Additional resources - Digital Preservation Coalition

We don’t all need to be experts in climate science, but a little bit of knowledge can go a long way as you talk to colleagues, peers and work out how to tackle the challenge of calculating your carbon footprint. There are links scattered through this toolkit and this section isn’t intended to bring all of those together in one place, rather it provides a list of resources that you may want to follow up on to learn more about this topic. The list isn’t intended to be exhaustive but provides a helpful starting point if you would like to do further reading and research. Note that members of the Carbon Footprint Task Force also shared a range of different experiences and some of these are linked from how this toolkit was created.

General resources

The DPC’s Technology Watch Guidance Note “Environmental Impact and Digital Preservation” by Eira Tansey provides a short and helpful introduction to this topic.
The DPC’s webpage on the environmental impact of digital preservation includes links to blog posts and webinars from the DPC that are relevant to this topic. Our events on environmental sustainability have included a range of different speakers describing their own work in this area. DPC Members can see recordings from these events on the relevant event pages by logging in to the website.
- Enacting Environmentally Sustainable Preservation – April 2020
- Environmentally sustainable digital preservation - moving from theory to practice – November 2021
- Digital Preservation and Environmental Impact – March 2024
The NDSA Climate Watch Working Group curates and disseminates a list of resources on climate change that is of relevance to those working in the field of digital stewardship. You can subscribe to receive regular updates from this group which includes new and relevant articles on climate change.
The 2026 revision to the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation has introduced leaf icons to the Levels matrix to indicate those areas of the model where environmental considerations might come into play in decision making. A new Environmental Sustainability Guide has been developed to provide supporting information on these environmental considerations.
An iPRES 2024 paper from Sibyl Schaefer includes really useful information about extraction of natural resources for the creation of computers and provides a framework for making decisions about the future: Energy, Digital Preservation, and the Climate: Proactively Planning for an Uncertain Future.
Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation by Keith Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, Tessa Walsh and Laura Alagna from 2019 is a hugely informative paper which has been widely cited by those working in this area since.
Sophia van Hoek’s 2023 report Walking a tightrope across the gap of digital preservation and environmental sustainability describes practical work carried out at the National Archives of the Netherlands to measure the carbon footprint of specific digital preservation activities and is well worth a read.
Ross Spencer’s blog post for the Open Preservation Foundation, Monitoring carbon emissions of digipres activities at home describes an approach to answer the question “How much do I and my one computer, doing digital preservation tasks at home, impact the environment?”. It is an interesting read that also covers some of the complexity and uncertainty around this topic.
42 tips to make your heritage website more sustainable - this guide on greening the user interface is just one of the resources on green IT available via the Kenniscommunity Informatie en Archief

Resources about the DIMPACT methodology for carbon calculation

The DIMPACT methodology for carbon calculation inspired this DPC toolkit - if you would like to more about this, the methodology, a demo and a number of case studies can be found below: