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.

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:

Jen Mitcham is the Chief Digital Preservation Officer at DPC.

The DPC developed the Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) in 2019 as part of a project with the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Based on a maturity model published by Adrian Brown of the UK Parliamentary Archives, RAM provided a way of articulating what digital preservation good practice looks like, and a means for organizations to better understand their current capability and set targets for continuous improvement.

Since that first RAM release, the model has been revised on a regular schedule to ensure it remains current and relevant and reflects the subtle changes in how we do digital preservation and what we consider to be good practice.

Andy Jackson is a Digital Preservation Specialist at the DPC.

I started to learn about digital preservation when I joined the British Library in 2007, during the early stages of the PLANETS Project. At the time, it seemed that taking care of digital collections was all about two big problems: keeping the bytes safe, and fighting off format obsolescence. Our preservation plans were built on the assumption that the data was safe for now, and we could keep our digital stories safe by migrating and emulating our way into the future.

We were wrong.

Phoebus Panigyrakis, Architect-Researcher, PhD, at Architectural Periodicals Database

When does a building become architecture? When it is experienced, and appreciated as a cultural object that people can live in. But a building is an idea long before it becomes reality, and this idea has been documented in designs long before it is built, and lives on paper even after it has been altered or demolished. For most of the twentieth century, the architectural magazine was where building news were recorded, circulated, and debated, changing the way we understand architecture as an intellectual practice. These magazines are often treated as secondary sources, useful only for mining specific information on a case by case basis. We see them differently. Architectural print media is heritage in its own right, and a large part of it is in danger. This is why we have developed a dedicated platform for research on architectural periodicals: architecturalperiodicals.com.

Tamara Velikodneva is an archivist at RIMA, the archive of Russian independent media built by Kronika.

On 30 October Novaya Gazeta announced its closure, ending its 33-year history of outstanding independent journalism. According to the editors, the Russian authorities and security services forced the newsroom to stop working under the threat of an “extremist organisation” designation, which could have led to the arrest of its journalists. Its record, from the first issue in April 1993 to the last, is now preserved in RIMA and open to anyone.

Eren Delaney is the Digital Preservation Specialist and Rachel MacGregor is the Digital Preservation Office at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

As an archives service, the Modern Records Centre’s main aim is to preserve and provide access to the historical material that we look after, seeking to maintain its existence in its current form for as long as possible. Our mission statement could well be "Save Our Stories" and we work hard across a wide range of collections to preserve endangered heritage. We are primarily responsible for paper, photographs and increasingly digital records and we are not an archive specialising in audio visual formats, however inevitably a wide range of formats and carriers turn up in the records we receive. Our paper-based records are stored in temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled, and pest-controlled environments; this is the best way to ensure that the paper continues to exist, undamaged and unchanged, for hundreds of years.  

Georgia Davis is Sales & Marketing Executive at Exact Editions.

The destruction of the Library of Alexandria tends to conjure up images of a fire ignited by Julius Caesar's troops, engulfing centuries of painstakingly copied texts in one all-consuming blaze. In reality, historians suspect that the loss of the great library was a much more insidious process, contributed to by a lack of funding from the Imperial Roman government and the gradual decay of papyrus in a humid climate. Information is most often lost not with a bang, but with a whimper, a result of mismanagement and apathy. As historian Roger S. Bagnall puts it in his work on the Library of Alexandria, “Why should anyone be disillusioned by the realization that creative achievements survive only if we foster a cultural milieu that values them?”

Many years after the loss of this most famous of libraries, we can observe the same slow downward march resulting in digital data loss; files become decayed due to “bit rot” or are left unreadable by modern machines when unchanged. To associate information loss with cataclysm is dangerous, because it forgets that loss happens simply as a result of time passing, and is only prevented by regular, meticulous work, and a commitment to preserving archives.

Ailie O’Hagan is the Digital Preservation Librarian at Queen’s University Belfast.

Last year, in the Library at Queen's University Belfast, we began to address preservation of our born-digital materials. The catalyst for this came from a story – or rather, our inability to completely access a story! Earlier in the year, we had received a donation of materials belonging to the late Professor Lord David Trimble, former First Minister of Northern Ireland, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and Nobel Peace Prize Winner (1998). Alongside shelves of draft papers, photographs, briefing papers, reports, and correspondence in binders and boxes, was an array of digital objects: Zip disks and floppy disks, Psion portable PCs, a Compaq pocket PC, multiple encyclopedia-sized Toshiba laptops, CD ROMs, a SUMO disk drive, USB flash drives - 247 obsolete carriers in total, recording iterations of Trimble's political documents and ephemera.

Helen Dafter is the Archivist at The Postal Museum.

Introduction

Many people think of history as something that happened in the past. The reality is that history is happening all the time. That is especially true when we seem to be constantly living in ‘unprecedented times’.

The project

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic The Postal Museum recognised the significance of the moment and the need to ensure there was a record of its impact on postal services. The Postal Museum holds museum and archive collections, including the business archives of Royal Mail and Post Office Limited. The curatorial and archive teams jointly undertook a contemporary collecting project focussing on different collecting streams. The nature of record keeping in the 2000s, and the changes to working practices resulting from the pandemic (such as home working) meant that this collecting project was primarily digital.