Jemma Singleton is the Archivist at Newcastle University and Melanie Clifford works at Great Bear Audio and Video Digitising.

‘Because…information can neither be created nor destroyed – it’s accessible or it’s inaccessible, but it is.’ – Pat Cadigan, Synners.

Digital preservation is having a hot moment at Newcastle University. The Special Collections department is experimenting with semi-automated approaches to processing vast quantities of born digital material already ingested into its systems. This in turn has improved the rate of cataloguing and making accessible archivally relevant born digital material across multiple collections.

Alea Cook is the Digital Preservation Analyst at Cambridge University Libraries and Archives (CULA).

When we talk about digital preservation today, the scope goes beyond scanning historical volumes or maintaining local drives. Modern preservation practices are fundamentally digital, and increasingly, they include open public data. Public datasets form the statistical backbone of modern society - underpinning democratic representation, public infrastructure, and research worldwide.

This blog is authored by Germano De Benedet, citizen preserver from Treviso, Italy - Gamertag: De Benedet.

Case SPD-MW-2022-2026-001 – Service for the Preservation of the MW Community, Italy. The service is not closed, but at risk of closure, without anyone ever having told its story.

Microsoft Wordament (2011-present) is a daily word puzzle that has connected millions of players worldwide for 15 years on Xbox and Mobile. With backend services evolving and older titles being retired, the entire competitive history and community memory are at risk of permanent loss. No official long-term preservation archive has been announced.

Niamh Murphy is the Digital Preservation Librarian at University College Dublin.

This World Digital Preservation Day, with the theme Save our Stories (SOS): Our Digital Heritage in Danger, I’m highlighting an ongoing digital preservation project with UCD Archives to recover material from 163 floppy disks deposited as part of the papers of novelist and travel writer Joseph Hone (1937–2016).

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.

Samir Musa is Digital Archivist and Electronic Records Manager at the Historical Archives of the European Union, located at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

What records will remain of today’s European institutions in fifty years? In one hundred?

Increasingly, the decisions, activities and evidence that document the history of the European Union (EU) are created and managed digitally. Yet digital records do not survive simply because the files themselves persist.

Formats change. Systems are replaced. Metadata can become separated from the records it describes. Links between documents may disappear, and with them the evidence needed to understand who created a record, why it was created and how it relates to other records.

At the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU) in Florence, this challenge lies at the heart of our digital preservation work.

And at the centre of that work is the HAEU Digital Archives Management System – DAMS.

This blog is co-authored by Salomé Rohr, Concepción Pérez Carrasco and Olivia Mandica-Hart at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

This year's World Digital Preservation Day theme, "Save our Stories (SOS): Our Digital Heritage in Danger ", invites us to reflect not only on archives threatened by conflict, neglect or technological obsolescence, but also on collections whose value remains insufficiently recognised. Administrative records are sometimes among the most vulnerable heritage assets precisely because they are seen as less significant than scientific or technical records.

Irina Schmid, Instructor and Digital Collections Archivist at The American University in Cairo.

Explanation of the image: The dots and dashes across the top spell out SOS in Morse code, which ties the image to the post's central idea without needing any words. The pixel fragments show the "quiet loss" the post describes: the stories are not destroyed all at once; they just crumble as they drift out of reach.

Most of us have a drawer with an old phone in it. There might also be a USB stick or a laptop that hasn't been switched on in years. We hang on to them because we suspect there's something on them we would miss: photos, messages, a draft of something we cared about. We rarely check them, though, partly because we're not sure we want to know whether they still work.

Scale that drawer up to a whole society, and we have a fair picture of what this year's World Digital Preservation Day theme is getting at: Save Our Stories (SOS): Our Digital Heritage in Danger.

This blog is authored by Cassie Shaw, Lead Digital Archivist at RMIT University Archives.

The concept of stories as a hook to grab an audience has been a major advocacy tool for us at RMIT University Archives as we’ve worked on our Digital Preservation Strategy and Roadmap over the past three years. When we started engaging with our users across the university via interviews and focus groups, we used the line “What is the story you want to tell about ​RMIT in the future?​” to draw them into sharing their aims of preserving what one respondent called the “blood, sweat and tears” of the achievements and the effort our community has put into making it a great place to learn and work.

Elizabeth Franklin, Celeste Vallance and Libor Coufal are members of the Digital Preservation team at the National Library of Australia.

On World Digital Preservation Day 2025, we published a blog post for the Digital Preservation Coalition titled We Will WARC You: preserving access to published CD-ROMs at NLA. In it, we described our novel use of WARC technology to provide access to complex, HTML-based publications from our collections — not harvested websites, but offline publications containing thousands of interconnected files in a wide range of formats.

This led us to an intriguing question: Could WARC technology also be used to provide access to other complex digital objects whose functionality depends on the relationships between their files?