At a ceremony in Amsterdam this month, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the Dutch Coalition for Digital Preservation (NCDD), joined forces to help agencies in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands address the complex challenge of making sure our collected digital memory can be accessed into the future.
‘Although we depend on them for so much of our daily routine, digital objects can be fragile’ explained William Kilbride of the DPC. ‘They are so ubiquitous that it’s easy to treat them as treat them as disposable. But the reality is that many of these resources are going to be valuable in the future too and we are poorly prepared to ensure long term access. Identifying those items which will be important, and securing items sounds like a simple question: but in practice it involves a many different types of expertise and different types of agency too.’
‘NCDD is a coalition of leading institutions in the Netherlands, with the goal of encouraging knowledge exchange and co-operation in of digital preservation,’ explained Marcel Ras, of NCDD. ‘We’ve always understood that collaboration is important for digital preservation, and because it is an international challenge it makes sense to work with partners around the world. DPC has had an impressive impact on digital preservation in the UK and Ireland so we’re delighted that we’ll be working more closely with them in the future.’
‘Our organisations have collaborated in a variety of practical ways in the past but up till now this has tended to be on an ad hoc basis.’ explained William Kilbride ‘Our real strengths are our members. This new alliance is designed so that our members can work more closely together and on a regular basis.’