David Mahoney is the Digital Archives Assistant at The University of Edinburgh, Heritage Collections
Last month I had the opportunity to attend the NetDRIVE 2026 Summer School at Durham University. The Summer School was a week-long programme exploring how Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI), High Performance Computing (HPC) and computational research can both contribute towards and themselves become barriers to, achieving the UK’s Net Zero ambitions. Bringing together PhD researchers from across the UK, the programme combined keynote talks, practical workshops, a poster session and collaborative activities with participants from the parallel EPCC’s HPC Days Summer School, creating an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas across different research communities.
Although the Summer School was primarily focused on sustainable HPC, much of what was discussed resonated strongly with my own doctoral research, which explores the use of web archives as a method for retrospective measurement of the environmental impact of websites, as well as my new role at The University of Edinburgh, Heritage Collections as a Digital Archives Assistant. Throughout the week, I found myself continually translating ideas from HPC into the context of web archives, building upon discussions I had just a couple of months earlier at the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Web Archiving Conference (WAC) workshop on Sustainable Web Archiving. Rather than answering questions I already had, the week left me asking new ones.
One workshop that particularly stayed with me focused on storytelling as a tool for advocacy and creating meaningful change. It seems only fitting, then, to reflect on the week by sharing the story of how it has informed my own thinking. Throughout the Summer School, I kept returning to one question: What does sustainable web archiving look like?
The full blog post can be read on the University of Edinburgh Digital Preservation Blog: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/digipres/2026/07/15/netdrive-2026/