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This year World Digital Preservation Day, November 6, 2025, coincides with the final day of iPRES 2025, the international digital preservation conference. The prompt for WDPD 2025, “Why preserve?” For The Ohio State University Libraries, we preserve the history of the University along with specialized collecting areas that enhance the mission and educational programs of the University.

This year, as I draft this between sessions at iPRES in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, I would like to reflect on the success of our Gray Digital Preservation Repository, launched nearly two years ago, as a repository ostensibly for born digital materials at scale.

Stephen Abrams, PhD, is Head of Digital Preservation at Harvard Library

World Digital Preservation Day is an annual event sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition to bring international attention to the critical challenges and opportunities of digital preservation stewardship.  The theme of this year’s celebration is Why Preserve?  This question has particular relevance right now given the sea change so many of us are experiencing in our institutional environments.  We find ourselves unexpectedly buffeted with new constraints on requisite programmatic resources arising from external actions and scrutiny that seemingly calls into question our fundamental mission and ethos.  Preservation is a demanding undertaking at the best of times; why do we affirmatively choose this hard path in uncertain times?

We do so because to do otherwise would repudiate our very identity as stewards, those who undertake the complementary functions of maintaining and advancing; that is, ensuring the continuity of shared experience over time, and leaving things better off than we found them.  These imperative goals themselves arise from a deep instinctual human need to remember and reconnect.  The indomitable human impulse to tell stories about the past is how individuals, institutions, and cultures bring order and illumination into the world, imparting meaningful sense to our present condition and shaping aspirations for the future.

This blog post was co-authored by James Mortlock, Jennifer Febles, Jennifer Pearson, Katie Kettle: the Digital Archives team at HSBC

HSBC's archive is a well-established global department within the Group Brand function. Founded in Hong Kong in 1865, our bank’s collections go back as far as the late 18th century and include many predecessor organisations. While we have physical archival storage vaults in London, Hong Kong, and Paris, our expanding digital collections are housed in a global digital archive repository. This repository safeguards both born-digital and digitised records from our rich history.

Paul Stokes is Jisc - Subject Matter Expert (Digital Preservation), Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition; Chair of the DPC Advocacy and Community Engagement sub-committee; Director of the Open Preservation Foundation; Director of OPF NL.

Why do I preserve…? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer (especially when you take into account that my day job is 100% digital preservation focused). There are all sorts of glib, business casey type answers to that question, but why do I personally preserve “digital stuff”?

It’s complex…

Ellie Burnage works for publisher Exact Editions based in the UK

The theme of World Digital Preservation Day 2025 asks ‘Why Preserve?’

It’s a big question, with numerous and far-reaching answers. Preservation, as its core, safeguards cultural memory by ensuring that stories, ideas and knowledge remain accessible to future generations. But there are other benefits too, from ensuring digital resilience in an era defined by ever-changing technological developments to opening up new potential markets for publishers to increase revenues.

A recent project in which Exact Editions digitised a collection of historical illustrated periodicals embodies all of these goals  -  we’ll explore how in the rest of this blog post to celebrate #WDPD2025. 

Helen Dafter is Archivist at The Postal Museum

Why Preserve? That’s a big question and there are as many answers as there are organisations carrying out preservation activities. My answer is we preserve for future use. How far into the future and who will be using the material may vary, but there is no point in preserving anything unless there is a reasonable expectation of it being used.

I’ve been considering our existing digital collections and how these have been or may be used. This should give some more tangible reasons for preservation, than just ‘Access’.

Helena Clarkson is Project Digital Archivist at Bank of England

Preserving Digital Records at the Bank

Every November, World Digital Preservation Day gives archives and libraries a chance to spotlight the importance of actively preserving digital content. In this blog, Helena Clarkson shares how the Archive Team has been working to protect born-digital records—to ensure that all forms of historic records, not just the physical, remain accessible in the digital age.

As technology moves on, older systems can quickly become outdated. The Bank has now retired its previous intranet and social network, Bank Exchange, and transitioned to Viva Engage, part of a wider shift to the Microsoft 365 environment.

Viva Engage is our new private social network, where staff can continue to share personal and organisation-wide updates, social activities, and reflections on how we work. It’s a fresh platform that keeps our workplace conversations flowing - just as the intranet once did.

Elisabeth Thurlow is the Digital Preservation and Access Manager at University of the Arts London

For World Digital Preservation Day 2025, we invited DPC Members and Supporters to share their reflections on this year’s theme, “Why Preserve?”. As part of this series, Elisabeth Thurlow at University of the Arts London shares her reflections on why digital preservation matters. Watch the vlog to hear her thoughts!

This blog post is co-authored by Catherine Jones, Peter Holt, Oliver Brough and Vivek Mistry at the UKERC Energy Data Centre at UKRI STFC

The Energy Data Centre’s vision is “Access to energy information for now and the future”, so its purpose is to preserve the research data and grey literature that is deposited within the service.  The team are usually busy doing preservation activities rather than thinking deep thoughts. However, this World Preservation Day’s theme gave us an opportunity to take a wider view of our roles.

Our EDC team has four members who cover a range of career stages, team roles with different perspectives, and personal experiences of the digital world.  Each of our team members has answered the “Why Preserve” question in their own words.

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

For World Digital Preservation Day 2025, we invited DPC Members and Supporters to share their reflections on this year’s theme, “Why Preserve?”. As part of this series, Rachel MacGregor and Eren Delaney offer the Modern Records Centre's perspective on the importance of safeguarding our digital heritage. Watch the vlog below to hear their thoughts!