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Articles
World Digital Preservation Day: Save Our Stories
Kelli O'Toole is Digitization Supervisor/ Project Manager at the NYC Department of Records & Information Services (DORIS), Municipal Archives The New York City Municipal Archives preserves centuries of government records documenting the people, places, and events that have shaped the city. Records like birth and death certificates, court proceedings, photographs, and government correspondence offer invaluable glimpses into the lives of New Yorkers across...
World Digital Preservation Day
About World Digital Preservation Day World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is held on the first Thursday of every November. This year we will celebrate all things digital preservation on 5 November 2026. Save our Stories (SOS): Our Digital Heritage in Danger Organized by the DPC and supported by digital preservation networks around the globe, World Digital Preservation Day is open to anyone interested in securing our digital legacy. On 5 November 2026, we invite you to join this year's...
A Brief Interview with Folasade Adepoju, Founder of YILCO and Coordinator of the African Web Archiving Fellowship
This blog is co-authored by Folasade Adepoju, Chief Librarian at the National Library of Nigeria, and Ima Oduok, Assistant Digital Preservation Analyst at the Rockefeller Archive Center. Across our field, we are facing decreasing resources and increasing risk to our digital materials. It is important to remember how this danger to digital heritage can reinforce and broaden existing inequities. It is also important to highlight the information and cultural heritage professionals doing...
Collaboration to Save Our Africa’s Digital Heritage and Knowledge in Danger
Gladys Kemboi is a doctoral student in Information Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My name is Gladys Kemboi. I am a doctoral student in Information Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My research and interests focus on knowledge management, digital preservation, decolonisation of knowledge, community archives and local and Indigenous knowledge in development. Over the past years I have been collaborating with leaders, partners and communities...
SOS! DPC RAM needs you! Call for community input into DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model
Jen Mitcham is the Chief Digital Preservation Officer at DPC. The DPC developed the Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) in 2019 as part of a project with the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Based on a maturity model published by Adrian Brown of the UK Parliamentary Archives, RAM provided a way of articulating what digital preservation good practice looks like, and a means for organizations to better understand their current capability and set targets for continuous improvement. Since...
Thirty-three years of Novaya Gazeta, open to all
Tamara Velikodneva is an archivist at RIMA, the archive of Russian independent media built by Kronika. On 30 October Novaya Gazeta announced its closure, ending its 33-year history of outstanding independent journalism. According to the editors, the Russian authorities and security services forced the newsroom to stop working under the threat of an “extremist organisation” designation, which could have led to the arrest of its journalists. Its record, from the first issue in April 1993 to...
One collection that changed the way we work...
Ailie O’Hagan is the Digital Preservation Librarian at Queen’s University Belfast. Last year, in the Library at Queen's University Belfast, we began to address preservation of our born-digital materials. The catalyst for this came from a story – or rather, our inability to completely access a story! Earlier in the year, we had received a donation of materials belonging to the late Professor Lord David Trimble, former First Minister of Northern Ireland, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party...
Who Holds the Keys to Our Stories? Vendor Lock-In and Staff Turnover in Digital Preservation
Jennifer Restrepo is the Customer Adoption Specialist at Libnova. Digital preservation depends on more than technology. Institutions need to maintain the knowledge, responsibilities, and control required to care for their collections over time. For World Digital Preservation Day 2026, with its theme Save Our Stories (SOS), we should also ask what might put the continuity of our digital heritage at risk. During a digital preservation user community session, one institution shared its...
We Will WARC You, One Year On: Beyond HTML
Elizabeth Franklin, Celeste Vallance and Libor Coufal are members of the Digital Preservation team at the National Library of Australia. On World Digital Preservation Day 2025, we published a blog post for the Digital Preservation Coalition titled We Will WARC You: preserving access to published CD-ROMs at NLA. In it, we described our novel use of WARC technology to provide access to complex, HTML-based publications from our collections — not harvested websites, but offline publications...
Launching the Global Ambassador Programme: Helping Communities Save Our Stories
This blog is authored by Karyn Williamson, Digital Preservation Specialist at the DPC. Every community has stories worth preserving. From local history groups and community archives to grassroots cultural organisations and volunteer-led heritage projects, communities around the world are safeguarding records, photographs, oral histories, websites, social media content, and digital collections that document who we are, where we've come from, and what matters to us.
DPC launches new Advocacy course as part of Novice to Know-How learning pathway
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has launched a new online training course today, N2KH: Advocacy, designed to support digital preservation professionals in communicating the value of their work and building support within their organizations. This training is the latest addition to the Novice to Know-How (N2KH) online learning pathway. Like previous courses in the series, it has been conceived and funded by The National Archives (UK) and delivered by the DPC.
New Digital Preservation Toolkit for Community Archives Launches on World Digital Preservation Day 2024!
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is pleased to announce the launch of the Digital Preservation Toolkit for Community Archives today on World Digital Preservation Day, November 7, 2024. The new resource is designed to empower community archives at every stage of their digital preservation journey. This year's World Digital Preservation Day theme, 'Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities', couldn't be more fitting for the toolkit's debut. It's a day that brings together...
Announcing the First release of the Digital Preservation Workbench
A second prototype service is now available from the Registries of Good Practice project, following on from the release of the Digital Preservation Publications Index in May. The Digital Preservation Workbench brings together a suite of different experimental interfaces and tools, aiming to help improve the practice of digital preservation and to understand what kinds of information systems we really need.
Reflections on my first IIPC WAC, Paris 2024
Ndahambelela Hertha Iipinge is Associate Archivist at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. She attended the IIPC Web Archiving Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters. Since August 2023, I have been working as an associate archivist in the digital preservation team at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. My role includes managing the UNHCR Web Archive, where my responsibilities include curating and capturing essential content. I work...
DP and Artificial Intelligence - A Four Point Plan
In June 2024 I was invited to give an opening keynote on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Preservation to a workshop of around 200 librarians organized by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), sponsored by the IFLA Information Technology Section, the IFLA IT Special Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence and IFLA Preservation and Conservation Section. The workshop had the theme ‘AI and the future of digital preservation’ and my own presentation was followed...
Digital Asset Register Toolkit
This Toolkit aims to offer practical guidance on how to build, maintain, and use a Digital Asset Register (DAR). It starts by taking you through what a DAR is, why you may wish to build one, and who this toolkit is aimed at. Subsequent sections detail what makes a good DAR, a step-by-step guide to developing one, an example template, further details about information gathering, and using and updating your DAR. This Toolkit is for anyone who would like to create a DAR to aid their digital...
What does good practice really look like for digital forensics?
The DPC recently held a series of events on the topic of digital forensics (an initial event on the 26th February and a follow up ‘Watch Party’ event suitable for community members in Australasia and Asia Pacific). As suggested by the title, the focus was to ‘investigate good practice’ through the sharing of knowledge, experiences and case studies. This event was born as a result of the interesting discussions in our very first DPC Reading Club which looked at an article on the topic of...
The room of requirement: working together to set up a digital preservation lab at State Library Victoria
This blog has been written by Carey Garvie, Senior Digital Preservation Specialist, Library Systems & Digital Preservation and Susannah Bourke, Digital Archivist, Description Original Materials at State Library Victoria This year’s theme for World Digital Preservation Day - Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort feels extremely pertinent to our experience over the last year. In December 2022, State Library Victoria appointed two new Digital Preservation positions. Together these...
Announcement: Call for Contributions iPRES 2024
16-20 September 2024, iPRES comes to Ghent and Flanders. Hosted by Ghent University, Digital Archives Flanders, VRT and meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives, we invite you to unlock the past, present and future of digital preservation together. We are pleased to announce the iPRES 2024 Call for Contributions!
Celebrating WDPD2023 at the Nelson Mandela Foundation
This video was sent to us by Zandile Myeka, Metadata and Photographs Archivist at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in celebration of World Digital Preservation Day 2023.