Blog

Michael Popham is Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

Every year since we launched RAM in 2019, we’ve organized a global “RAM Jam event” to give an opportunity for both new and experienced RAM-practitioners to come together and share their views and experiences of using the DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model. These sessions provide an ideal opportunity for DPC members to learn from one another, to pick up ideas about how best to undertake a RAM, and how to make the most of the results.

Last year, the RAM Jam took the form of a round-the-world relay race, in a series of four sessions spread across different global time zones. The idea was that each session would pass on the “baton” of lessons learned to the next stage in the race, until we’d completed one full circuit of this marathon 24-hour course – and had crossed the finishing line both elated and enlightened. You can read all about it in Jen Mitcham’s race report, posted to the DPC blog.

Angela Puggioni is DPC's Community Engagement Manager

December has a way of arriving with a quiet sparkle, inviting reflection, small celebrations, and the chance to slow down as the year wraps up. This year, we’re marking the month with the DPC Festive Knowledge Wrap: a four-week series where we share one small festive “gift” each week, highlighting the parts of the DPC community that make the Coalition what it is. Because the DPC is, above all, a community, this first December Gift invites you to unwrap the places where our members meet and connect throughout the year - and we would be delighted to welcome you along in 2026!

Over the last year, we have been working with Dr Leontien Talboom on the Future Nostalgia Project. As part of that work, Leontien has been working with a range of floppy disk experts to pull together a new reference guide for working with floppy disks, called Copy That Floppy!

We know there is a lot of expertise in this area among the DPC membership, so we wanted to put out a call for comments and feedback. If you've worked with floppy disks, please consider taking a look and helping us make this guide as rich and helpful as possible! Leontien will keep the Google Document version open for comments until the end of the year, and the first official version of the guide will be published shortly after that.

Angela Puggioni is Community Engagement Manager for the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

Today we’re celebrating something quite special: the 25th anniversary of the DPC Discussion List (DPC-DISCUSSION@jiscmail.ac.uk). For 25 years now, this listserv has been a friendly, supportive place where DPC members can ask questions, share ideas, and help each other make sense of the ever-changing world of digital preservation.

Long before remote working and virtual meetups were part of daily life, the list was already bringing people together across countries, sectors, and time zones. It has quietly hosted hundreds of conversations, from quick troubleshooting questions to thoughtful exchanges. Over time, it has become one of the things that makes the DPC community feel so open and easy to connect with.

 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.