Jennifer Restrepo is the Customer Adoption Specialist at Libnova.
Digital preservation depends on more than technology. Institutions need to maintain the knowledge, responsibilities, and control required to care for their collections over time. For World Digital Preservation Day 2026, with its theme Save Our Stories (SOS), we should also ask what might put the continuity of our digital heritage at risk.
During a digital preservation user community session, one institution shared its experience of inheriting a preservation workflow that nobody had documented. The departure of the people who had previously managed it made it difficult to maintain the program and delayed progress.
This experience illustrates a risk that can affect any institution. A breakdown in digital custodianship occurs when responsibility for a collection depends on a particular person, organizational structure, or service provider remaining in place. The causes may differ, but the underlying vulnerability is the same: continuity has not been sufficiently documented or secured.
After an Organizational Restructuring, What Falls Within the Scope of Digital Preservation?
When an institution restructures, materials that have never been formally included within the scope of its digital preservation program are particularly vulnerable.
In this case, an organizational restructuring narrowed the preservation program to the library and special collections. Committee minutes and other institutional records fell outside its scope. These documents reflect how university decisions were made and form part of its institutional memory. Yet they were no longer covered by the preservation program.
This case highlights the importance of formally defining and documenting which materials should be preserved and assigning clear responsibility for them. When an institution’s structure changes, collections that are not formally recognized within the scope of preservation can be left out. Responsibilities that exist only in the knowledge of particular individuals can disappear when those individuals leave.
Staff Turnover: When Someone Leaves, Can Digital Preservation Continue?
Tacit knowledge does not always survive a change of team. Documenting procedures is therefore an essential part of digital custodianship.
At one institution, a single person is responsible for all digital preservation activities. This creates a single point of failure: the continuity of the program depends on that person remaining available.
National archives face a related challenge when staff change: transferring knowledge while training new team members. The experience shared by this institution offers a practical response. Having experienced the difficulties of inheriting an undocumented workflow, the institution began documenting its procedures to support staff onboarding and succession planning.
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Digital Preservation Documentation Guide and the DPC Competency Framework provide useful resources to help institutions document their practices and identify the competencies needed to sustain digital preservation programs.
Continuity must also be maintained when an institution needs to change systems and retrieve its collections.
Vendor Lock-In: Can You Retrieve All Your Data If You Do Not Renew?
Vendor lock-in occurs when an institution cannot leave a system without relying on the provider’s cooperation or risking the loss of data, metadata, or preservation history.
During a contract renewal, one archive raised a fundamental question: what would happen to its data if it decided not to renew? Before considering the price, it needed to know whether it could retrieve its entire archive without depending on the provider’s intervention.
Similar situations arise across the digital preservation community when institutions want to leave their current provider and migrate to another platform. These cases highlight a shared need: institutions must retain control of their collections and be able to decide how to manage them over the long term.
It is useful to distinguish between two types of migration. Format migration helps keep files usable as technologies evolve. Platform migration involves transferring an archive to another system. Vendor lock-in can make the second process more difficult.
Changing systems requires planning and may require teams to develop new knowledge and skills. However, the ability to retrieve an institution’s own data should not depend on maintaining its relationship with a particular provider.
An exit strategy should therefore be considered a key factor when selecting digital preservation software, not just when a contract is approaching its end. How would the entire archive be exported, including its metadata and preservation history?
The DPC Digital Preservation Procurement Toolkit provides guidance on addressing these questions during procurement. For further guidance, Libnova’s article on digital preservation exit strategy explores how institutions can plan to retrieve their collections and retain control of their data when they need to change systems.
What Happens When the Chain of Custody Breaks Down in a Digital Archive?
The chain of custody of a digital collection is weakened when responsibility depends on practices, knowledge, or agreements that are not documented and may disappear following organizational, staffing, or provider changes.
These risks can arise even when an institution has appropriate technology in place. Technology helps preserve files; people, procedures, and agreements sustain accountability for them. Both need continuity.
Maintaining custodianship therefore requires more than preserving files. It also means defining who is responsible, documenting how work is carried out, and verifying that the institution can retain control of its collections even when people or systems change.
A practical starting point is to formalize that responsibility and establish, before it becomes necessary, what would happen if the institution had to leave its current system.
How to Avoid Vendor Lock-In and Protect Digital Custodianship: Four Checks
Before the next contract renewal or staff handover, any institution can review four areas:
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Appoint a person responsible for digital custodianship and a deputy. This ensures that responsibility remains clear if someone leaves, changes roles, or becomes unavailable.
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Document procedures and fixity checks. Knowledge currently held in one person’s memory must be available to whoever takes on that responsibility in the future.
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Assess digital preservation practices regularly. The DPC Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM) and the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation can help institutions review their existing capabilities and identify areas for improvement.
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Use open formats and test your exit strategy. An institution should know how it would retrieve its data before it needs to do so. This includes checking whether large volumes of information can be exported and, where available, whether storage can be accessed directly.
Together, these checks address continuity from different angles: responsibilities, knowledge, the assessment of preservation practices, and the ability to retrieve data. To be effective, they must form part of routine preservation management rather than depend on an imminent contract renewal or staff change.
A tested exit strategy and documented custodianship share one principle: neither should depend on who remains in the team.
Long-term digital preservation requires responsibilities, procedures, and control over collections to survive organizational, human, and technological change.
This World Digital Preservation Day, the challenge is to turn that continuity into institutional practice: preserving not only the files but also the ability to remain responsible for them.
#WDPD2026