William Kilbride is the Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)
World Digital Preservation Day 2024 encourages us to consider the communities in which and for whom we work. The theme ‘Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities’ has lots of layers and I am looking forward to hearing the many ways our diverse communities will respond to the theme. One of the initial reasons for creating World Digital Preservation Day was to help the highly distributed but also highly collaborative and welcoming community of digital preservation specialists to connect. That remains as true and as important especially as the community has grown. It also reminds us about the communities whose valuable digital content we are trusted to preserve. As regular readers of this blog will have heard me say before, preservation is not for the sake of the bits and the bytes: it’s about the people and the opportunities. If you are unsure where to start, start there.
Community archives and community-generated digital-content are at the front of my mind just now. Others got to the topic long before me but the importance of community archives, and the problems they face in preservation was crystallized for me at iPres in September 2022. In a remarkable keynote, Tamar Evangelista Dougherty challenged the conference to recognize the work of community groups as a legitimate and necessary contribution to digital preservation. iPres is a wonderful conference and even more wonderful community (and if you are interested in hosting it sometime then let me know!) but I am not sure how many community groups were represented in the audience to hear that message.
It was therefore a great pleasure to meet Sherry Williams, one of the community leaders that Tamar had highlighted, at iPres 2023 with a keynote that articulated the barriers and benefits of community-engaged preservation. At iPres 2024 September I was lucky enough to join a panel that dived a bit more deeply into the topic, discussing community archives through the lens of ‘post-custodial’ approaches to digital preservation.
The idea of ‘post-custodial’ archives is not new. It describes a range of efforts that empower community groups to select and preserve their own content when traditional memory institutions are not available or not appropriate. It imagines a new kind of relationship between archival institutions and their publics. It’s a well-established concept but not devoid of challenges, and digital preservation only adds to the complexity. For example, what is the appropriate relationship between community driven approaches and existing memory institutions? This is complicated enough in the analogue world but is further impacted by dependencies on third party technology providers and platforms. Does the concept of community owned and preserved digital content undermine well established workflows; and how much is gained in return? How do we enable participatory metadata creation and management for digital resources? What technical steps are needed? How do we resolve disputed meanings and contested access within digital preservation practice? What is the relationship between community groups very broadly defined, and the OAIS notion of the designated community? That’s all before we consider wider contexts such as decolonization.
I have had the privilege lately of discussing these themes as part of the ‘Our Heritage Our Stories’ project which has explored the challenges of sustaining a large number of small-scale, community-based digitization and archival initiatives in the UK. The project has drawn on research, current practice, and case studies with the preservation of community-generated digital content. Its next big deliverable (due tomorrow but here’s a sneaky preview) is a Community Archives Digital Preservation Toolkit which has been co-designed with a wide range of community archives groups. The toolkit is also a partial response to the relevant entries in the Global List of Endangered Digital Species (also updated tomorrow) which identifies community archives as critically endangered.
The Toolkit answers some questions but inevitably will raise more, not least about how communities and institutions should interact. This blog will be published while I am on a late train to London to join colleagues at the launch of the Toolkit tomorrow morning, and it will be released as the Sun rises over the Pacific Ocean. That leads me to wonder aloud, what should we learn from the indigenous data sovereignty movement in the Pacific Islands? I am ready to acknowledge the limits of our experience and keen to learn from the experiences of others.
Digital preservation is a global challenge: World Digital Preservation Day demonstrates that we are a vibrant community scaled to match.
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 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.