The DPC’s Reading Club provides a forum to chat about a recent digital preservation publication with other Members in a friendly and informal group. Established in 2023, sessions typically run on a monthly basis in a variety of different time zones and cover reading on a range of topics relevant to digital preservation.
Why Reading Club?
Digital preservation is an ever changing discipline, and it can be hard to keep up with new developments and publications relevant to our work. DPC’s Reading Club provides a useful signpost to a recently published article and the opportunity to chat about it informally with your peers. This can be a helpful way of maintaining a connection with current digital preservation literature when in a busy and demanding role with limited time for research. Reading Club could also be considered to be a part of your own Continuous Professional Development.
Come along to an event
Reading Club is open to all DPC Members, but places are limited to enable small group discussion. Keep an eye on our events page and weekly digest email on the DPC-DISCUSSION mailing list to find out what we are reading next and when we will be meeting to discuss it. You don’t have to come along to every session, just join in when it suits you. Most of our Reading Club events are held online.
Suggest something for us to read
We are always happy to receive suggestions of publications to read for these events. Note that we prefer to read articles, book chapters or blog posts that are:
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Relevant to digital preservation
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Thought provoking
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No more than 40 pages in length
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Freely available for all to access online
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Recent - i.e. published (or made openly available) in the last three years
Do get in touch with Jenny.Mitcham@dpconline.org with ideas, comments and suggestions.
Reading list
Missed a Reading Club event? Don’t worry, we maintain a list of all the articles and publications we have read below (ordered by event date). Do dive in and catch up on what we’ve been reading in your own time:
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July 2025: Arroyo-Ramírez, E., & Fidler, C. V. (2024). Processing. Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary. Retrieved from https://digital-preservation-a-critical-vocabulary.pubpub.org/pub/5fyrimds
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June 2025: Yakel, E., Faniel, I. M., & Polasek, K. (2024). Trust . Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary. Retrieved from https://digital-preservation-a-critical-vocabulary.pubpub.org/pub/mfby9zaj
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May 2025: Cochrane, E. (2024). Obsolescence. Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary. Retrieved from https://digital-preservation-a-critical-vocabulary.pubpub.org/pub/ajzjdqk4
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April 2025: Canning, D., Jaillant, L. (2025) AI to review government records: new work to unlock historically significant digital records. AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02221-0
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March 2025: David Pearson and James Doig (2022), "Tales from “THE disK FILES”: Lessons Learnt from a Data Recovery Project in 2003–2006 at the National Archives of Australia", The American Archivist (2022) 85 (2): 359–401. https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-85.2.359
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February 2025: Max Eckard; Elizabeth Gadelha; Mike Shallcross (2022) "Level Up! Lessons Learned from Six Years of Collaborative Technical Skills Development" The American Archivist 85 (2): 402–442.
https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-85.2.402 -
Janaury 2025: Milligan, Ian. (2024) “Archiving Disaster: The Case of 11 September 2001“ in Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory. John Hopkins University Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/oa_monograph/chapter/4050591/pdf
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December 2024: Schaefer, S. (2024), "Energy, Digital Preservation, and the Climate: Proactively Planning for an Uncertain Future", iPRES 2024: https://ipres2024.pubpub.org/pub/1sm257xx/release/2
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November 2024: Altman, M and Landau, R (2024), "Selecting Efficient and Reliable Preservation Strategies: Modeling Long-term Information Integrity Using Large-scale Hierarchical Discrete Event Simulation". International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol. 18, No. 1 https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v18i1.743
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October 2024: Frank, R.D. (2024), "Constructing risk in trustworthy digital repositories", Journal of Documentation - open access copy available here: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/194298
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September 2024: Dentler, J., Jaillant, L., Foliard, D. and Schuh, J., 'Sensitivity and Access: Unlocking the Colonial Visual Archive with Machine Learning' Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 18, Number 3 (July 2024) https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/18/2/000742/000742.html
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August 2024: Andrews, N. IT’S NOT IMPOSTER SYNDROME: RESISTING SELF-DOUBT AS NORMAL FOR LIBRARY WORKERS, In the Library with the Lead Pipe (June 2020) https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/its-not-imposter-syndrome/
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July 2024: Owens, T (2024). After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory, University of Michigan Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12410213 (Chapter 3 - ‘Where Data Drives’ pp.43-78).
