Nance McGovern is Director for Digital Preservation Instruction and Practice at Global Archivist LLC.
Happy World Digital Preservation Day 2026! Celebrating a favorite day as a bright spot in an especially hard year.
What’s missing? What’s lost? What’s waning? What can we do about it? This is a SOS for digital content to the digital preservation community and beyond. Our digital collections are at risk and being lost in many apparent and some less obvious ways:
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Content: much of our community continues to focus on digitizing content often to the exclusion of also prioritizing born digital content before it is lost; too much of what is digitized began as born digital content; more complex and less familiar content is lost before that content is prioritized and feasible strategies are implemented. Action: reconsider sustainability priorities for your collections, shift from viewing equitable access as digitize everything – especially for archival collections – to ensure everything is described and findable; refocus on storytelling as a sustainability strategy for complex content, a discussion that began in our community during a panel at iPres 2018 and needs to continue.
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Culture: in recent years, the focus at iPres and in our community literature has been increasingly on digital archives – topics that have many more discussion venues than digital preservation; our discussions can seem more combative or competitive than collaborative; as library funding decreases, archival programs are shrinking both in number of programs and number of trained archivists, being rolled into special collections, being treated like a library service rather than a program with specific requirements, or otherwise being demoted – at least in the US ; we seem to be taking less care to acknowledge and appreciate the many domains that participate in and contribute to digital sustainability (see radical collaboration) especially as funding is stretched and declining. Action: take time to convene and discuss on a regular basis, be sure to include those without the resources to attend in person and avoid defaulting to majority rules.
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Capability: continuing and academic education programs that focus on aspects of digital sustainability are shrinking in number and size, being rolled into larger general programs for information science, for example; people who take classes are increasingly inclined to want to acquire advanced expertise in a shorter and shorter timeframe; there is often a greater interest in learning digital archives and other real-time tools (see DAP Framework) than in delving more deeply into learning about digital sustainability infrastructure that includes identifying and using tools across generations of technology. Action: create a development plan for yourself to learn, apply and share in an ongoing way; partner with others who are specializing in content you need to preserve and share your expertise with them; set self-development objectives that require time and effort to achieve; find continuing education and other opportunities to share what you’ve learned and experienced.
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Capacity: Not long ago, our community was making progress towards infrastructure implementation options that could be right-sized to optimize requirement-based storage use. The demise or decline of some community options, the rapid increase of data centers for AI, reductions in budget and increases in costs are combining to limit available options as collections are going. Action: refer to the discussion of Independence in the Digital Preservation Storage Criteria Usage Guide to avoid single points of failure; work on strategies to avoid cloud-only infrastructure and avoid being overwhelmed by the destructive impact of data center expansion that are not focused on digital sustainability.
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Collaboration: With all of the pressures on our time, energy, attention, and well-being – including governmental (disruptive and caustic politics), economic (extreme budget and grant cuts), environmental (cataclysmic climate crisis), and human rights (attacks on rights and safety) – it is harder to make time and take time to work together just when it is more and more important to maximize increasingly limited resources for digital sustainability. These pressures and their impacts everywhere are some of the stories that need to be captured for the future. Action: support efforts to engage in global efforts to document and save cultural heritage; partner – really collaborate – on strategies to feasibly increase capacity in responsible ways; community infrastructure – the need for which was called out in since its inclusion in the 1996 Preserving Digital Information report as requisite national networks - is possible, mutually beneficial, and necessary.
Here are some community-based things I’ve been working on:
DPM Three-legged Stool and Five Stages model: Kari Smith, founder of Global Archivist LLC, and I recently developed a self-paced five-module asynchronous course for digital content and collection curators to help raise awareness among people who work with collections and may not be familiar with good practice for digital sustainability. The extended DPM model is making its way through the publication process for a volume on Archives and Social Justice. I’m rebuilding our DPM Management Tools to make them more like a workbook to achieve each outcome:
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adopt a set of digital sustainability principles
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develop a comprehensive digital sustainability policy framework (the first DPM management tool that began with the first DPM workshop in 2003)
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conduct a digital content review to document and manage your digital sustainability scope of responsibility
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develop and maintain digital sustainability workflows
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determine your levels of commitment for your digital content and collections to right-size your sustainability program and maximize your resources
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develop a full disaster readiness approach for your digital sustainability program
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engage in ongoing self-assessment and peer review audit for your digital sustainability program
I’m repeating my nod to Preserving Digital Information (1996), the seminal document for the digital preservation community on its twenty-fifth anniversary!
DAP Framework: One thing I learned this year – digital sustainability is a term we’ve been using since the start of the DPM Workshop that is particularly timely now with all the aspects of sustainability to address (shout out to Sibyl Schaefer for her awesome iPres keynote!) Using digital sustainability to refer to the broad scope of what we do makes it easier to see the distinctions and connections between good practice for digital archives and digital preservation. There’s probably an updated DAP Framework on its way…
Happy WDPD 2026!
Resources:
Digital Preservation Management (DPM) Workshop Management Tools: https://dpworkshop.org/dpm-eng/workshops/management-tools.html - this is the link to the current version and we’ll be releasing the revised versions beginning in 2027.
DPM Model – Five Stages and Three-legged Stool – the origin story: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/spobooks/bbv9812.0001.001/1:11/--digital-libraries-a-vision-for-the-21st-century?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
Digital Archives and Preservation (DAP) Framework: https://www.nancemcgovern.org/DAP-McGovern_FINAL.pdf – exploring the distinct but connected digital archives and digital preservation roles
Radical Collaboration in Research Library Issues (RLI) 296, 2018: https://publications.arl.org/rli296/ - more important than ever to convene at the digital practice roundtable and collaborate on shared outcomes
Preserving Digital Information, 1996 report published by a predecessor of CLIR in 1996. Happy anniversary!