Blog

Janet Jennings is Digital Curation Lab Coordinator at the University of Salford in the UK

Tucked into a corner of the University of Salford’s MediaCity Campus, the Digital Curation Lab (DCL) houses an array of equipment which indices both nostalgia and possibility. Super 8 and 8mm projectors sit alongside reel-to-reel tape recorders, cassette decks, mini disc players and a copy stand, amongst an array of other devices. It is a space caught somewhere between the past and the future, providing opportunities for revealing hidden histories and creating digital treasure. I recently started my new role here and am excited and intrigued by the possibilities that lie ahead.

On this World Digital Preservation Day of 2022 I wanted to celebrate file format identification. It is a topic that is central to digital preservation ingest workflows and close to many of our hearts. We are so lucky within this community to have a number of different tools that can carry out and automate file format identification at scale, and of course the amazing resource that is PRONOM that underpins so many of those tools.

Leading up to World Digital Preservation Day I started thinking about what we would do if we didn't have those tools, and also what happens when we have to investigate and interpret each file individually. These thoughts were also triggered by a tweet from Helen Dafter of the Postal Museum about a double file extension that she had recently come across. It was great to see the file format enthusiasts of the digital preservation community piling in to try and help solve the mystery...!

The annual review of The Bitlist, the Global List of Digitally Endangered Species, has been a fixed point for World Digital Preservation Day since its inception.  This year's revisions are the work of a small task force and have been compiled and edited by Dr Amy Currie, general editor of the list.  The following excerpt, the Director's Introduction highlights the major trends and offers a call to action.  The full list can be found here: http://doi.org/10.7207/dpcbitlist-22 

The BitList 2022 is the third interim review of the list since its initial publication in 2017. It builds on the work of previous BitList juries, and in particular the comprehensive review in 2021.

The BitList 2022 offers a brief update and reflection on the state of the art since the last year. The list was assessed by a Taskforce on behalf of the DPC’s Advocacy and Community Engagement Sub-Committee which guides DPC’s advocacy work on behalf of the DPC’s global membership.  The Taskforce were briefed to identify and comment on trends towards increased or reduced risk against every entry on the list as published in 2021. There are no new entries to the list nor has the Taskforce substantially changed, rescoped or restructured entries in the 2021 BitList.

Johanna Gallego Gutiérrez is responsible for digital deposit for the Collection Development Group at Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

[la versión en español sigue]

The National Library of Colombia joins in the celebration of Digital Preservation around the world. This year one of the reflections is about what an image tells us about the story. An image can mean a lot or really nothing without a context, in a different year, country or culture.

Sally McInnes is Head of Unique and Contemporary Content Department at the National Library of Wales

Today is World Digital Preservation Day and an opportunity to highlight the work undertaken by the National Library of Wales to ensure that digital content is preserved for the future.  In order to raise general awareness of issues relating to enabling on-going access to  digital content, which affect personal as well as organisational data, I would like to introduce you to Wilf.

This blogpost has been written by St George’s, University of London (SGUL) Archivist Juulia Ahvensalmi, Research Data Support Manager Michelle Harricharan, and Records Manager Kirsten Hylan.

‘Data for All, For Good, Forever’ is the theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, demonstrating how digital preservation allows ‘digits to flourish’.  What an apt theme for a university that has been transforming health and medical care since 1733! Whether it is developing the earlier practices of variolation into vaccination (introduced by Edward Jenner in 1798) that eventually eradicated smallpox or transforming health practice though our pioneering work in infection and immunity, population health and molecular and clinical research, for St George’s data has always been for good, for all and, with proper care, forever. This post will consider how by preserving records and data regardless of format that are held in the archives and currently being developed by our staff, we are not only ensuring we maintain our history, but that St George’s continues to contribute to ground-breaking medical research by allowing digits to flourish.

Karin Haveman is Acting Manager Government Archives and Preservation at the Tasmanian Archives and Digitisation Services Coordinator

In February 2021, Libraries Tasmania launched the Preservation Digitisation Project – a major collaborative project that brings together Digitisation Services, System Support and Delivery, Government Archives, and the Community Archives teams. The aim of this project is to digitise our Tasmanian film, sound, and video collections for long-term preservation and to provide greater access to our collections for the public. Our priority is our magnetic tape collection which is at great risk of being lost forever if not digitised before 2025 (NFSA paper: Deadline 2025 | National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (nfsa.gov.au))

It is always good to be able to release new resources on World Digital Preservation Day and this year is no exception. The resource I’m going to talk about isn’t exactly a ‘new’ resource, it was originally published and promoted by the Archives and Records Council Wales (ARCW) back in August, but they generously agreed that the work could be repackaged and re-released on the DPC website to ensure that a wider and more international audience could also benefit from it.

Why am I so excited to get this particular resource out on World Digital Preservation Day? Well the theme of World Digital Preservation Day this year is particularly inclusive - ‘Data For All, For Good, Forever’. Much of the work that I do at the DPC tends to have a focus on working with people who are already part of our community, and are already sold on the idea that digital preservation is ‘A Good Thing’. This is all good, but sometimes I am aware of the echo chamber within which I tend to reside.

Natalie Baur is Program Director for DPOE-N

Happy World Digital Preservation Day from your colleagues at the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N)! We are excited to celebrate this important day with you, and we wanted to share some of our resources and funding opportunities that are available to the community. 

DPOE-N was created by the Library of Congress in 2010 to provide digital preservation training across the U.S. The program transitioned to Pratt Institute School of Information and New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program in 2018 to further develop it and support it into the future. In 2020, DPOE-N received a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its operations. In 2022, DPOE-N received two more years of grant funding from the Mellon Foundation.

Andy Jackson (@anjacks0n/@This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) & Paul Wheatley (@prwheatley) have shared this post on behalf of all the digipres.org contributors.

Calling All Digital Preservers!

The digital preservation community is small and under resourced. This means we must work together if we want to make the biggest impact. To this end, a small group of us have been attempting to help the members of the digital preservation community better support each other. On World Digital Preservation Day, we'd like to encourage you all to (re)discover what we've built so far: