here We Are Conference with the support of the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I was recently the lucky recipient of a #DigitalPreservationCoalition (DPC) grant to support my registration and attendance to this year’s #AustralianSocietyofArchivists (ASA) national annual conference – #HereWeAre2022 in Canberra.

As a staff member of the National Archives of Australia and working in the Digital Archives Innovation and Research section, I am fully aware of the importance of digital preservation. By safeguarding Australian Government digital records and data, we can ensure that future generations will be able to access and use this rich and important digital collection. The ASA is Australia’s peak professional body for archivists and recordkeepers. They advocate on behalf of archivists, and the archival and recordkeeping profession, and seek to promote the value of archives and records, as well as support best practice standards and services. Key themes for this year’s conference included Practice and Identity, Collaboration and Advocacy, and Developing Practices.

Over two days I posted about conference presentations on LinkedIn which related to digital preservation. In this blog I will be sharing one of the presentations that was of particular interest to me.

I discovered iPres in 2019 when I was looking for articles for my final master's work. I found many good papers that helped me a lot. When I started searching for more about iPres and decided to participate in the next one, which would be in 2020, it didn't happen because of the pandemic. However, I didn't give up; I kept following on social media to keep updated. Participating in iPres meant acquiring more knowledge about digital preservation, to put it into practice in my job, and the result was better than expected. 

I am currently an archivist at the National Library of Brazil, working in records management and I am a member of the permanent commission for digital preservation. Since 2018, the production of digital documents has been growing in my institution, and has required acquiring more knowledge to preserve them. In addition, we have the largest digital library in Latin America, with 2,138,378 million documents. Attending this conference in 2022 helped me outline strategies, exchange experiences and ideas with professionals from four continents, to preserve all these digital documents.