Celebrating World Digital Preservation Day 2024

Today, we celebrate World Digital Preservation Day, an annual event organized by the Digital Preservation Coalition that highlights the significance of preserving our digital heritage.

As someone who has worked in Digital Preservation for over 25 years, this day holds special meaning as we take a moment to recognize the vital work being done within the Digital Preservation community. It's a chance to reflect on how we collectively safeguard our digital history and ensure that future generations have access to the rich tapestry of information and stories that define our world.

This year’s theme, "Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities”, emphasizes the importance of connecting all of our work while honoring the diverse digital legacies of communities worldwide. From local histories to global narratives, every story matters, showing there are many Digital Preservation communities that cross national boundaries, organizational function and size, and product choice.

Honoring diversity and celebrating digital legacies

At Preservica, I am proud of how we celebrate the rich diversity of the preservation communities we work with around the globe. Each organization we partner with plays a vital role in safeguarding unique digital legacies, contributing to a global tapestry of narratives that shape our collective history.

From Temple Rodef Shalom, which preserves the powerful stories of Holocaust survivors, to various Indigenous Nations, which protect its rich cultural heritage, these communities ensure that their histories endure for future generations. The HSBC archival team leverages digital preservation technology to secure the bank’s vast historical collections, while the Royal College of Nursing captures real-time data and events, preserving the critical moments of the pandemic.

These efforts, along with the work of many others like the Folklore Library, showcase how diverse communities from around the world contribute to preserving valuable digital content. At Preservica, we are honored to support these organizations, helping them protect their digital legacies and ensuring that these important stories continue to resonate, inspire and enrich our world.

Preserving the everyday and the extraordinary

Preserving both everyday moments and remarkable digital artifacts is essential because together they tell the full story of our shared history, capturing the richness of daily life alongside pivotal events and achievements.

Through our "What Do You Preserve?” campaign held annually during Archives Month, we've highlighted how organizations safeguard everything from the ordinary to the extraordinary, ensuring these diverse narratives endure for future generations.

For instance:

The National Theatre ensures the long-term accessibility of valuable collections like the Black Plays Archive.

The West-Brabants Archief has preserved Vincent van Gogh's birth certificate, representing the beginnings of an iconic artist.

The Lawrenceville School maintains historical reports from 1882, offering insights into nearly 150 years of academic evolution.

The Dulwich Archive holds school magazines dating back to 1863, capturing the voices of generations.

The Sisters of St. Francis reflects the 1960s as a period during which much took place in the lives of its Sisters.

Together, these efforts enrich our understanding of the past, allowing future generations to explore the stories that shape our collective identity.

Preserving legacies to inspire future generations

In an era where information is abundant but often fleeting, the importance of digital preservation has never been more vital.

Preservica is honored to play a key role in preserving the world’s digital memory. Digital Preservation goes beyond just safeguarding information for institutions—it empowers organizations of all sizes to protect and share their unique stories with the world.

By preserving their digital content, our users can document their histories and ensure that future generations can engage with and learn from them. Digital Preservation allows organizations to safeguard and celebrate their legacies and equip them with the tools to educate and inspire future generations.

Working together on global challenges

As Preservica users, our customers are preserving their own digital content and contributing to the wider Digital Preservation community, where they collaborate on shared challenges and shape best practices that address the evolving landscape of Digital Preservation.

As digital formats become obsolete or unsupported, new tools and recommendations emerge, and preservation strategies continually adapt to ensure digital content remains accessible.

Many Digital Preservation challenges are the same whether you are developing your own solution or have selected a product such as Preservica. I am proud of how we as a community work together to solve some of the fundamental problems we all face and share solutions across these boundaries.

Preservica is committed to sharing our experience. We have also published a series of White Papers on Digital Preservation opening up our data model and our preservation approaches to all.

We are also an enthusiastic member of the Preservation Action Registries initiative and make all our preservation actions and recommendations available online and via our file format expert David Clipsham, we contribute to the constant effort to improve the PRONOM database, the cornerstone of many Preservation systems.

This collaboration benefits everyone: by working together, we can deliver the highest-quality preservation systems to support practitioners in their vital work.

Looking to the future

As we celebrate World Digital Preservation Day, we continue to envision a world where Digital Preservation is different - the acquisition of information, the processes required to preserve it and the delivery of information to those that need it is fully seamless and automated. This will democratise this vital technology allowing the foundational research of this current community to be applied to users of all abilities.

For those that want it, Preservation will just happen, seamlessly integrated into the systems that manage our digital records, enabling us to harness the vast potential of our ever-growing and increasingly complex digital memory to enrich and protect our cultural, social, business and political lives.

Our community is poised for significant growth, and through today’s dedicated efforts we can achieve the vision we all share.