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A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph, published on Friday 24th July 2020

Dear Editor,

In the House of Commons on Wednesday 15 July, the Prime Minister committed the UK government to an independent inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic.  As he stated, this will require “huge amounts of official time” as we seek to learn the lessons of the pandemic.  

Both this inquiry, and any future research into the pandemic, will require significant amounts of evidence.  This evidence will not be captured on paper but almost entirely as digital records: email, text messages, recordings, data sets and documents sitting on thousands of servers, with long chains of dependence upon platforms, interfaces, and applications.  These records will have been created by politicians and their staff, by government officials, advisors, and by a host of individuals outside of government, including private contractors.

The DPC is deepening its commitment to help members in a time of crisis.

From 1^st August 2020, the DPC is launching a new support program in anticipation of the economic pressures that members are likely to face from the global COVID-19 pandemic.

As we have moved through the phases of COVID-19 pandemic, the DPC has responded swiftly and thoughtfully at each step: closing our offices before the lockdown began, moving all our operations online, launching a wealth of new resources, and opening up a new series of activities for members and partners around the Globe.  We have delivered – and in many ways exceeded - the commitment that we made that our members would leave the lockdown better connected and better skilled.  The DPC community is much greater than the sum of its parts, and members contribute much more than money to the cause.

Almost all heritage institutions have them: CDs, DVDs and floppy discs bearing digital heritage. Unfortunately, at about 40% of the Dutch heritage institutions this material is in danger of being lost, according to a recently published study by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (DDHN). That is … if no action is taken now.

"The information on these CDs and other so-called physical carriers belongs to collections and should therefore be permanently accessible," says Niels Komen, project leader of the DDHN project Endangered Digital Heritage on Portable Media. This spring, his project group conducted research among 150 Dutch heritage institutions.

Niels: "We saw that many heritage institutions don’t really know what to do with floppy disks, CD-ROMs or a hard disk. Sometimes because there is no equipment available to read them, sometimes because the carrier has been damaged over the years. But if action is not taken in time, in many cases the content of the carrier will be lost forever."

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome data management consulting and software company AVP to its Supporter Program this month.

AVP offers a full range of digital preservation services and products of relevance to the DPC community, including: assessments and audits; system selection, implementation, and customisation; custom software development and software products such as Fixity and Exactly.

[French and Spanish versions follow]

We, the signatories of this statement, call on governments, businesses, and research institutions around the world to document their decisions and transactions now and for the future. 

Building on the UNESCO communique ‘Turning the threat of COVID-19 into an opportunity for greater support to documentary heritage’ and reinforcing the call that decision-makers in the public and private sectors recognise the value of records management and archives, the statement has three calls to action: 

Today the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the UK National Archives celebrates the release of the Novice to Know-How online digital preservation training pathway with an online launch event. As part of The National Archives' ‘Plugged In Powered Up’ strategy, the free online training provides learners with the skills and confidence required to preserve the born-digital records held by their organisation.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has released a new resource designed to assist its members in the construction of a digital preservation policy.

Exclusively for DPC Member institutions and developed with a team from the University of Bristol, the Digital Preservation Policy Toolkit guides users from initial research and preparation phases, through to drafting a policy, gathering feedback and communicating the finished policy.