Blog

A few weeks ago we welcomed two new members of staff to the DPC team. Garth Stewart has joined us to take on the role of Head of Good Practice and Dorothy Waugh is our new Head of Workforce Development.

We are very much enjoying working with them and finding out more about them, and we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce them to the wider community too! To this end, I sat them down with a (virtual) cup of tea and all the (most essential) digital preservation-related questions…and it went a bit like this…

Andy Jackson is Preservation Registries Technical Architect at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

After publishing Archiving Facebook, Right Now we got quite a lot of comments, feedback and ideas (LinkedIn, Mastodon).  I was rather hoping someone would appear and say "You've got it all wrong, it's easy!" and outline the workings of some suitable solution.  But so far everything I've seen boils down to either labour-intensive web archiving, API-based downloads or accepting individual data exports. It remains difficult to find clear, publicly available documentation of techniques that work and of outputs that can be preserved.

Last year, the first output from the Registries of Good Practice Project was the first version of the Digital Preservation Publications Index, which focussed on bringing together the proceedings of the iPRES conference series from 2004-2023. Then, just before Christmas, the iPRES 2024 committee helped bring the index up to date (a.k.a. v.1.1.1).

Now, the latest version (v1.2.0) fixes some issues with the iPRES 2022 data, where some publications were missed and others could not be accessed any more. You can see the improved iPRES 2022 records here. 

Fixing these problems was rather fiddly, and the resulting situation raises some questions about how we all might want to manage iPRES proceeding in the future. If you're interested in that, please read the more detailed analysis in Re-indexing iPRES 2022.

If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to email me, book a call with me, or talk to me at iPRES 2025.

Ray Moore is an Archives and Records Officer with the City of Edinburgh Council and member of the DPC Advocacy and Community Engagement Sub-Committee.

Back in spring (2025) the City of Edinburgh Council made a successful application to the UK National Archives, through its Archives Revealed program to secure and catalogue the digital legacy of the Transport Initiatives Edinburgh Ltd, latterly known as TIE Ltd (TIE). Active between 2002 and 2011, TIE functioned as an arm’s length external organisation (ALEO) for the City of Edinburgh Council and was responsible for the development of the transport infrastructure within the Edinburgh and surrounding areas. The company gained some notoriety, both nationally and internationally, due to the handling of the Edinburgh Trams development, with claims of mismanagement, contractual disputes, litigation, delays, and financial overspend. Such was the extent of these concerns that the project became the subject of a non-statutory public inquiry in 2014 (this reported in 2023). The records associated with TIE therefore represent an important, if controversial, part of Edinburgh’s recent history, but also have considerable academic interest as important exemplar of ALEO’s and their role in how local government managed infrastructural development at the start of the century.

Holly Duncan is the account executive for Preferred Media and DPC Supporter

More than forty years ago, Preferred Media began as a physical archive, safeguarding film, tape, and disk media for clients across Australia. At the time, the role of an archive was straightforward: provide shelves, cataloguing, and climate control so materials could be stored and retrieved when needed.

Over the decades, preservation has changed. Today, it is not just about storage, but about ensuring media survives rapid technological shifts, remains accessible, and does so in a way that is sustainable.

Sarah Middleton is Chief Community Officer for the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

Whether you are attending iPRES 2025 virtually, or you are simply curious about the latest in digital preservation, iPRES Radio provides a front-row seat to the global conversation happening in Wellington this year.

Running daily from Monday 3rd to Friday 7th November 2025, alongside the iPRES 2025 Conference, iPRES Radio is a relaxed, one-hour online session hosted via Zoom, and it is open to everyone - no registration for the main conference is required. It is a chance to connect, reflect and engage with the iPRES community, wherever you are in the world.

Lisa Lawlis is an Assistant Archivist at Western Libraries and Rachel MacGregor is the Digital Preservation Officer at Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

One of the best parts of being DPC Members is connecting with other professionals who have similar digital preservation challenges. We met during the Reappraising Appraisal event (https://www.dpconline.org/events/eventdetail/360/-/-) in September 2024 and discussed how we both needed a resource for staff to triage born digital record donations.

Andy Jackson is Preservation Registries Technical Architect at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

Archiving social media is a long-standing concern for digital preservation, and a challenge that only seems to get more difficult as the years go by. Recently, we’ve had a couple of members raise questions in this area, and so I spent a little time looking at a specific example:

If you need to archive a Facebook account now, like, right now, what should you do? 

Because as far as I can tell, it’s a bit of a nightmare.

Sebastiaan Schoonebeek is Digital Collections Team Software Developer at University of York. He attended the IIIF Annual Conference Archiving with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

This year’s International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Annual Conference at the University of Leeds brought together a vibrant community of researchers, developers, and digital preservation practitioners. Over three packed days, institutions from around the world shared their work with IIIF and related technologies.

Geoffrey Schilling is Digital Production Technician at University of Arizona Libraries. He recently attended the IS&T Archiving Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Through a grant provided by the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Career Development Fund, I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to attend the IS&T Archiving 2025 conference in Granada, Spain. This year’s conference location was just down the hill from the breathtaking Alhambra and Generalife at the University of Granada’s Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura.