Blog

Zach Johnson is Associate Director for Digital Special Collections at Vanderbilt University Libraries

World Digital Preservation Day (#WDPD2024) offers the digital preservation community a chance to highlight the importance of preserving our digital legacy through effective strategies collectively created by members of the Digital Preservation Coalition and other institutions around the world. This year’s theme of “Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities” is particularly relevant to Vanderbilt University Libraries. The team at Special Collections and University Archives have made major efforts to address digital preservation needs within the libraries and have expanded the level of support we can offer to Middle Tennessee community groups. We have made this real in the fall of 2023 by hiring Sarah Calise as Metadata Coordinator and Curator of Community Histories who is explicitly tasked with working with local underrepresented communities to expand our community collections. Furthermore, we have acquired new high-quality digitization equipment, and we are continuing to spend significant staff hours documenting a digital preservation strategy, alongside developing comprehensive policies, procedures, and standards.

Amanda Tomé is Preservation Coordinator for the Digital Research Alliance of Canada

Background

2024 is the year of file formats for the Digital Research Alliance of Canada’s Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR). It’s been a year of being confused by file formats, overwhelmed by file formats, and generally trying to figure out what to do with the file formats in our repository.

After reviewing the results of a file metrics scan undertaken on the repository in March 2024, which effectively confirmed our suspicions that many of the file formats in FRDR were not present in file format registries, I knew there was a lot of work to be done to get a better handle on the file formats in our repository. However, I wasn’t entirely sure how to get started or the approach to undertake. I also wanted this work to benefit the Canadian research data community and the digital preservation community.

Hannah Wang is Senior Digital Preservation Specialist at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is pleased to announce that we have a new blog: Fixity Check! Fixity Check will highlight digital preservation efforts at NARA, from updates to our Digital Preservation Framework, to file format deep dives, to interviews with staff across NARA. In addition to our dedicated digital preservation staff, NARA is fortunate to have experts in electronic records and digital preservation working across the agency, from records policy to archival processing – we are excited to share more information about the work that we do across NARA to ensure long-term preservation and access to our nation’s records.

Jeanne Kramer-Smyth is the Digital Preservation Program Lead at the World Bank Group Archives

Back in 2018, when the Digital Preservation Program at the World Bank Group had matured enough for me to begin sharing regular progress updates with the broader World Bank Group Archives team, I had an opportunity to redefine what it meant to be “part of” our digital preservation community. With the enthusiastic support of the leadership of the Archives, I hosted a half-day workshop that included all the archives’ staff.  My goal was to invite everyone to participate in the creation of the new program. We needed the combined depth and breadth of their expertise. While digital preservation certainly has major technological components, it still needs adherence to standard archival principles and processes to be successful. We needed our subject matter expects in transfer, ingest, appraisal, selection, arrangement, description, and access to tell us what we didn’t know.

Nathan Tallman is Executive Director at APTrust

World Digital Preservation Day is organized by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a global membership organization dedicated to ensuring the longevity of digital assets. Through their annual Bit List of Endangered Species, the DPC highlights digital materials at high risk of loss.

 The 2024 Bit List of Endangered Digital Species has classified oral histories as “Endangered,” with a noted trend toward even greater risk. The urgency to act within the next three years underscores the critical need to preserve these invaluable narratives, particularly given the increased risk of degradation and obsolescence of media holding such histories.

Gladys Kemboi is a PhD candidate in Information Science , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the recipient of the 2024 Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Fellowship Award.

On this World Digital Preservation Day, we reflect on the significance of African digital content and Indigenous knowledge systems. In Africa, an elder is the entire library and knowledge repository of wisdom, information, knowledge, cultural practices, and stories. What happens when this human knowledge walks away? This highlights the significance of digital preservation efforts in documenting and preserving this valuable knowledge. DPC recently honored Gladys Kemboi with the 2024 DPC Fellowship Award, for her impact in digital legacy and preservation of local and Indigenous knowledge in Kenya and across Africa. As we reflect on this World Digital Preservation Day, the work of individuals like Kemboi and global partners serves as a powerful reminder and highlights a growing movement to support Indigenous communities in digitizing their knowledge and creating a digital legacy that will inform and enrich future generations.

Nance McGovern is Associate for Digital Preservation Practice and Instruction at Global Archivist LLC and a DPC Fellow

Happy World Digital Preservation Day! Since introducing WDPD, the DPC has done such a great job engaging the digital preservation community in celebrating our most festive day.  It is always fun to see what the theme is and this year is a great example - ‘Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities’ is so timely.

Kate Murray works as Digital Project Coordinator and Liz Holdzkom as Digital Collection Specialist for the Library of Congress

Accessibility is a growing area of interest in the digital preservation community. The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) for example has published Guidelines for Software Accessibility for Open Source Digital Preservation Applications and Guidelines for Embedding Metadata in WebVTT Files.

Starting in 2024, the Sustainability of Digital Formats resource, hosted by the Library of Congress, initiated a project to document support for digital accessibility features in file formats listed in the Recommended Formats Statement (RFS). The FDDs or format description documents are one of the resources used by RFS Content Teams determine if a format is preferred or acceptable under the RFS guidance.

Kate Wittenberg is Managing Director at Portico

The Portico digital preservation service is developing a pilot project to include in our dark archive important under-represented content that may be at-risk because it is not preserved.  For this project, we define under-represented content as material concerning people, communities, or topics that have had inadequate representation in traditional publishing, library and archival collections, and preservation services and that may therefore be at risk over the long term.

This blogpost has been written by the City St George's School of Health and Medical Sciences Archivist Juulia Ahvensalmi, Records Manager Kirsten Hylan, and Research Data Support Manager Sarah Stewart.

Our speciality is healthcare with the records and data we produce supporting our education and research activities, ultimately becoming part of the history of medicine.  Digital preservation ensures these records remain accessible to have the greatest positive impact and meet our aim to improve health for everyone through inspiring education and research. 

‘Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities’ is the theme of this year’s , allowing us to celebrate, how, by working with recordkeeping colleagues across the university and beyond, digital preservation has become another tool in our information management toolbox. Digital preservation helps us to comply with regulations regarding the retention of records, research sponsor requirements, and ensures our institutional history continues to be sustained.