Advocacy never ends… but where does it begin?

Lena Böse is a student at University College Dublin 

At last month’s DPC Unconference in Dublin, participants voted to have one of the spontaneous DPC member-led sessions focus on advocacy. When an Unconference participant shared their experience of institutional data loss and neglect, the group for this session came together as a supportive sounding board: They shared their own experiences openly and offered suggestions on how to overcome adversity in institutions and organizations to get the resources, time, and recognition required to successfully preserve digital material.

How can we encourage other people to care about digital preservation? The Unconference participants proposed a number of strategies that fall into five broader advocacy approaches:

1. Convince management

2. Establish a policy and assign responsibility

3. Spread the word to other departments

4. Benchmark your institution against others

5. Center the conversation around established values

Convincing management or “pushing the issue up” within your institution can be a useful approach for success. DPC’s RAM model is a great tool for convincing managers of the value of digital preservation for your organization because they understand the importance of benchmarking. If you can demonstrate the value of digital preservation by preserving material that senior executives will come looking for in the future, you can also create favorable conditions to persuade the leaders of your institution to take action. When it comes to resource negotiations, one member of the group recommended to “ask for more than you want” because that will increase the chances that you will be able to get the staff, time and funding you actually need.

Although Unconference participants agreed that it can at times be a challenge to persuade people in an organization to take digital preservation steps, even when failing to do so contradicts a legal requirement, a winning approach could be to integrate digital preservation into the strategic plan of your organization. To ensure that this approach is successful, it is essential that responsibility is clearly assigned to one or more people because otherwise good intentions can easily fall by the wayside.

Besides pushing the issue within your organization’s hierarchy, another sensible approach can be to spread the word to other departments. Identifying people who can act as champions for digital preservation together with you can not only help with all other strategies mentioned here but it will also alleviate the pressure and frustration that stems from feeling like you are the only person in your institution who cares about this issue. “Playing the long game” by having lots of conversations and “planting the seeds” of digital preservation wherever you can, is a strategy that can ultimately bear fruit in the form of institutional support and action. Collaborative projects with other departments are a great opportunity to both build new working relationships and demonstrate the value of digital preservation if you can find a way to integrate it. The DPC's Executive Guide on Digital Preservation contains some useful messages to help start this conversation, for organisations of various types. 

Additionally, looking outside of your own institution to find other similar organizations who are doing a better job of preserving their digital material might be the spark that is needed to inspire your own organization to take action. If your institution is already in the habit of comparing itself to one or more of its competitors, it is worth looking into the digital preservation strategies of these organizations in particular to see if you can find evidence with which to confront your own organization. In anticipation of facing opposition on the basis of cost, moreover, you might also want to prepare cost efficiency demonstrations to show that investing in digital preservation can actually save your organization money in the long run.

The last approach discussed in this session entails centering the conversation around already established values. For example, no organization is likely to take a loss of reputation lightly. Following the recent cyberattack that the British Library suffered, Unconference participants pointed out that there is no better time than the present to advocate for more cybersecurity and, in the same breath, integrate digital preservation strategies into the conversation. If innovation is valued highly by your institution, highlighting digital preservation as a cutting-edge field of technological innovation can constitute a convincing strategy. Since, as one Unconference participant pointed out, “cold facts rarely change people’s minds,” you might be more successful by making use of people’s desire to create a legacy or by invoking feelings of nostalgia to persuade them of the importance of digital preservation. The DPC's Getting Started in Advocacy for Digital Preservation Training slides contain some useful tips for storytelling and making a more personal connection in relation to digital preservation. 

One of the strengths of the digital preservation community lies in its willingness to share expertise, and it was on full display in this discussion about approaches to advocacy. The spontaneously organized DPC member-led sessions appear to be at the heart of the Unconference concept in providing a forum for open discussion where participants feel comfortable to share their struggles and ask for help because the community meets them with empathy and collaborates to find actionable solutions.