WDPD2024
Articles
World Digital Preservation Day 2024: Raising Awareness for Oral Histories at Risk
Nathan Tallman is Executive Director at APTrust World Digital Preservation Day is organized by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a global membership organization dedicated to ensuring the longevity of digital assets. Through their annual Bit List of Endangered Species, the DPC highlights digital materials at high risk of loss. The 2024 Bit List of Endangered Digital Species has classified oral histories as “Endangered,” with a noted trend toward even greater risk. The...
Building our community - what's your role?
Nance McGovern is Associate for Digital Preservation Practice and Instruction at Global Archivist LLC and a DPC Fellow Happy World Digital Preservation Day! Since introducing WDPD, the DPC has done such a great job engaging the digital preservation community in celebrating our most festive day. It is always fun to see what the theme is and this year is a great example - ‘Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities’ is so timely.
Digital Preservation and Accessibility Community Engagement: Documenting Support for Digital Accessibility Features in File Formats
Kate Murray works as Digital Project Coordinator and Liz Holdzkom as Digital Collection Specialist for the Library of Congress Accessibility is a growing area of interest in the digital preservation community. The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) for example has published Guidelines for Software Accessibility for Open Source Digital Preservation Applications and Guidelines for Embedding Metadata in WebVTT Files. Starting in 2024, the Sustainability of Digital Formats...
Portico pilot project preserves under-represented archival content
Kate Wittenberg is Managing Director at Portico The Portico digital preservation service is developing a pilot project to include in our dark archive important under-represented content that may be at-risk because it is not preserved. For this project, we define under-represented content as material concerning people, communities, or topics that have had inadequate representation in traditional publishing, library and archival collections, and preservation services and that...
Preserving the Voices of the Grain Trade
Sarah Lorenowich is a Director with Friends of Grain Elevators and Sara Janes is University Archivist at Lakehead University In 2003, Friends of Grain Elevators’ (FOGE) founding members came together with the shared goal of preserving the slowly fading history of Thunder Bay’s grain industry. Companies amalgamated, grain elevators were slated for demolition, and critical historical information about the port’s accomplishments—and the people who achieved them—was being lost....
Integrity Checking Detective: An Interactive Activity to Build Digital Preservation Skills
Laura Isabel Sastoque Pabon is Digital Preservation Training Officer at the University of Southampton In celebration of World Digital Preservation Day 2024, Digital Preservation Southampton presents an interactive lesson on file integrity checking, designed for educators and trainers to implement in their own classroom or workshop settings. This engaging activity invites participants to take on the role of digital detectives, where they will identify and restore corrupted files.
World Digital Preservation Day 2024: Bolstering Online Communities
Ellie Burnage works for publisher Exact Editions based in the UK “Membership is a relationship. People give their money, but also their time, ideas, expertise and connections to support a cause that they believe in […] It’s a two-way relationship.” Ariel Zirulnick, Fund Director of Membership Puzzle Project (Press Gazette, 2021) In recent years, many specialist interest magazine publishers (and media organisations as a whole) have transitioned into membership models as a way to create...
SIPping from the fount of collective knowledge
Tom Wilson is Digital Preservation Archivist at the British Film Institute National Archive So, let’s address the first elephant in the room. I’m aware that a SIP is a Submission Information Package, i.e., an input into a system. I’m also aware that “sipping from” implies taking something out, but the pun was too good to pass on! The second elephant in the room (at least, in the rooms I frequent at work), is the one regarding the “new” digital preservation practices...
Celebrating Digital Preservation Communities in the North of England
Fran Horner is an Archivist at the University of Sheffield. This World Digital Preservation Day, I would like to highlight and celebrate the digital preservation communities I am part of and find extremely valuable. I am an Archivist at the University of Sheffield Library Special Collections, Heritage and Archives and digital preservation falls under my remit. The university is part of the White Rose Libraries (WRL) partnership which was established in 2004 and brings together the...
Preserving Community Heritage through the SCRAN Transfer Project
Isobel Reed is SCRAN Digital Archive Officer for HES (Historic Environment Scotland) What is SCRAN? The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network, or SCRAN, first went online on 25th July 1997. It contains over 460,000 digital resources including images, audio-visual material, text documents, and even 3D scans. These resources are drawn together from collections held by museums, galleries, archives, the media, community projects, and individuals who represent Scotland’s...