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June 2024: Vaarzon-Morel, P., Barwick, L., & Green, J. (2021). Sharing and storing digital cultural records in Central Australian Indigenous communities. New Media & Society, 23(4), 692-714. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820954201
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May 2024: Déirdre Joyce; Laurel McPhee; Rita Johnston; Julia Corrin; Rebecca Hirsch (2022), "Toward a Conceptual Framework for Technical Debt in Archives", The American Archivist 85 (1), 104 - 125, https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-85.1.104
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April 2024: British Library cyber incident review paper (2024), https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf.
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March 2024: Lise Jaillant and Katherine Aske, (2024), "Are Users of Digital Archives Ready for the AI Era? Obstacles to the Application of Computational Research Methods and New Opportunities", Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (Volume 16 Issue 4), https://doi.org/10.1145/3631125
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February 2024: Sam Alloing (2023), "MONITORING FILE FORMAT OBSOLESCENCE IN REPOSITORIES: An applied method", iPres 2023 https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121117
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Janaury 2024: Daniel Steinmeier (2023), "BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU CAMPAIGN FOR: How formal organization practice may negatively impact adaptability aspects of preservation", iPres 2023 https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121088
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December 2023: Sophia van Hoek (2023), "Walking a tightrope across the gap of digital preservation and environmental sustainability: The National Archives of the Netherlands and the challenge of achieving a climate-neutral digital archive", https://kia.pleio.nl/attachment/entity/931f65cb-2058-4fe9-a500-99bc53dfde40
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November 2023: Kieran Hegarty (2022), "Representing Biases, Inequalities and Silences in National Web Archives: Social, Material and Technical Dimensions", Archives & Manuscripts, 50(1) https://doi.org/10.37683/asa.v50.10209
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October 2023: James Cummings (2023), "Academics Retire and Servers Die: Adventures in the Hosting and Storage of Digital Humanities Projects", Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol 17 No 2. http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/1/000669/000669.html
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September 2023: Venkata, S. K., Young, P., Bell, M. and Green, A. (2021), "Alexa, is this a historical record?", Journal of computing and cultural heritage, Vol. 15 Issue 1, Available from https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/our-research-and-academic-collaboration/our-research-projects/open-access-research-from-our-staff/alexa-is-this-a-historical-record/
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August 2023: Anderson, T., Colón, R.D., Goben, A. and Karcher, S. (2022), "Curating for Accessibility", International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol. 17 No. 1, http://www.ijdc.net/article/view/837
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July 2023: Cushing, A.L. and Osti, G. (2023), "“So how do we balance all of these needs?”: how the concept of AI technology impacts digital archival expertise", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 79 No. 7, pp. 12-29. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2022-0170 (read a blog post about this Reading Club session here)
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June 2023: Jaillant, L. (2022) “More Data, Less Process: A User-Centered Approach to Email and Born-Digital Archives” The American Archivist Vol. 85, Issue 2. Available at https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/More_data_less_process_a_user-centered_approach_to_email_and_born-digital_archives/16560135
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May 2023: Monique Lassere and Jess M. Whyte (2021), Balancing Care and Authenticity in Digital Collections: A Radical Empathy Approach to Working with Disk Images, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies (2021) https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.125 (read a blog post about this Reading Club session here)
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April 2023: Thorsten Ries (2022), Digital history and born-digital archives: the importance of forensic methods, Journal of the British Academy, volume 10: https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/010.157 (read a blog post about this Reading Club session here)
Find all the Reading Club blog posts here.