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So here we are…the day after another amazing iPRES conference and I find myself running through my notes and trying to process the incredible amount of knowledge and experience that has been shared in such a short period.

iPRES was a virtual conference for me this year. I love this conference and most of all I love the face-to-face interactions with the digital preservation community, but it was hard to make the logistics work in order to attend in person this time around. Despite having a serious case of FOMO (especially when conference delegates headed off on a boat to the conference dinner) the virtual conference experience was a good one for me. I kind of got used to the 8:00am start (and the dog was very happy with the early pre-conference walks).

A second prototype service is now available from the Registries of Good Practice project, following on from the release of the Digital Preservation Publications Index in May. The Digital Preservation Workbench brings together a suite of different experimental interfaces and tools, aiming to help improve the practice of digital preservation and to understand what kinds of information systems we really need.

Rosie Dyson is the Digital Collections Officer at Leeds University Libraries and Galleries (Special Collections). She attended the ARA 2024 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

I was delighted to receive a DPC Career Development Fund Grant to attend the ARA 2024 Conference in Birmingham, UK. As anticipated, it was an excellent opportunity for networking, knowledge-sharing and gaining fresh ideas and perspectives. In this blog, I reflect on my time at the conference and recount some of the top takeaways and practical solutions for reducing our digital carbon footprint.

Andy Jackson is a Preservation Registries Technical Architect at the Digital Preservation Coalition

The digital preservation community has known for many years that the volatile world of social media platforms represented a significant risk to digital history. It was added to the Bit List in 2019 and it hasn’t eased since. In truth, it’s worse now, because it’s no longer just about losing our content. It’s about losing our connections. Our communities.

The loss of the once-vibrant #DigiPres community on Twitter has been lamented loudly and widely. And as ‘X’ continues its indecent descent, the poor moderation and new barriers to access mean staying there seems increasingly untenable. Many digital preservation community members no longer feel welcome there, and a growing number of organisations are choosing to minimise their engagement on X or leave the platform altogether (like JISC).

Of course we’re on LinkedIn, Facebook & Instagram, which works fine for more official output. But it’s all a bit, you know, corporate. It doesn’t feel very #DigiPres. 

So where should we go?

Karyn Williamson is a Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition.

As some of you may already know, The National Archives UK has recently opened applications for a newly expanded Archives Revealed grant program. 

Although it has existed for a while, it has been significantly expanded with a new partnership between the National Archives, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Pilgrim Trust and the Wolfson Foundation. The program is dedicated to ‘unlocking archival collections’, making them accessible to researchers and the public. There are three distinct kinds of grants to meet different needs: Scoping Grants, Cataloguing Grants, and Consortium Grants.

Karyn Williamson is a Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition.

I was lucky enough to be asked to give the Keynote address at the Community Archives and Heritage Group (CAHG) Conference at University College London on the 10th of July 2024. I’ve been working on the Our Heritage Our Stories project since March and it’s given me the opportunity to work with a wide range of community archive groups and learn about what they need and the experiences they have had when contacting or working with established archives across our sector. This experience is what led to the thoughts and opinions in this blog, which are mine alone. I wanted to share this to encourage record keepers to think about their current practice when working with community groups and if this could be improved. This keynote has been slightly edited into this blog.  

As it’s been on our “To Do” list for longer than I care to admit, I’m SO pleased that I can finally say that the project which will produce a 3^rd Edition of the Digital Preservation Handbook is underway! In this blog post I’ll provide a quick update on how we got to this point, and describe some ways we hope the digital preservation community will be able to engage with its development.

In 1990, Edinburgh University Computing Service (EUCS) launched the Bulletin of IT Services – or BITs for short. Produced by the staff in the EUCS team, BITs reported on the latest developments in communications and information technology at the University until Information Services was formed in the early 2000s.

Helen Busby is Archive Manager at University of East Anglia Archives.

For a small archive service, we like to dream big and ‘Do Different’ as the UEA moto goes. The inception of, and growth of our literary archive has been one of hope, ambition and the good will and generosity of our depositors. The British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) lives in the library service at the University East Anglia, the home of the oldest Creative Writing MA in the UK and a centre of literary activity. Alongside the UEA archive and rare books collection BACW proactively collects contemporary literature from Doris Lessing in 1945 through the twentieth century to the poets and prose writers of the present moment. 

Ndahambelela Hertha Iipinge is Associate Archivist at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. She attended the IIPC Web Archiving Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

Since August 2023, I have been working as an associate archivist in the digital preservation team at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. My role includes managing the UNHCR Web Archive, where my responsibilities include curating and capturing essential content. I work closely with UNHCR websites owners, social media team and the Records and Archives Section Web Archiving Working Group, notifying them about scheduled website crawls to ensure content selection and inclusion. The role is crucial in maintaining optimal performance, data integrity and that the process runs smoothly and without undue strain on servers.

I also work closely with UNHCR’s web archiving service provider to oversee the crawling of our websites and social media platforms, safeguarding the online digital web legacy of UNHCR’s global efforts.