Blog

William Kilbride is Executive Director at the Digital Preservation Coalition

•  Coda: a passage that brings a piece or a movement to an end.
• Canon: a theme that is repeated and imitated and built upon by other instruments with a time delay, creating a layered effect.

World Digital Preservation Day 2023 adopted a musical turn of phrase with the theme ‘A Concerted Effort’, emphasizing the need for collaboration and partnership to achieve a shared goal.  As the saying goes, ‘No one can whistle a symphony, it takes a whole orchestra to play it’.  It might be phrased less elegantly: if you’re doing digital preservation on your own, you’re doing it wrong.

In musical terms this blog post is the coda which brings our celebrations to a close.  It’s too early for me to take stock of all the different initiatives and outputs which have been shared over the course of the last 36 (ish) hours. I only have space for a few items which caught my eye so a very limited perspective.  But here are a few things that, if you didn’t already know about, are worth holding on to:

Julienne Pascoe is a Digital Archivist for Library and Archives Canada.

Digital Preservation is a collaborative effort, one that benefits from a variety of perspectives, expertise, and multifaceted participation. As a Digital Archivist at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), I work closely with my team in our section, Digital Integration, as well as colleagues in the Digital Preservation section, to perform a variety of tasks and services in ensuring that digital records are transferred, assessed, and preserved for sustainable access in the future. The stewardship of our digital legacy would not be possible without a collaborative, concerted effort with my colleagues who contain invaluable, diverse expertise and perspectives that combine to research and devise strategies for tackling the many nuanced digital preservation challenges. This collaborative effort to ensure continued access to our digital legacy extends to (and relies upon) the community that we are a part of, the digital preservation community, and it is this subject that I would like to discuss in my blog post today. More specifically I would like to discuss my experience as a ‘first-timer’ with the DPC this year, and the value that such a network brings to my role as a digital preservation practitioner. 

Nance McGovern is Associate for Digital Preservation Practice and Instruction at Global Archivist LLC and a DPC Fellow

Digital preservation at its best is a collaborative sport. As always, the theme for World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is timely and important.

Collaboration has been an important part of digital practice for me since I started preserving digital content in 1986 at the Center for Electronic Records at the U.S. National Archives. We regularly welcomed visitors from all over who were interested in hearing about our program and in sharing what they were working on with us. An open source approach – sharing, using, and contributing back – contributes to the sustainability of good practice for digital preservation. Welcoming visitors – virtually and in-person – is a relatively easy opportunity for organizations engaged in digital preservation to contribute and to be informed.

This blog post has been written by Laurence Brewer, Elizabeth England, Lisa Haralampus, Leslie Johnston, and Markus Most at National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Background

The U.S. federal government has signaled how important web content is to the public documentation and experience of government. According to U.S. government website tracking data, every 90 days there are over 5 billion visits to government websites. Enabling long-term preservation of government website content is critical to public understanding of the government and its history.

Adam Harwood is Research Data & Digital Preservation Technologist at the University of Sussex

I talk about digital preservation with IT colleagues regularly and I often feel like I am in a position of perceived weakness - lecturing them on technical matters relating to preserving data. Needing a little confidence boost, I used ChatGPT to see what it had to say about the difference between backup and digital preservation. I posted an interesting outcome of this conversation in the Digital Preservation jiscmail list. Its answers boosted my confidence and I no longer feel those nagging pangs of talking nonsense during technical conversations.

Marcus Nappier is Senior Digital Collections Specialist at the Library of Congress

This year’s DPC World Digital Preservation Day theme, “Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort” highlights the necessity of collaborative work to achieve digital preservation goals and ensure that our collective digital heritage stands the test of time. I’ve been thrilled to work alongside amazing colleagues at the Library of Congress to annually update and publish the Recommended Formats Statement, a digital preservation guidance tool and culmination of file format nerdiness.

Heather Tompkins is Senior Project Officer at Library and Archives Canada

As World Digital Preservation Day approached this year, I started to think about what might be worthwhile to share with our digital preservation colleagues across the world. One of the topics that came to mind is the work we are undertaking at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) to develop our digital preservation policies.  In 2022, our digital preservation area underwent an audit which resulted in several findings. One finding was to develop a digital preservation policy suite that defines our preservation priorities. Another finding was to have criteria for the acquisition and preservation of digital material that takes into account LAC’s ability to preserve and make them accessible.  While we had an overarching policy on preservation, we didn’t yet have clear documentation of these priorities or criteria as it relates to the unique aspects of digital preservation. We internally recognized we could improve how we work, in part, by clarifying these priorities and criteria.

Chris Prom is Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is proud to release the iPRES 2023 Proceedings on World Digital Preservation Day. We hope you find them profitable and useful for your work.

Doing so is a fitting capstone to the community effort that underpins digital preservation work so evident during the iPRES 2023 meeting, held from September 19 - 22, 2023. As conference co-chair, along with Tracy Seneca, I can truly say that organizing the conference was THE highlight of my professional career to date. The sense of welcome, collegiality, rigor, and fun that the entire conference planning team - our program committee, local organizers, peer reviewers, and supporters - brought to the table, was truly extraordinary and inspiring!  

Sally McInnes is Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales. 

As a small, smart country, we in Wales are well accustomed to undertaking concerted efforts for the common good, notably reflected by our Well-being of Future Generations Act. This Act is unique to Wales and requires public bodies to think about the long-term impact of their decisions and to work collaboratively. We have certainly delivered the Act in the context of digital preservation, influencing decision making through the creation of a national policy, advocating for investment, skills development and through many collaborative initiatives.

Antonio Guillermo Martinez is the Founder and Head of Product at LIBNOVA. 

Este blog está disponible en español a continuación: 

One more year we join the Digital Preservation Coalition's initiative to celebrate the World Digital Preservation Day. This year the central theme to reflect on is "Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort".

At LIBNOVA we firmly believe that a successful digital preservation project is the result of a joint effort between the institution and the provider, which is why we have always advocated a project approach based on cooperation, with the needs of our customers as the driving force for innovation and by engaging in collaborative research projects. But, what does this really mean?