Blog

Kelli O'Toole is Digitization Supervisor/ Project Manager at the NYC Department of Records & Information Services (DORIS), Municipal Archives

The New York City Municipal Archives preserves centuries of government records documenting the people, places, and events that have shaped the city. Records like birth and death certificates, court proceedings, photographs, and government correspondence offer invaluable glimpses into the lives of New Yorkers across generations.

While the records we preserve weave a dynamic fabric of city history, the records we don’t save also tell meaningful stories.

Ada Alster is the archivist at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), where she works to preserve and provide access to the Centre’s collections. She sleeps a little more soundly knowing that the VHEC’s audiovisual testimonies are being carefully preserved, monitored and protected through ongoing digital preservation work.

What does it take to ensure that Holocaust testimony remains accessible decades from now?

The VHEC holds more than 200 audiovisual testimonies, oral histories and interviews with BC Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses, including former “enemy aliens” internees, rescuers and liberators. We also hold recordings of events, including symposia and other educational programs. These recordings document personal experiences and historical perspectives and remain an important resource for education, research and remembrance.

Carol Kussmann is the Digital Preservation Analyst and Jenny McBurney is the Government Publications Librarian at University of Minnesota Libraries.

The Save Our Signs project has been helping to Save our Stories since July 2025. With educational signs and displays at U.S. National Parks, monuments, and historic sites at imminent risk of removal or censorship, the SOS team recruited the help of the public to collect photographs of as many signs as possible before the initial submission deadline of September 17, 2025.  The first iteration of the Save Our Signs Archive launched in October 2025 with over 10,000 photos of National Park Service Interpretive signs, submitted by people from all over the country.

Karen Hanson is the Lead Research Developer at Portico.

For World Digital Preservation Day and the Save Our Stories theme, it seemed apt to introduce our current pilot project to preserve digital news and a new Mellon-funded project with Portico’s long-time partner, NYU Libraries. 

For over a decade, members of the library, archives, and journalism communities in the US have raised concerns about whether digital news is being adequately preserved as the industry shifts from print to digital. As legacy newspapers move online, reduce or end print operations, and in some cases close altogether, new kinds of digital and hyperlocal outlets are emerging to fill the gaps, often experimenting with new funding models to survive. Preserving hyperlocal and community-focused reporting is essential to capturing an inclusive historical record, yet this volatile environment places this vital record at a high risk of permanent loss. 

This blog is co-authored by Amy Currie, Digital Preservation Specialist, and Dorothy Waugh, Head of Workforce Development, of the Digital Preservation Coalition.

As part of this year's World Digital Preservation Day, the DPC Workforce Development team is presenting at the virtual NDSA DigiPres 2026 conference. Our presentation is titled 'Making Digital Preservation Work Visible: Using Labour Market Evidence to Support Sustainable Workforce Development.' However, in a lot of ways, it could easily be retitled to something like 'Making Digital Preservation Work Visible: Exploring Digital Preservation Labour and Workforce Sustainability to Save Our Stories', because of the important connection between protecting digital content and supporting a sustainable and resilient digital preservation workforce.

Stephen Abrams, PhD is an independent scholar, and former Head of Digital Preservation, Harvard Library

Storytelling is essential and inherent to the human spirit and experience.  We tell each other stories to make sense of ourselves, the world around us, and our place in it.  Stories let us remember the past, navigate the present, and extrapolate the future, facilitating the transformation of factual data into evocative information, rich knowledge, and enduring wisdom. 

One of the earliest tangible examples of storytelling we know of is an Indonesian cave painting over 51,000 years old.

This blog is co-authored by Folasade Adepoju, Chief Librarian at the National Library of Nigeria, and Ima Oduok, Assistant Digital Preservation Analyst at the Rockefeller Archive Center.

Across our field, we are facing decreasing resources and increasing risk to our digital materials. It is important to remember how this danger to digital heritage can reinforce and broaden existing inequities. It is also important to highlight the information and cultural heritage professionals doing incredible work in their local communities, promoting preservation of indigenous knowledge and traditions. To this end, I want to share an interview with a friend, Folasade Adepoju, who is leading efforts in digital preservation and web archiving in Nigeria and collaborating across the African continent. 

Melissa Bailey is an independent recording artist, author and network engineer.

I looked back to see how far I had come, only to discover that some of my achievements were becoming harder to trace publicly. One example is the historical Billboard R&B Digital Song Sales entry connected to my single “Dancing in the Rain.” I have older evidence of that chart history, but the entry is no longer easy to locate through the current artist-profile experience. I have been in contact with Billboard about the missing information, and its team is investigating. I haven’t lost my music. What I risk losing is the ability to show someone else the evidence behind part of my story.

Gladys Kemboi is a doctoral student in Information Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

My name is Gladys Kemboi. I am a doctoral student in Information Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My research and interests focus on knowledge management, digital preservation, decolonisation of knowledge, community archives and local and Indigenous knowledge in development. Over the past years I have been collaborating with leaders, partners and communities across the globe to digitize and preserve local and Indigenous knowledge in development. Through the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) support, I have made significant contributions and extended our digital preservation efforts to preserve local and  Indigenous knowledge in Africa.

The urgency to preserve Africa’s heritage emerged from my motivation and collaboration with Folasade Adepoju of National Library of Nigeria, and founder of Youth Initiative for Literacy and Cultural Orientation (YILCO). As we celebrate 2026 World Digital Preservation Day, we celebrate the impact and collaboration in (1) saving humanitarian archives and health knowledge in danger, (2) web archiving, and (3) catalysing African community archives for social good.

Justin Simpson is the Managing Director at Artefactual Systems.

Today the Digital Preservation Coalition publishes its snapshot of the Global Bit List of Endangered Digital Species,^[1] documenting what we stand to lose and what is putting it at risk. The List gives practitioners something to point at when they ask for time and money.

I see a pattern there. Content on commercial platforms, collections held in cloud services, records of organisations under political or financial threat, formats that can only be read by an abandoned tool. Many Bit List entries are not about bits decaying at all. They are about records that depend on another party, a supplier, a platform, a funder, a host institution, who may not be there, or may not be willing, when the records need to move to their next keeper.

So here is my entry, which will never appear on the list because it is not a thing. Our stories are not only in danger because files rot. They are in danger whenever the next keeper is blocked by something it has no power over, whether that is a decision by a supplier, a licence, a sanction, or a platform that has closed its doors.