Blog

Jenny Mitcham is Chief Digital Preservation Officer for the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

The iPRES conference was held in the beautiful city of Copenhagen last week and I was lucky enough to be able to attend in person. Among various other more formal contributions, myself and colleague Dorothy Waugh facilitated a ‘Birds of a Feather' session on the preservation of e-Theses - an idea that was supported by our collaborators from the Open Book Futures project, Gareth Cole, Jenny Fry and Paul Stokes. I don’t think either of us had ever delivered a Birds of a Feather session before, but it seemed like a nice counter to the more formal presentations, posters, panels and workshops that we were already committed to, and an appropriate way to continue the conversation on e-Thesis preservation with the community. It wasn’t so much about sharing our thoughts on the topic, but rather more to provide a space for community members to talk about their own challenges and pain points.

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

Back in March, when we invited the global digital preservation community to submit nominations for the Digital Preservation Awards 2026, October felt a long way off. Now it’s just around the corner. On 15 October, we’ll celebrate the very best work in digital preservation and reveal the winners at a sparkling ceremony during the No Time to Wait 10 conference in Warsaw, Poland!

It all started with the nominations. One thing I like about the Awards is how open they are: there’s no fee to enter, and you don’t need to be a member of the Digital Preservation Coalition. Individuals, teams and organizations from around the world can put forward their work, wherever they are in their digital preservation journey.

The Digital Preservation Coalition may have been born in the UK, but we've grown global now. In those earlier years, our "flagship" event format was the Briefing Day. These would be in-person events, inviting speakers to present around a particular topic, and giving space for attendees to learn about that topic and explore the issues together.

In this cash-strapped, post-COVID world, this is no longer practical, even within the UK. For a global organisation, it makes no sense at all.

Garth Stewart is Head of Good Practice at the Digital Preservation Coalition

In these disruptive geopolitical times, we’ve all become aware of the threat which cyber crime poses to our everyday. Whether it’s targeting government, education, civic infrastructure, even big tech itself, cyber crime is a depressing topic we see on the news a lot, and is a trend which shows no sign of diminishing.

As digital preservation involves the preservation and provision of access to digital materials, it’s no surprise that cyber crime and cyber security have long been hot topics for DPC Members. We’ve responded to this through recent programming.

Karyn Williamson is Digital Preservation Specialist at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

What is the Global Ambassador Programme?

The Global Ambassador Programme was established to support the adoption and use of the Digital Preservation Toolkit for Community Archives.

The Digital Preservation Toolkit was developed to help community groups manage and preserve their digital collections. Following its launch, feedback highlighted that many groups would benefit from additional support to implement the toolkit's recommendations and build sustainable digital preservation practices.

It became clear that this support would be most effective when provided by established cultural heritage organisations that understand the needs and challenges of their local communities. However, many organisations reported that they lacked the confidence, knowledge, or training skills needed to provide this support effectively.

The Global Ambassador Programme addresses this need by providing practical guidance, training resources, and support materials for established cultural heritage organisations. These resources help organisations understand the toolkit, promote its use, and work with community groups to preserve local heritage for future generations.

David Mahoney is the Digital Archives Assistant at The University of Edinburgh, Heritage Collections

Last month I had the opportunity to attend the NetDRIVE 2026 Summer School at Durham University. The Summer School was a week-long programme exploring how Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI), High Performance Computing (HPC) and computational research can both contribute towards and themselves become barriers to, achieving the UK’s Net Zero ambitions. Bringing together PhD researchers from across the UK, the programme combined keynote talks, practical workshops, a poster session and collaborative activities with participants from the parallel EPCC’s HPC Days Summer School, creating an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas across different research communities.

Nathan Tallman is Executive Director at APTrust

Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust), a member of the Digital Preservation Coalition, has released the production version of DART 3, a major update to its Digital Archivist's Resource Tool. While DART was originally built to serve APTrust's own member institutions, it has been free and open source since its earliest versions and is now used by archivists and digital preservation practitioners at institutions well outside the APTrust consortium. This post introduces DART to those who may not be familiar with it and outlines the changes in the new release.

Dr Natasha Kitcher is Digital Researcher at The National Archives

I started at The National Archives a little over a year ago with the brief to investigate how to unlock the UK Government Web Archive’s (UKGWA) data for computational researchers. I was asked if there was a way we could enable computational access to the web archive, and what might be the best solution both for us as an institution and for researchers in general.

Andy Jackson is a Digital Preservation Specialist at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

During the recent DPC Members event, Every Object An Orchestra: A Software Preservation & Emulation Showcase, the presenters and attendees worked together to capture some notes about the event and related information. While the recordings are only available for DPC Members and paid attendees, we hope these shared notes will help anyone interested in knowing what the Showcase showed and the discussions discussed!

I'm excited to share that our brand new Digital Preservation Advocacy Toolkit is now live and available for a 5-week Member preview on the DPC website! 🚀

The new resource is grounded in lived experience across our community, designed to be used in real situations: whether you’re building internal buy‑in, shaping a campaign or translating technical needs into organisational value.