News

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) today releases a draft version of its new Carbon Footprint Toolkit for community comment and testing.

The Toolkit provides a practical methodology to help organizations calculate the carbon footprint of their digital preservation activities. Designed to support a wide range of organizations, regardless of size, sector, geography, or prior experience, it also includes a Carbon Footprint Calculation Tool to support carbon footprint calculations in practice.

The Towards a National Collection (TaNC) Program has announced the launch of the Environmental and Sustainability strand of the National Research Infrastructure for Cultural Heritage (N‑RICH) Prototype project.

Funded through the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund Preliminary Activity grant awarded to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and delivered by the TaNC Program in partnership with AHRC, the two-year N-RICH Prototype represents a significant investment in strengthening the UK’s cultural heritage research infrastructure.

NDSA has announced the release of version 2.1 of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation, introducing environmental sustainability considerations into the Levels recommendations and supporting resources.

The main addition in version 2.1 is a new Environmental Sustainability Guide, a supplemental resource intended to help organizations embed environmental sustainability into digital preservation decision-making when using the Levels to assess and shape their preservation strategy. The guide introduces core concepts relevant across digital preservation practice, alongside sustainability decision points linked to the Storage, Integrity, and Content functional areas of the Levels matrix.

Digital Cleanup Day on 21 March is a good reminder that digital clutter has a footprint too. To mark the day, the DPC is kicking off its own internal digital clean-up by tackling our email inboxes. We’ll be clearing out what we no longer need and recording how much space we save along the way.