A Community Effort: Year Two of the Open Book Futures Project archiving work package
Gareth Cole is Open Research Development and Discovery Lead at Loughborough University Last year, my colleague, Dr Miranda Barnes, wrote about the work we’ve been conducting as part of the Open Book Futures Project. This blog post aims to update on that work and highlight where we’ve made advances and to reinforce how it could not have been achieved without a community effort within, and outside, the team. As Miranda highlighted, Community is key to the project and, in fact, is...
Community-Driven Evolution of Repository Definitions & Descriptions.
Hervé L’Hours, Repository & Preservation, UK Data Service, UK Data Archive, University of Essex, in collaboration with the CoreTrustSeal Standards & Certification Board. This post is a collaboration between the UK Data Service[1] and the CoreTrustSeal[2] for World Digital Preservation Day[3]. In 2024, a CoreTrustSeal board position paper defined a set of curation and preservation levels[4] that organisations can use to document how they care for digital...
Biblio-Equity in Archiving and Preservation: Ensuring Diverse Representation
Gali Halevi is Collection Development Director at CLOCKSS In the field of archiving and preservation, the concept of "biblio-equity" is essential for ensuring that collections reflect the rich diversity of global scholarship and communities. Biblio-equity embodies principles of fairness, justice, and equal access to preserved resources, while preservation efforts focus on safeguarding materials that represent a wide range of languages, cultures, and backgrounds. To develop archiving...
Heritage At Risk and Digital Preservation within the Historic England Archive
Amy Baker is Digital Preservation Assistant at Historic England This year World Digital Preservation Day coincides with another major project for Historic England: the release of the Heritage at Risk Register for 2024, coming late November. As a result, it has been a busy time for the digital preservation team here at Historic England, and so felt like a perfect time to not only celebrate #WDPD2024 but also bring attention to the importance of digital preservation within projects like...
Danum Digital: engaging professional communities about digital preservation
Simon Wilson is Archives Consultant and DPC Supporter Background In August 2023 the City of Doncaster Archives was awarded funding under The National Archives Resilience grant programme. I was brought-in to deliver the project working closely with the Council’s archives and records management colleagues. The project has two distinct strands – to develop a business case for digital preservation to secure, preserve and manage the Council’s born-digital records and this work is still...
The Missing Link: Connecting Readers with Early Digital Text in Libraries
Justine Provino just completed a PhD in English at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Leontien Talboom is a technical analyst at Cambridge University Libraries This blog post highlights the collaboration between the Cambridge University Library (CUL) Transfer Service and a PhD research project on Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992). The joint work of the writer William Gibson, the artist Dennis Ashbaugh and the publisher Kevin Begos Jr, Agrippa is an artist’s book made to...
Review, Understand, Implement: Planning for Digital Preservation by taking Inventory
Jack Wain is Coordinator, Digitisation and Preservation at Deakin University Library University collections come in many shapes, formats and sizes, and typically involve a large variety of interconnected systems, discovery platforms and repositories, often accrued and integrated over many years – even decades. These systems will also often have their own data analysis tools or reporting functions, or have integrations set-up for this task, and as a result it can sometimes be difficult...
Shaping iPRES 2025 Together: Celebrating Community in Aotearoa New Zealand and Beyond
Andrea Goethals is Manager, Digital Preservation and Data Capability at Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa National Library of New Zealand, and Conference Chair for iPRES 2025 in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Valerie Love is Senior Digital Archivist and Acting Digital Collections Team Leader at the Alexander Turnbull Library, the Archives and Special Collections for Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa National Library of New Zealand. They are one of the Co-Chairs for iPRES 2025. Nau mai, haere...
From iPRES Workshop to Working Game: File Format Fling
This game and blog has been created by: Susanne van den Eijkel, Anton van Es, Francesca Mackenzie, Sharon McMeekin, Elaine Murray, Ellie O’Leary, and Lotte Wijsman. Proudly presenting the game FILE FORMAT FLING, a game quite unlike any other digital preservation game out there. Is it needed? Almost definitely not! Is it educational? A bit! Does it bring something new and different to the pantheon of games that you haven’t seen before? Almost definitely and it is probably fun too! In...
Collecting Communities as a business archive in a museum
Helen Dafter is Archivist (Digital Preservation) at The Postal Museum Celebrating communities is core to the work of The Postal Museum. The focus of our audience engagement work is local communities (those in the Camden and Islington boroughs, where the museum is based) and Royal Mail staff. This blog explores how the museum’s work with communities intersects with our collecting activity. The Postal Museum holds both museum and archive collections. The archive collections mainly...