About World Digital Preservation Day

World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is held on the first Thursday of every November. This year we celebrate all things digital preservation on 2nd November 2023! 

The DPC invites all data creators, curators and consumers from around the world to celebrate digital preservation by participating in a whole day dedicated to all of the benefits and opportunities enabled by the hard work of our dynamic and collaborative community.

Participate in World Digital Preservation Day

Organized by the DPC and supported by digital preservation networks around the globe, World Digital Preservation Day is open to participation across all sectors, from anyone interested in securing a sustainable future for our digital assets.

• MAKE, BAKE, CRAFT

  Can you bake an at-risk digital material, crochet a file format, or reconstruct a process in Lego? Share your pictures with us on social media using the hashtags #BitListBakeOff and/or #WDPD2023.

   

• SING AND DANCE

  Channel your musical talents into creating a digital preservation song to share on World Digital Preservation Day.

  Need inspiration? Just look at some of the awesome contributions from previous years…

• BLOG

  Use your blogging platform to highlight the collections you are working on, share a workflow or simply to explain how you got started in digital preservation.

  Read some of the WDPD2022 posts from bloggers around the world 

• EVENTS

  Hold a seminar, webinar, live stream, watching party, hackathon or games room! If you would like your event to be added to our events listing on the DPC website, submit details to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

• RESOURCES

  The DPC will publish a new edition of the Global Bit List of Endangered Digital Species as part of the celebrations.

  Check out the Bit List

• LOGO

  The WDPD logo is available in 40 languages from around the world.

  Download in your language and add it to related emails, communications and event publicity OR order as stickers!

• NEWS

  Read our World Digital Preservation Day news stories on the DPC website.

  Go to news pages

• SOCIAL MEDIA

  Highlight the collections you are working on by sharing photos, videos, and updates about your own digital preservation day using the social media platform of your choice OR take over the corporate social media account for the day to let others outside our community know about digital preservation.

  Remember to use the hashtag #WDPD2023! 

Our second DPC Reading Club was held last month and focused on an article by Monique Lassere and Jess M. Whyte called “Balancing Care and Authenticity in Digital Collections: A Radical Empathy Approach to Working with Disk Images” (available at https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.125)

This paper was a great follow on from our reading from Thorsten Ries last time as it looked at the topic of digital forensics from a different angle, suggesting a ‘radical empathy’ approach to tackling disk images.

We had another great session, with lots of interesting discussion arising from the article.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to share translations of two more Technology Watch Guidance Notes: Preserving 3D and Wikidata for Digital Preservationists.

Now available in French, the Technology Watch Guidance Notes complement the DPC’s popular Technology Watch Report series. Preserving 3D forms part of the DPC’s Data Type series which is designed to provide a primer on the current state of community knowledge about types of data commonly encountered by those seeking to preserve their digital assets. Wikidata for Digital Preservationists provides practical advice on using, contributing, describing and curating data entries to enable storage and access to trusted data.

[sigue la versión en español]
The PREMIS Editorial Committee has released a Spanish language version of the Understanding PREMIS guide this week.

The guide provides a brief overview of the PREMIS preservation metadata standard, offers an idea of what PREMIS is all about and introduces the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata.

Liz Long is Assistant Director DAIR (Digital Archives Innovation and Research) at The National Archives of Australia. She recently attended the AMaGA 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

As a DPC grant recipient, I attended the Australian Museum and Gallery Association’s (AMaGA) conference in Newcastle from 16-19 May 2023. The theme, Discomfort: Brave conversations and new connections in changing environments, was largely explored via two key concepts of rapid technological and socio-cultural change in GLAM institutions. The two main themes of digital disruption and listening to marginalised voices made for a rich program that left me inspired rather than overwhelmed or weighed down by the all-too-common guilt that is felt by cultural heritage workers around our institutions’ past links with colonialism.

Bridie-Ann Carr is the Records and Information Manager at Imperial War Museums. She recently attended the IRMS 2023 Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

In mid-May I attended the IRMS Conference with support from the Career Development Fund. This year’s theme was ‘Embracing a New Information Generation’, which felt like a perfect fit, as I am new professional working with electronic records. I have wanted to attend a conference since qualifying as a Records Manager and set myself the aim to come back to IWM with new skills and knowledge I could immediately apply to my work. I also wanted to meet as many people as I could from across our sector. Covid moved many events on online and I feel like I have missed out on learning from others over a cup of tea and a biscuit!

Over the last couple of months the Digital Preservation Coalition has been working to procure and migrate to a new Learning Management System (LMS). Our LMS is primarily used to host and provide access to the Novice to Know-How (N2KH) courses, developed in partnership with and funded by The National Archives (UK).

John Dewees is the Digital Asset Management Lead at the University of Rochester and Pauline Schwartzman is the Digital Asset Management Analyst at the University of Rochester.

In this blog post, John Dewees and Pauline Schwartzman write about their experiences using The DPC’s Digital Preservation Competency Framework at the University of Rochester Libraries (URL).

The #DPClinic at the end of May, took the form of a “watch party” on the theme of database preservation. Peter Francis, Manager, Standards and Policy at PROV (Public Record Office Victoria), recently gave a presentation at an online event in Australasia, where he described using the SIARD Suite (Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases) tools to convert and store database content. At the watch party, highlights from a recording of Peter’s presentation were shared with approximately 25 attendees, drawn from Europe and US.