This blog post is authored by Andrea Davidson, Project Manager - Innovation at LIBIS @ KU Leuven
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) project ‘Enhancing Digital preservation strategies at European and National level’ (EDEN) aims to support and promote digital preservation practices and standards to advance the long-term preservation of digital data. Between January 2025 and December 2027, EDEN is creating a framework to help institutions to identify what data are candidates for digital preservation and to preserve research outputs as high-quality, FAIR data in the long term.
This work involves setting standards and protocols, which the project determines by assessing data usage, quality, and the data’s benefits to science and society. EDEN has engaged with the GLAM [Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums] sector, among other key stakeholders in the area of research data management, to understand each sector’s specific needs for long-term digital preservation. Engagement activities focus on soliciting external feedback, ensuring validation, and encouraging adoption of EDEN outcomes in the digital preservation community.
Long-term preservation for GLAM
The GLAM sector aspires to robust preservation practices. EDEN is developing frameworks, guidelines, and best practices for the identification, selection, and appraisal of data for long-term preservation. As part of that effort, EDEN carried out a large-scale survey in 2025, in order to better understand contemporary working practices in the sector. This is important for GLAM institutions as they increasingly integrate the FAIR principles and participate in the Collections-as-Data movement, which strives to make digital information about collections available as data for computationally-driven research enquiries.
EDEN has engaged GLAM sector stakeholders from the outset of this project, initially collecting input on existing identification, selection, and appraisal practices for digital preservation. The 2025 survey received 250 valid responses from 31 states/nations worldwide, with 151 responses representing the GLAM sector: 70 archives, 64 libraries, and 17 museums/galleries. Other stakeholders responding to the survey included repositories, research performing organizations, research infrastructures, digital preservation services, and one academic publisher.
The 2025 survey led to five important takeaways that have guided EDEN’s work and reflect the landscape and priorities for digital preservation among GLAM organizations. A full report of the survey is available for download at https://zenodo.org/records/17984753.
1. The international digital preservation community works in a variety of settings and locations.
There is significant diversity as to how digital data objects are handled: no single strategy for processing digital data objects and long-term preservation of data exists across the GLAM sector.
EDEN strives to be responsive to the different contexts for long-term digital preservation by offering solutions that adopters can adapt to their priorities. First and foremost, the Core Preservation Processes (CPPs) or 30 specific actions that a trustworthy digital archive should take to ensure digital preservation that a group of digital preservation practitioners has developed address generic processes regardless of specific content, domain, or discipline. The CPPs are described as a sequence of implementable steps that focus on operational activities required by digital preservation.
The CPPs were one of three finalists for The National Library and Archives, Singapore Award for Research and Innovation from the DPC in 2026. Read more about the CPPs here.
2. Stakeholders are interested in sharing their experience and concerns.
Concerns that resonated across all types of survey respondents include sensitive or protected data, challenges of data volume, and access provision because these issues threaten FAIRness over time. To a lesser extent, stakeholders also expressed concerns about long-term provision of service, lack of useful policy or directive, software preservation, provenance issues, and format problems in order to meet community needs.
3. The principles of FAIR data are familiar but the TRUST and CARE principles are less known or used.
Survey findings reveal that the FAIR principles can be considered foundational in preservation practice. However, even knowledge and use of conceptual frameworks - including FAIR and other frameworks and implementation standards for digital data handling - vary across GLAM institutions.
4. “Long-term preservation” is still an unstable concept, as many respondents work at an organisation where there is no agreed or working definition.
For example, while 76% of archives responded that their organization has an agreed definition of "long-term" in the context of digital preservation (this was the highest percentage among all types of organizations surveyed), only 7% of museums/galleries and 26% of libraries had defined “long-term” in their organizations. Of those organizations with a definition, “long-term” ranges from 1-5 years until 100 years, with 32.4% of respondents indicating that 100 years is the initial duration for preservation and 21.2% indicating 10 years.
Similarly, the criteria used to assess the quality of digital data object candidates for long-term preservation at the point of ingest ranges widely, with different types of quality checks being performed to different extents across the sectors. According to the figure below, archives are more likely than libraries, museums, and galleries to consider a wide variety of criteria that includes content quality, technical (metadata) quality, descriptive metadata quality, and administrative metadata quality. Museums and galleries report lower frequency of checking technical quality, descriptive metadata quality, and administrative metadata quality. Archives generally exhibit different behaviour from all other organisation types, with more checking activity reported overall and in particularly high levels of checking for provenance, completeness and documentation.
Types of quality checks performed on digital data objects at the point of ingest for "long-term" digital preservation (1). Figure 36a in Molloy, L., Lindlar, M., Benauer, M., Andreassen, H. N., Presser, K., & Anu, M. (2025). EOSC EDEN D1.1 - Overview of Identification, Selection and Appraisal Practices for Long-Term Preservation of Data. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17984753
Although the survey indicates that relatively few GLAM organizations undertake to regularly reassess the quality of preserved digital data objects, GLAM organizations predominate among those 18.8% of survey respondents that do define “long-term” AND perform quality checks at the point of ingest AND perform reassessments of the quality of digital objects at later stages in the preservation period. That group of organizations that conduct the most rigorous long-term preservation process with these three steps consists primarily of museums or galleries (35.7%), libraries (31%) and archives (16.4%), with digital preservation services, research infrastructures, repositories, and research performing organizations represented at 14.3% of the group or less.
5. Urgent issues for contemporary digital preservation practitioners include resourcing, metadata quality, dealing with sensitive data, handling increasing data volume, and meeting changing user needs.
As EDEN works to provide the community with solutions to the most pressing needs for long-term digital preservation, the project also fosters a community of practice that will carry on with this mission after the end of the project. The Digital Curation and Preservation Network gathers practitioners to work together to exchange knowledge and develop further solutions. At a 2025 in-person meeting where we gathered prospective members to help shape this network, several participants represented archives or repositories across Europe. If you work in data curation and are looking to get involved in a professional network, we invite you to participate in the upcoming DCPN events and find out if one or more of our working groups match your interests.
Follow EDEN for updates on our work supporting long-term digital preservation
In summer 2026, EDEN ran a follow-up survey on the quality of research data and metadata for long-term preservation that attracted over 250 responses from GLAM sector stakeholders. This survey investigated how both preservation professionals and researchers experience issues related to sharing, finding, accessing, and working with research data. Follow EDEN to find out more about the results of the 2026 survey when they are available.
Subscribe to EDEN’s newsletter or follow the project on LinkedIn or Bluesky to learn more when we publish the results.