William Kilbride is Executive Director at the Digital Preservation Coalition

•  Coda: a passage that brings a piece or a movement to an end.
• Canon: a theme that is repeated and imitated and built upon by other instruments with a time delay, creating a layered effect.

World Digital Preservation Day 2023 adopted a musical turn of phrase with the theme ‘A Concerted Effort’, emphasizing the need for collaboration and partnership to achieve a shared goal.  As the saying goes, ‘No one can whistle a symphony, it takes a whole orchestra to play it’.  It might be phrased less elegantly: if you’re doing digital preservation on your own, you’re doing it wrong.

In musical terms this blog post is the coda which brings our celebrations to a close.  It’s too early for me to take stock of all the different initiatives and outputs which have been shared over the course of the last 36 (ish) hours. I only have space for a few items which caught my eye so a very limited perspective.  But here are a few things that, if you didn’t already know about, are worth holding on to:

Adam Harwood is Research Data & Digital Preservation Technologist at the University of Sussex

I talk about digital preservation with IT colleagues regularly and I often feel like I am in a position of perceived weakness - lecturing them on technical matters relating to preserving data. Needing a little confidence boost, I used ChatGPT to see what it had to say about the difference between backup and digital preservation. I posted an interesting outcome of this conversation in the Digital Preservation jiscmail list. Its answers boosted my confidence and I no longer feel those nagging pangs of talking nonsense during technical conversations.

This blog has been written by Carey Garvie, Senior Digital Preservation Specialist, Library Systems & Digital Preservation and Susannah Bourke, Digital Archivist, Description Original Materials at State Library Victoria

This year’s theme for World Digital Preservation Day - Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort feels extremely pertinent to our experience over the last year. In December 2022, State Library Victoria appointed two new Digital Preservation positions. Together these roles have been focused on setting up procedures and equipment for processing incoming and legacy digital acquisitions. One of the first steps has been to set up a working group of staff from across the acquisitions, description and library systems teams who process unpublished digital materials for the collection. This group has been working together to map out current workflows, identify opportunities for improvement and document procedures. While this was occurring a search was also underway for a location to set up the digital preservation equipment.

Chris Prom is Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is proud to release the iPRES 2023 Proceedings on World Digital Preservation Day. We hope you find them profitable and useful for your work.

Doing so is a fitting capstone to the community effort that underpins digital preservation work so evident during the iPRES 2023 meeting, held from September 19 - 22, 2023. As conference co-chair, along with Tracy Seneca, I can truly say that organizing the conference was THE highlight of my professional career to date. The sense of welcome, collegiality, rigor, and fun that the entire conference planning team - our program committee, local organizers, peer reviewers, and supporters - brought to the table, was truly extraordinary and inspiring!  

William Kilbride is Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition

Digits are born vulnerable.

Every single byte of data depends on a global infrastructure of technology, process and people for its meaning and purpose to be realized. Much data serves the moment: it is quickly forgotten in a continuous flow of process and interaction. Other data serve lengthier purposes, as evidence and outputs of transactions that have significant impacts and long duration, longer than the infrastructure and the institutions through which the data was created. Everything in the latter category falls into the scope of digital preservation—the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary, beyond the limits of media degradation, technical obsolescence, and organizational change.

The Bit List is not a paper exercise. It was originally conceived as a call to action based on the insight and authentic voice of the global digital preservation community, and it remains so.

This video was sent to us by Zandile Myeka, Metadata and Photographs Archivist at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in celebration of World Digital Preservation Day 2023.

Antonio Guillermo Martinez is the Founder and Head of Product at LIBNOVA. 

Este blog está disponible en español a continuación: 

One more year we join the Digital Preservation Coalition's initiative to celebrate the World Digital Preservation Day. This year the central theme to reflect on is "Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort".

At LIBNOVA we firmly believe that a successful digital preservation project is the result of a joint effort between the institution and the provider, which is why we have always advocated a project approach based on cooperation, with the needs of our customers as the driving force for innovation and by engaging in collaborative research projects. But, what does this really mean?

Julienne Pascoe is a Digital Archivist for Library and Archives Canada.

Digital Preservation is a collaborative effort, one that benefits from a variety of perspectives, expertise, and multifaceted participation. As a Digital Archivist at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), I work closely with my team in our section, Digital Integration, as well as colleagues in the Digital Preservation section, to perform a variety of tasks and services in ensuring that digital records are transferred, assessed, and preserved for sustainable access in the future. The stewardship of our digital legacy would not be possible without a collaborative, concerted effort with my colleagues who contain invaluable, diverse expertise and perspectives that combine to research and devise strategies for tackling the many nuanced digital preservation challenges. This collaborative effort to ensure continued access to our digital legacy extends to (and relies upon) the community that we are a part of, the digital preservation community, and it is this subject that I would like to discuss in my blog post today. More specifically I would like to discuss my experience as a ‘first-timer’ with the DPC this year, and the value that such a network brings to my role as a digital preservation practitioner. 

Nance McGovern is Associate for Digital Preservation Practice and Instruction at Global Archivist LLC and a DPC Fellow

Digital preservation at its best is a collaborative sport. As always, the theme for World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is timely and important.

Collaboration has been an important part of digital practice for me since I started preserving digital content in 1986 at the Center for Electronic Records at the U.S. National Archives. We regularly welcomed visitors from all over who were interested in hearing about our program and in sharing what they were working on with us. An open source approach – sharing, using, and contributing back – contributes to the sustainability of good practice for digital preservation. Welcoming visitors – virtually and in-person – is a relatively easy opportunity for organizations engaged in digital preservation to contribute and to be informed.

This blog post has been written by Laurence Brewer, Elizabeth England, Lisa Haralampus, Leslie Johnston, and Markus Most at National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Background

The U.S. federal government has signaled how important web content is to the public documentation and experience of government. According to U.S. government website tracking data, every 90 days there are over 5 billion visits to government websites. Enabling long-term preservation of government website content is critical to public understanding of the government and its history.