At iPRES this year I presented a (rapid fire!) paper sharing my thoughts on the current state of digital preservation workforce development. The headlines were:

Zhenxin Wu is Professor of the Information System Department, and Deputy Director of the Digital Preservation Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences at the National Science Library in Beijing, China. She is also responsible for the technical system and data archive for NDPP (National Digital Preservation Program).

[Chinese version follows]

---From CCDP2019 to WDPD2019 and iPRES2020

Thanks to the invitation from DPC, I have an opportunity to be involved in World Digital Preservation Day again and also to introduce China's progress in digital preservation.

After being busy with Chinese Conference on Digital Preservation 2019 (CCDP, http://dipres2019.csp.escience.cn/dct/page/1 ), I start writing this blog for WDPD2019. Just like DPC's World Digital Preservation Day has become an international event, the CCDP series of conferences have also became the most important event for Chinese archivers. The surprises and exhaustion brought by CCDP2019 have not disappeared, and my mind is still full with  CCDP2019.

Jaye Weatherburn is Program Manager, Digital Preservation at The University of Melbourne in Australia

This year for World Digital Preservation Day, several passionate souls at the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with friends from the Australasia Preserves community of practice, have produced a video to celebrate all things digital preservation.

Lee-Anne Raymond is Senior Coordinator, MV Images (DAMS) at Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Australia

When Mary Poppins measures herself using her magical tape measure it reads, “Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.” (Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers, 1934)

In the real world realm of Digital Preservation we can strive but will struggle to approximate such perfection without the assistance of the right software and engineering principles, as an intervening Poppins, in order to underwrite the magic. To perform digital preservation actions at scale competently and efficiently and in a repeatable way with trusted results, practically perfect, we need systems as well as systematic approaches. As laudable as our efforts are to do so using manual techniques underpinned by strict rules based standards, they do not and will not meet the challenge that the digital realm presents us.

Serena Coates is Digital Preservation Coordinator at State Library of Queensland in Australia

At State Library of Queensland (like at many other institutions around the world) when we started acquiring digital content on floppy discs, CDs, and DVDs, we didn’t know what to do with them.  So, what was the wisdom of the day?  “Put it in a box, and store it in the repository until there is a time when we work out what to do with it.”  For State Library, that time is now!

With an increasing maturity of skills and knowledge in the area of digital preservation, and the imminent implementation of a digital preservation system (Rosetta), in 2016 we felt we were ready to tackle the issue of obsolete carriers that had been squirrelled away in our repositories for anywhere up to 30 years.  And so, we embarked on an audit of physical carriers in our repositories.

Andrea Goethals is Digital Preservation Manager | Kaiwhakahaere Matapopore Matihiko, at the National Library of New Zealand | Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

At the National Library of New Zealand, quite a few of us play a role in preserving the nation’s digital heritage. If you were to ask each of us what digital materials are most at risk in New Zealand you would hear a variety of different opinions, depending on where we sit in the Library. Among other things you would hear about at-risk audio-visual collections on obsolete physical media, born-digital archival and special collections material across New Zealand, and social media. It’s true that these are very real challenges, but we are chipping away at many of them through a variety of initiatives at the Library and in collaboration with others. 

So what challenges are we finding especially hard to address? In this post, Steve Knight and I describe some of the key challenges we face. 

Is it World Digital Preservation Day yet?  Yes it is!  Here are some ways you can tell:

• Has the sun come up over the National Library of New Zealand on the first Thursday in November? 

• Is this the first post of a digital preservation themed blog-a-thon on the DPC website?

• Will there be a new edition of the BitList of Digitally Endangered Species before the end of the day? 

• Are there an abundance of stickers in more than a dozen languages, and versions of the swooshie logo available to download in even more?

• Will there be lectures and seminars and workshops and webinars about digital preservation in dozens of countries and perhaps hundreds of venues? 

• Will there be digital preservation themed cake to share, and biscuits and baking?

• Will there be singing and videos to match? 

• Will the fun continue till midnight somewhere out over the Pacific Ocean in about 36 hours from now?

World Digital Preservation Day is just around the corner. November 7th is just 5 weeks away which means, for me, the countdown has really begun!

We’ve chosen a theme - ‘At-risk Digital Materials’ - to tie in with the new edition of the BitList of 'Digitally Endangered Species' we’re publishing on the day and work on that is underway in earnest, we’ve updated logos, added MORE logos in different languages, created event packs and stickers, posted them to all corners of the globe, invited a whole bunch of interesting bloggers to write for us on the day…so now it’s getting exciting!

Charles Miller is a former BBC documentary producer, currently working for a tech startup in London and studying for a Masters in History. Anchoring will be his second book.

In all discussions about digital preservation, there’s an impossible question to answer: how much should I keep? While institutions are limited by budgets and staff time, for individuals, it’s more personal. Decisions about deleting, and the very process of organising and preserving, bring out complicated emotions about family, nostalgia and sometimes grief.

It’s one of the issues I’m looking at in a book I’m writing about how the digital world has changed ideas about what we want to hang on to and how we can best do it.

Afterclap (n) – the last person who claps after everyone else has stopped.

It’s Friday, so it must be Schiphol Airport Amsterdam. Here’s me at the departure gate for the flight home after a day that has lasted almost 48 hours and has crammed in a year’s worth of digital preservation news. 

An airport lounge seems an appropriate place to reflect on World Digital Preservation Day.  It’s practically home: my work involves so many airport lounges that, rather being an honorary lecturer at Glasgow University, I should really be an honorary air-traffic controller at Glasgow Airport.  Schipol offers so many connections: in every one of them an emergent digital preservation need is arising, and in many an incipient digital preservation community is forming.  There’s also a lot of time dependencies at airports too, a lot of verification of identities and checking of manifests: a lot of strong metaphors for our daily work.  These challenge us to connect but remind us that if we hang about too long then our digital preservation work is going to become a lot harder and a lot more expensive.  As with aeroplanes, if you want digital preservation to be difficult and costly just ignore the repeated calls to get on board.