Justin Simpson is the Managing Director at Artefactual Systems.
Today the Digital Preservation Coalition publishes its snapshot of the Global Bit List of Endangered Digital Species,[1] documenting what we stand to lose and what is putting it at risk. The List gives practitioners something to point at when they ask for time and money.
I see a pattern there. Content on commercial platforms, collections held in cloud services, records of organisations under political or financial threat, formats that can only be read by an abandoned tool. Many Bit List entries are not about bits decaying at all. They are about records that depend on another party, a supplier, a platform, a funder, a host institution, who may not be there, or may not be willing, when the records need to move to their next keeper.
So here is my entry, which will never appear on the list because it is not a thing. Our stories are not only in danger because files rot. They are in danger whenever the next keeper is blocked by something it has no power over, whether that is a decision by a supplier, a licence, a sanction, or a platform that has closed its doors.
A relay, not a vault
In 2009 Greg Janée, James Frew and Reagan Moore published a paper on what they called relay-supporting archives.[2] Its central assumption is uncomfortable and, I think, correct: a prudent conservator must assume that any archive will eventually fail, usually through the ordinary entropy of organisations as staff leave, budgets shrink and software reaches its end. Long-term preservation is therefore not one archive that endures. It is a relay of handoffs between storage, software, institutions and funding regimes. The baton is the records together with everything needed to read and trust them.
Relay races are not lost by a runner who tires. They are lost at the handoff. Most handoffs in preservation are planned: hardware reaches the end of its life, software is replaced, a collection passes to another institution, and there is time to prepare the baton. That is the relay Janée and his colleagues describe. The dangerous handoff is the unplanned one. A supplier withdraws a service, a security incident takes a system down, a law changes in a country you do not sit in, and the baton has to move on someone else's timetable.
A handoff that stopped
In February 2025 the United States sanctioned the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. By May he had lost access to his Microsoft-hosted email. Court staff say Microsoft cancelled the address, which Microsoft disputes.[3] Either way, the chief prosecutor of the court that prosecutes the gravest crimes in international law lost his email. Not through an attack, and not through decay, but through a decision taken in another jurisdiction, enforced by its own supplier. In October 2025 the Court confirmed it is replacing its office software with an open source suite.[4]
The Court had a contract. It had a relationship, but a relationship is not the same as sovereignty.
Records live in relationships
Records are stored on servers and hard drives and it is tempting to think that is where they live. Thirty years ago, Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder argued that infrastructure is not a thing but a relation. It exists in the ties between people, organisations, tools, standards and communities, and it becomes visible only when it breaks.[5] Records live in relationships with suppliers, standards bodies, communities, and host institutions, and every one of those relationships has terms governing who may read the records, check them, take them away, or change the rules, and whether anyone else gets a say. A handoff is the moment all those terms are tested at once. It is where the infrastructure becomes visible, usually because something has broken.
Here is the question I have learned to ask, of our customers and of ourselves: if these records had to pass to a different keeper in three years, what would that look like? If the answer is not clear, the records are not sovereign. Sovereignty here means nothing grander than agency: they can move, freely and unimpeded, when someone needs to carry them. Records that cannot have not failed yet. They have just not been tested.
The runner you will never meet
Laura Millar calls archivists, records managers and librarians evidence professionals.[6] They protect the authentic record so that rights can be upheld and communities can understand themselves across time, and they decide where records are kept on behalf of successors whose circumstances they cannot know.
The American philosopher John Rawls asked what rules we would choose for a society if we did not know which position in it we would occupy.[7] You could ask the same of the relay. Imagine you do not know whether the next runner will be well funded or barely staffed, in a stable state or a sanctioned one. You do not know whether it will be you. Behind that veil you would not choose terms that bind the records to any one party's goodwill. You would choose terms the weakest runner could still act on.
Save the handoff
In practice that means four things the next keeper must be able to do without needing anyone's permission: read the records without the supplier's software, verify them without needing to trust the supplier, take all of them and go, and study and change the tools that keep them. An arrangement that fails any of the four is a Bit List entry waiting to be written.
Saving our stories is not only a matter of keeping them. It is a matter of making sure they can be handed on. To everyone making it possible for the baton to be carried on today, thank you.
[1]Digital Preservation Coalition. The Global Bit List of Endangered Digital Species. https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/champion-digital-preservation/bit-list
[2]Janée, Greg, James Frew and Reagan Moore. "Relay-Supporting Archives: Requirements and Progress." International Journal of Digital Curation 4, no. 1 (2009). doi:10.2218/ijdc.v4i1.78
[3]Quell, Molly. "Trump's sanctions on ICC's chief prosecutor have halted tribunal's work, officials and lawyers say." Associated Press, 15 May 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/trumps-sanctions-on-iccs-chief-prosecutor-have-halted-tribunals-work-officials-and-lawyers-say. Microsoft's president Brad Smith later said the company's measures "in no way included the termination of services to the ICC" and declined to comment on the circumstances of the prosecutor's account: heise online, 5 June 2025, https://heise.de/-10429628.
[4]First reported by Handelsblatt on 30 October 2025 and confirmed by the Court on 31 October 2025. See Tridgell, Jennifer. "Justice Recoded: Why It Matters that the International Criminal Court Embraced Open Source Software and Ditched Microsoft." EJIL:Talk!, 20 November 2025. https://www.ejiltalk.org/justice-recoded-why-it-matters-that-the-international-criminal-court-embraced-open-source-software-and-ditched-microsoft/. openDesk is developed by ZenDiS, the Zentrum für Digitale Souveränität, owned by the German federal government.
[5]Star, Susan Leigh and Karen Ruhleder. "Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces." Information Systems Research 7, no. 1 (1996): 111–134.
[6]Millar, Laura A. A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age. Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2019.
[7]Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.