William Kilbride is the Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)
One day more. As the sun sets on the Pacific islands west of the Americas, it’s time to declare an end to World Digital Preservation Day 2024.
The idea of World Digital Preservation Day is simple – to connect and to raise awareness. Those connected themes are still true and perhaps more needed than ever before. The theme this year was ‘Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities’. So, as well as building and strengthening the digital preservation community, it encouraged us to consider the communities in which and for whom we work. In a lovely simile, Jeanne Kraymer-Smyth has compared the digital preservation community to the Crow and the Pitcher from Aesop’s fables: that we all can all add a pebble into the pitcher of water, raising the level for each other.
It seemed entirely appropriate for me to spend the day at a workshop organized under the auspices of ‘Our Heritage Our Stories’ a discovery research project funded by the strategic ‘Towards a National Collection Program’. The project has allowed DPC to work with an amazing cross section of community archives in the UK, helping us to understand their digital preservation needs.
The main output from our perspective is a new ‘Community Archives Digital Preservation Toolkit’ which has been co-designed with a wide range of community archives groups. It joins the growing library of advice and guidance from the DPC. It’s a surprisingly radical document, not only for what it says but also for what it does not say. We’ve long known that inaccessible or long-winded advice can make digital preservation unattainable: that best practice sometimes gets in the way of good practice. The hard lesson we’ve learned from the community archives is that good practice can get in the way of no practice at all. If we are serious about welcoming them into the digital preservation community, it has to be on their terms not ours. We are partners with them on the road to a sustainable digital future. We are not their destination.
That much I had learned from Karyn Williamson who led on the project for us, and I think there was genuine surprise from some delegates that the ‘toolkit’ was not introducing another new set of tools. Quite rightly, the workshop was built around 6 case studies from community archivitsts who reflected on themes of the toolkit. Putting these voices at the centre of the event was a masterstroke. I had not previously realised how subtle the idea of community archives can be. Communities create digital content, and want to collect and preserve that for the future: that communities make archives is entirely what I was expecting. I had not fully appreciated the extent to which the reverse is also true: the community archive project as a forum for creativity and connection for Bengali women in East London; the safe space for skills development and support to the LGBTQ+ community in Cork; the 4000 registered users for the Manchester Digital Music Archive. To summarize, communities make archives and archives make communities.
And making (or remaking) community is also what we’ve been doing these last 24 hours. There’s been an almighty outpouring of blogs and tweets and toots and skeets and xeets which it will take a moment to process: so much that the DPC blog briefly fell over during the day. There have been numerous workshops and events. I’ve spotted knitting, baking, at least one picnic and the overture to a symphony inspired by discussions at a DPC event about appraisal (the notes to the score are joyous). There was the first Mastowall. I didn’t even know that was a thing. Among the games, The File Format Fling gets a special mention in the alliteration category.
When we first suggested World Digital Preservation Day in 2017 we were entirely unsure what would happen next. I recall it was proposed at a DPC Sub-Committee, challenged to do something with impact but no budget. We’ve been round the sun seven times since then, and for all the fun (perhaps because of it) you get the sense that World Digital Preservation has become a tradition: a shared activity across a community that is seemingly self-propelled. It’s only a matter of time before an AI-generated Bing Crosby will be dreaming about the ones he used to know.
This was my first World Digital Preservation Day without Twitter. I’ve been dabbling a bit lately on Bluesky and although it looks very similar it’s noticeably quieter and there are just a lot fewer people. But it’s slowly growing and pleasing that some of that lively interaction with colleagues seems to have started to emerge there. I counted 50 or so posts on Buesky with the ‘#wdpd2024’ tag . That’s nothing to the hundreds and hundreds that I’d pick up on Twitter in previous years, but the encouraging thing also is the slow but steady increase in familiar faces too. I had promised to try joining the Digipres Club on Mastodon with instructions from the on-boarding webinar we ran last month. I had intended to bridge this to my Bluesky account but am afraid the time just ran away from me. In any case, the object lesson is that communities and professional networks need attention. They are sometimes put at risk for reasons outside our control. World Digital Preservation Day is a moment to connect again and connect anew.
I cannot bring the curtain down on World Digital Preservation Day without a word of thanks to all involved. Thank you to everyone who has participated and shared their energy and creativity so generously. It’s never good to pick names but if you didn’t already know that the DPC staff team were amazing then you’ve not been looking. It’s amazing the impact that such a small and dedicated team can have, and how cheerfully and creatively they support each other: Amy Currie, Andy Jackson, Sharon McMeekin, John McMillan, Jenny Mitcham, Ellie O’Leary, Anna Perricci, Michael Popham, Karyn Williamson, Paul Wheatley and Robin Wright. A special call out to Angela Puggioni and Sarah Middleton who led and co-ordinated the program for us. Thank you also to the DPC’s members around the world who put their confidence in us and enable all of this to happen, and to their representatives, especially the Advocacy and Community Engagement Sub-Committee of the Executive Board who commission and oversee World Digital Preservation Day. I am privileged to work with and for all these wonderful people and I look forward to adding more members and more staff in the year ahead.
It doesn’t end there. The challenge is to continue building and strengthening our networks, so that by World Digital Preservation Day next year (6th November 2025 – get it in your calendar!) we are even more connected than this year.
If our purpose is about resilient digits, then we need resilient communities too.
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the Our Heritage, Our Stories project, AH/W00321X/1, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, as part of the Toward a National Collection funding stream, and especially Karyn Williamson of DPC who has coordinated the delivery of the Community Archives Digital Preservation Toolkit together with Paul Wheatley. I would further like to acknowledge the Co-Investigators on the project and wider team members, based at the University of Glasgow, the University of Manchester, and The National Archives.