Irina Schmid, Instructor and Digital Collections Archivist at The American University in Cairo.
Explanation of the image: The dots and dashes across the top spell out SOS in Morse code, which ties the image to the post's central idea without needing any words. The pixel fragments show the "quiet loss" the post describes: the stories are not destroyed all at once; they just crumble as they drift out of reach.
Most of us have a drawer with an old phone in it. There might also be a USB stick or a laptop that hasn't been switched on in years. We hang on to them because we suspect there's something on them we would miss: photos, messages, a draft of something we cared about. We rarely check them, though, partly because we're not sure we want to know whether they still work.
Scale that drawer up to a whole society, and we have a fair picture of what this year's World Digital Preservation Day theme is getting at: Save Our Stories (SOS): Our Digital Heritage in Danger.
Loss that doesn't look like loss
When a physical archive is under threat, people tend to notice. There is a fire, a flood, a leaking roof. Digital loss is far less dramatic. A link stops working. A file would not open because the software that made it is gone. A platform sends an email saying a service is being "retired". Nobody sets out to destroy the record. It just is not there when someone goes looking for it.
This has already happened on a large scale. When GeoCities shut down in 2009, millions of personal websites went with it: fan pages, family histories, early online communities. Volunteers saved what they could in a hurry, but a great deal was still lost. In 2019, MySpace admitted that a server migration had wiped out music uploaded over about twelve years, including songs by bands that had no other record of their work. And when Flash reached end of life in 2020, years of web games, animation, and teaching material stopped running unless someone had made the effort to rescue them.
None of this came from carelessness in the usual sense. It came from a widely shared assumption that what goes online stays online.
It's the stories, not just the files
Digital preservation can sound like a purely technical field, all file formats, storage media, and checksums. Those things matter a lot. But the word "stories" in this year's theme is a useful reminder of what the files actually hold.
A spreadsheet of hospital admissions is part of the history of a pandemic. A folder of voice notes may be how a family separated by migration stayed in touch. A research dataset is the evidence behind findings that could shape policy for decades. A recording made on a phone might be the only account of a local dialect, a craft, or a neighborhood that has since changed beyond recognition. When the files go, those stories go with them.
What's putting our stories at risk
Several pressures stand out. The first is how much we depend on platforms we do not control. A large share of our collective memory sits on commercial services whose terms, owners, and business models can change at any time. Content that feels permanent is often closer to being rented.
The second is complexity. Digital heritage now includes interactive websites, video games, software-based artworks, research code, and very large datasets. The more a work depends on a particular technical environment, the harder it is to keep usable.
Then there is volume. We produce enormous amounts of digital content, and much of it was never meant to last. Deciding what to keep is a serious intellectual and ethical task in its own right.
Many organizations also lack the money, staff, and skills to look after what they already hold, and digital preservation is still too often treated as an IT job rather than a long-term responsibility.
Finally, in many parts of the world, records face conflict, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and political pressure. A digital copy can be what survives when a building is destroyed. Just as often, though, the digital record is what disappears.
What we can actually do
The encouraging news is that much of the digital heritage we still have survived because someone spotted a risk early and did something about it.
A sensible first step is simply finding out what we got. It is challenging to protect material we have not identified, and even a basic record of what exists, where it's kept, and who is responsible for it makes a real difference.
It also pays to think ahead. If our material lives on a third-party platform, we need to work out now how we would get it back out, in what format, and with what information attached. It's much easier to plan an exit before we need one.
Sending the signal
World Digital Preservation Day is a chance to draw attention to a problem that does not usually announce itself. The stories we look after today are the ones people will be able to read, watch, and learn from tomorrow. The ones we do not may not get a second chance.