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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.

Angela Puggioni is DPC's Community Engagement Manager

As the year edges toward its close, many of us take a moment to reflect on what we’ve learned and the progress we’ve made. With that spirit in mind, we’re continuing the DPC Festive Knowledge Wrap: a four-week series throughout December that highlights different parts of the Coalition’s work, and the people who make it possible.

Last week, we unwrapped the first December Gift by spotlighting the places where DPC members meet, connect, and exchange ideas throughout the year. This week, we turn to something just as essential: strengthening the skills, confidence, and capacity of the digital preservation community. In this blog I've highlighted some of the ways the DPC supports workforce development year-round.

None of this happens in isolation. The DPC’s programmes only work because of the energy, generosity, and expertise of the community: our Members, Supporters, friends and colleagues across the world who share knowledge, encourage one another, and shape the digital preservation field together. 

 
The DPC Career Development Fund (CDF)

The CDF remains one of DPC's most appreciated programmes, giving our Members the chance to attend events, coures, workshops, training, and conferences through fully funded grants. Thanks to the generosity of our DPC Supporters - and the input we receive from our Members - the Fund helps digipres colleagues take up development opportunities they might not otherwise be able to access. Since it began, the CDF has awarded more than 200 grants across all regions, supporting learning in areas like digital forensics, audiovisual preservation and risk assessment.

We’ll continue to expand these opportunities in 2026, with new grants released throughout the year.

Novice to Know-How (N2KH)

Our ongoing partnership with The National Archives (UK) means we can keep offering practical, high-quality training to the wider digital preservation community. The N2KH programme gives you an on-demand, structured way to build and put digital preservation workflows into practice within your organization. With four courses available, N2KH has become a trusted go-to for colleagues in many regions and roles. And the best part? Every course is completely free: for both members and non-members.

DPC Competency Audit Toolkit (CAT)

CAT supports organizations in understanding and assessing the skills of staff involved in digital preservation. The toolkit offers a clear, structured process for reviewing current capabilities against the competency areas and skill elements set out in the DPC Competency Framework. Development of CAT has been supported by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and it is freely available for anyone to use! A new version was released in April 2025, strengthening its relevance and practical value for teams of all sizes. If you haven’t explored the updated version yet, this is a great moment to take a look.
 

As you unwrap the best of 2025, I hope it inspires you to think about your own learning journey: what you’ve discovered this year, the skills you’ve strengthened, and the areas you’d like to explore in 2026. And if you’re not yet a DPC Member but would like to access these and other opportunities regularly, we’d be delighted to welcome you.

Next week, we’ll continue our December Knowledge Wrap with a focus on the tools, resources, and guidance that help the digital preservation community put good practice into action. Stay tuned!

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!