Over the past several years, numerous digital preservation communities and networks have evolved all over the world. While some cover all aspects of digital preservation, other focus on specific aspects of digital preservation or may deal with several other aspects. It has become an interesting but often hard to navigate landscape.
To help make this landscape more visible and transparent, the "Community Survey" working group of nestor launched the Community Survey several years ago. The survey provides a structured overview of networks active in the field and is repeated every three years to reflect ongoing developments.
From 2025 onwards, the nestor working group is cooperating with the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) who will create a search facility for the data from the nestor Community Profiles, called the ‘Digital Preservation Community Search”. The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and OPF will also support nestor in promoting both the survey and the meta-search functionality for its results.
The 2026 iteration of the nestor Community Survey is now open! (closing 31 March 2026)
For your convenience, we have a PDF preview of the questionnaire, available here: https://wiki.dnb.de/x/46nqE
A great number of communities agreed to publish their Community Profiles on the nestor website. They can check whether they will adapt and update these data for the 2026 questionnaire. Please keep in mind that we need only one completed questionnaire per community / network for every new iteration of the survey. Please communicate this in your network and ensure, that one single questionnaire is the “official” version of your community. Information regarding data privacy protection is included in the survey.
The results of the last nestor Community Survey in 2023 are published in Open Access (nestor materials 27: Results of the nestor Community Survey 2023), as well as the community profiles (please scroll to the end) which provide an unprecedented global overview of networks in the field of long-term archiving - irrespective of their size and area of focus.
Please join one of the upcoming webinars, where nestor will present the project and provide guidance on completing the online questionnaire.
The same webinar will be offered twice to accommodate different time zones:
- Wednesday 25 February, 2-3 pm CET (check your local time)
- Friday 27 February, 6-7 am CET (check your local time)
You will find additional information and the registration form on https://www.tickettailor.com/events/dpc/2074071
We greatly appreciate your participation in the survey and hope that the survey’s outcomes will increase visibility and transparency of digital preservation communities around the world.
The survey has been designed by nestor - the German Network of Expertise in Digital Preservation.