Blog

Cassie Shaw works as Digital Archivist at RMIT University Archives 

In August 2025, the RMIT University Information Governance Board endorsed our Digital Preservation Roadmap. It was an exciting mile marker for our team at the University Archives, after close to three years’ work on both the roadmap and our underlying Digital Preservation Strategy 2024-2031, which is a foundational document for improving digital preservation capability and capacity across the University.

RMIT University Archives operates as the institutional repository for university records that are evidence of the functions and activities performed throughout RMIT.  Our mission is to acquire, organise, preserve and publicise such materials and to assist researchers in their use. This is our what.

We are always conscious that maintaining compliance with laws and regulations that support accountability, transparency and authenticity is key, but in this process, we also focussed on how important it is to keep the stories of the work we all do. We spend our work lives doing useful, interesting and valuable things that we want to remember, to recognise both the fact that we do these things, but also that investment in great ideas, work and people. This is our why.

Holly Duncan is the account executive for Preferred Media and DPC Supporter

For World Digital Preservation Day 2025, we invited DPC Members and Supporters to share their reflections on this year’s theme, “Why Preserve?”. As part of this series, Holly Duncan of Preferred Media offers her perspective on the importance of safeguarding our digital heritage. Watch the vlog below! You will find the matching story in Holly's blog here. 

Discover more Why Preserve? stories in our vlogs, blogs, and on our virtual wall. And if you’d like to add your own reason(s), simply complete this short form to share your message with the community.

Carey Garvie is Senior Digital Preservation Specialist at State Library Victoria.

November is rolling around again, bringing with it World Digital Preservation Day. While most of my colleagues are planning how they are going to celebrate the Melbourne Cup, which falls two days before, I’m pondering this year’s World Digital Preservation Day theme: ‘Why Preserve’. In some ways, the Melbourne Cup is an interesting example of this for State Library Victoria. It is said to be the race that stops a nation, certainly for Victoria where public holidays tend to be based on significant sporting events, it is a day off for most people. Running since 1861, even back then public servants and bank officials got a half day to celebrate the occasion.

So, what is it about the Melbourne Cup that makes it so famous? For the serious punters, it’s all about the horses, trainers and jockeys and there are many a story to be told about these. When I think about the Cup, though, I think about the people. The Melbourne Cup is held as part of the Spring Racing Carnival which has become a social event in the Melbourne calendar. People travel from all over with tickets so highly sought after that some only make it to the members’ carpark which itself has become an iconic venue for celebrating the day. Not to mention the now-famous Birdcage where you might spot a celebrity or even a Royal!

Holly Duncan is the account executive for Preferred Media and DPC Supporter

This World Digital Preservation Day, we’re reflecting on two questions: “Why preserve?” and “Who benefits?”

The answer is simple: everyone does. From cultural institutions protecting centuries of heritage, to brands rediscovering the power of their archives, to future technologies learning who we are — preservation is no longer just about storing files. It’s about shaping identity, protecting truth, and creating pathways for innovation.

At Preferred Media, we see this every day. So, to explore the “why,” let’s meet two very different perspectives: Margot, a traditional archivist, and Eli, a futurist working at the intersection of ethics and artificial intelligence.

Celeste Vallance, Elizabeth Franklin and Libor Coufal are members of the Digital Preservation team at the National Library of Australia

Over the past ten years, the National Library of Australia has worked on establishing a holistic and systematic digital preservation program. With all but one of our end-to-end digital preservation workflow steps now in place and running as business-as-usual, work has recently started on implementing the final stage: enhancing access to digital collection material and facilitating its long-term preservation.

William Kilbride is the Executive Director at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and is writing from the iPRES 2025 conference in Wellington ...

I bring greetings from tomorrow. 

This year I am privileged to be spending World Digital Preservation Day in the remarkable company of the National Library and Archives of New Zealand, host to the iPRES conference 2025.  So I am able to send you this message from the future and (at least from the perspective of Wellington Harbour) to make a promise of sunshine, blue skies and calm waters.

Michael Popham is Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

The 27^th October isn’t just the day we celebrate the births of the noted humanist Erasmus, violin virtuoso Paganini, poet Dylan Thomas, and comedian John Cleese – it also happens to be the date UNESCO selected as the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. An annual reminder that, as UNESCO points out, “Audiovisual archives tell us stories about people’s lives and cultures from all over the world. They represent a priceless heritage which is an affirmation of our collective memory and a valuable source of knowledge…”

This blog post was co-authored by Karen Hanson, Jonathan Greenberg, Thib Guicherd-Callin, Angela T. Spinazzè, and Scott Witmer.

Karen Hanson is Lead Research Developer at Portico/ITHAKA; Jonathan Greenberg is Digital Scholarly Publishing Specialist at NYU Division of Libraries; Thib Guicherd-Callin is Technology Manager at LOCKSS; Angela T. Spinazzè was Project Manager and is Principal of ATSPIN consulting; and Scott Witmer is Digital Preservation Specialist at University of Michigan Library. All were part of the “Embedding Team” for this research.

Over three years, with support from the Mellon Foundation, NYU Libraries led a project that embedded a team of preservation experts into the editorial and production workflows of nine publishers and three publishing platform developers. The publishers were creating what we described as complex or enhanced digital works, publications with features such as interactive visualizations, video, and non-linear navigation. The preservation partners joined early conversations about these works and offered feedback on how they could be made more preservable. The platform developers were managing or building systems to support such works and we met with them to assess how well their platforms supported preservation and to recommend improvements. In each case, we tracked which changes were adopted and how effective they were in improving preservability.

A few weeks ago we welcomed two new members of staff to the DPC team. Garth Stewart has joined us to take on the role of Head of Good Practice and Dorothy Waugh is our new Head of Workforce Development.

We are very much enjoying working with them and finding out more about them, and we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce them to the wider community too! To this end, I sat them down with a (virtual) cup of tea and all the (most essential) digital preservation-related questions…and it went a bit like this…

Andy Jackson is Preservation Registries Technical Architect at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)

After publishing Archiving Facebook, Right Now we got quite a lot of comments, feedback and ideas (LinkedIn, Mastodon).  I was rather hoping someone would appear and say "You've got it all wrong, it's easy!" and outline the workings of some suitable solution.  But so far everything I've seen boils down to either labour-intensive web archiving, API-based downloads or accepting individual data exports. It remains difficult to find clear, publicly available documentation of techniques that work and of outputs that can be preserved.