News

Martin Eve of CrossRef has some sobering news for researchers. A recent analysis suggests that around a quarter of academic publications are not being preserved for the future. 

Eve’s sample is based on the assessment of around 7.5 million of the e-books and articles for which CrossRef provides a fixed identifier, or Digital Object Identifier.   These identifiers prevent ‘link rot’ so that, even if a URL changes, an article or book can still be cited and retrieved.  But they’re not enough on their own because they only preserve the link not the destination. So, unless there’s a preservation service guaranteeing the content, the DOI will stop working if a publisher goes out of business or simply removes a title.  Scholarly content needs to be preserved before it is deleted, not after. 

Prompted by the 2022 Society of American Archivists (SAA) publication of Museum Archives: Practice, Issues, Advocacy (ed. Rachel Chatalbash, Susan Hernandez, and Megan Schwenke), the Yale Center for British Art and SAA's Museum Archives Section are hosting a one-day symposium to examine the current position and future directions of the museum archives field. The symposium will be held in person at the Yale University Art Gallery and livestreamed online. We welcome proposals from new and established museum archivists, and their professional allies, that examine any aspect of the museum archives profession. Themes for consideration include, but are not limited to: 

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is pleased to announce the general release of a new Technology Watch Report on Preserving Geospatial Data today.

First released to DPC Members in July 2023, Preserving Geospatial Data has been authored by Meagan Snow, Geospatial Data Visualization Librarian at the Geography & Map Division of the Library of Congress. Published by the DPC in association with the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the report is the second edition of an earlier report by Guy McGarva, Steve Morris and Greg Janée, published by the DPC in 2009. Though much of the information in this original report was still relevant, there were many updates necessary given the pace of change in the complex landscape of tools and file formats for geospatial data.

Would you like to help shape a new edition of an important, free digital preservation resource? If so, please read on!

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is currently undertaking a project, funded by the Welsh Government Culture Division, to scope requirements for developing a new, revised 3rd Edition of the Digital Preservation Handbook (the Handbook).