William Kilbride is the Executive Director at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and is writing from the iPRES 2025 conference in Wellington ...
I bring greetings from tomorrow.
This year I am privileged to be spending World Digital Preservation Day in the remarkable company of the National Library and Archives of New Zealand, host to the iPRES conference 2025. So I am able to send you this message from the future and (at least from the perspective of Wellington Harbour) to make a promise of sunshine, blue skies and calm waters.
It’s a fitting location to be marking World Digital Preservation Day which was initiated in 2017 as a way to connect practitioners in our very dispersed but also highly fragmented community, and also to raise awareness of our work, to each other and to colleagues and decision makers around the world. The conference forum means the connection to colleagues has been skilfully crafted by the iPRES organizing committee. They have done a remarkable job to make connections possible and engage a large and diverse community, welcoming also a whole new generation of practitioners into the dynamic and rapidly changing community. The task of raising awareness remains: to reach beyond our own communities and into the wider mainstream of public consciousness.
The theme of World Digital Preservation Day 2025 is: Why Preserve? Colleagues around the world have been honing messages that explain the value of their work, as well as the harms that arise when that work is deferred, delayed or undone. I am looking forward to hearing and sharing these stories, and I hope also we may capture some of them so that DPC can sharpen and focus our own advocacy too, supporting and amplifying the work of the community around us.
It’s not an easy case to make, considering the many crises that surround us, and the thickening multitude of competing priorities that gather at the door of policy makers in public and corporate life. These crises only magnify the need for accountability, and for ensuring the safe custody of authentic records of how decisions were made.
Why preserve? Because the consequences of decisions we make may be visited on us for many years and on generations that follow. And in the digital age, with platform dependencies, volatile content, misinformation, disinformation and hallucinated AI slop, the ability to identify, preserve and authenticate genuine content turns out to be a super-power.
There’s no shortage of work to be done. The biennial review of the ‘BitList’ makes this clear: Important and irreplaceable content is critically endangered, and in some cases already practically extinct, because the work of saving them is technically challenging, the skills needed to achieve that goal are in short supply, and the policy landscape leaves too many gaps in provision.
So what is my message from tomorrow? It’s that the work we do today matters.
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