World Digital Preservation Day 2022 has arrived.
You might be looking at your watch and thinking it’s still only Wednesday 2nd and not even close to midnight wher you are, but World Digital Preservation Day is a global event. So as the working day begins across the Pacific Ocean, so it's time to get this show on the road.
The theme of World Digital Preservation Day 2022 is ‘Data for all, for good, forever. I am looking forward to a global outpouring of blogs and presentations and tweets and songs and cakes which celebrate and interpret this theme. Almost anyone working in or thinking about digital preservation can have something to say about a theme as open as this. The day has two broad purposes: to raise awareness about the digital preservation challenge; and to help a growing but widely distributed community connect with each other.
I like the various ambiguities in this theme. Data is a joyfully ambiguous term which I don’t intend to unpack (though if you’ve not read Christine Borgman’s efforts to bring meaning to this topic then I recommend you stop reading this blog immediately and spend the day tracking down a copy of Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World.) Data ‘for all’ has a clever ring to it – not only can you unpack ‘for’ in multiple ways, but ‘all’ is ambiguous. A sloppy reading might imply suggest ‘all people alive today’ but it might as well be ‘all people in the future too’. And why stop at people. Maybe the digital preservation can be ‘for’ the whole planet too. (If it’s not then there’s something missing.) ‘For good’ has a double meaning too: it could be about purpose in the ethical sense but also could be ‘forever’; and although ‘forever’ implies something perpetual I really don’t think many of us expect to keep digits literally forever: it’s a neat slogan which invites a question.
There will be some set piece activities today from the DPC which I am allowed to mention in advance. We’ll start with news of a new DPC member. I don’t want to pre-empt this, but your clue is we’re making the announcement to catch the Australian time zones. Also in Australian time zones, we’re going to be presenting at a workshop organized by RIMPA. Later in the day we’ll launch a new guide which we’ve recently published with help from ARCW called Digital Preservation for Small Businesses and we’ll publish two more French translations in the Technology Watch Series.
That’s the context for two other major releases: we’re ready now to publish the book of proceedings from the iPres 2022 conference, which of course has the same title ‘Data for all for good forever’. There’s more work to do, especially with the many hours of recordings generated for our hybrid conference. That will come later, but as a teaser we’ll be share recording of the three keynotes along with the proceedings.
As a side note, regulars will remember that in previous years World Digital Preservation Day was something of a blog-a-thon with many dozens (hundreds!) of blogs published. That was great fun but also a bit overwhelming. While there will be some blog posts, releasing the iPres 2022 proceedings instead means there’s a proper book this time which you can spend all year digesting.
Later in the day we’ll release the 2022 revision to the BitList, the Global List of Digitally Endangered Species. There will be news in here about 13 entries which have new trends associated with them, and there will be 4 strong recommendations arising. There are some very direct and serious messages in here too, which hit directly the ‘raising awareness about digital preservation’ button.
The only thing missing from the line up are the Digital Preservation Awards. In the past we’ve hosted the award ceremony as our contribution to WDPD. It’s a way to thank the many professionals and communities around the world who have demonstrated and shared good practice over the years. This year we presented the awards on the opening night of iPres. The ceremony was webcast, but the real gems are the short videos which finalists made, recording and sharing the good practice for which they have rightly been recognised. If you are missing your regular dose of Digital Preservation Awards I can heartily recommend these as an alternative.
Some of the more light-hearted activities will help with the building relationships between colleagues around the world. I have heard rumours about crafting, cookies and songs. I even stumbled into a web conference a few days ago where dance moves were being rehearsed. I don’t know what to expect but will be tuning in.
So, with immense pleasure and some trepidation, let me welcome you all to World Digital Preservation Day 2022!