Angela Puggioni is Community Engagement Manager at the Digital Preservation Coalition

With the end of the year in sight, I’d like to unwrap the final gift in our DPC December Knowledge Wrap, a four-week series sharing small reflections, resources, and highlights from across the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) as the year comes to an end. For this last post, let’s turn to advocacy: making the case for digital preservation, helping others understand why it matters, and giving practitioners the confidence and tools to speak up for their work.

Advocacy at the DPC isn’t about slogans or soundbites. It’s about helping people explain the value of digital preservation in ways that resonate with colleagues, senior decision makers, funders, and wider audiences, and about amplifying the voices of our community as a whole.

The Bit List: making digital risk visibleOne of the most visible advocacy tools the DPC offers is the Global ‘Bit List’ of Endangered Digital Materials. Reissued this year in a refreshed and updated form, the Bit List continues to shine a light on digital materials at risk and the actions needed to safeguard them. It’s used by practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and journalists alike - not just as a list, but as a conversation starter about digital fragility, responsibility, and urgency.

The strength of the Bit List lies in its community roots: it evolves through shared insight, lived experience, and collective review. As an advocacy tool, it helps translate technical preservation challenges into something tangible and relatable - and that’s powerful!

World Digital Preservation DayAdvocacy was also at the heart of World Digital Preservation Day 2025, which explored the theme Why Preserve? This year’s celebrations brought together stories, blogs, events, and conversations from across the globe. Together, they showed once again that digital preservation isn’t just about systems and standards, but about people, memory, evidence, creativity, and care.

The ideas and reflections shared around World Digital Preservation Day continue to shape our thinking. They’re feeding directly into the development of DPC’s new advocacy training, designed to help our members draw on real examples and shared language when making the case for preservation in their own contexts.

**Looking ahead: Digital Preservation Awards **Advocacy is also about recognition, and 2026 is a Digital Preservation Awards year! The Awards offer a chance to celebrate achievements, highlight good practice, and tell positive, inspiring stories about digital preservation work happening around the world. As we head into the new year, it’s a great time to start thinking about nominations - whether that’s your own work, a project you’re proud of, or a brilliant piece of digital preservation you’ve seen and think deserves a wider audience.

Alongside this, the DPC team is preparing a refreshed version of the DPC Executive Guide, due for release in early 2026. The updated guide will be supported by new training and learning opportunities, helping practitioners engage more confidently with senior decision-makers and connect digital preservation to organizational priorities.

As we close this year’s December Knowledge Wrap, I hope these four small gifts have offered moments of reflection, inspiration, and connection. Advocacy - like community, workforce development, and good practice - grows through shared effort and conversation, shaped by the experience and voices of people working in digital preservation.

For the DPC, advocacy means helping to create a climate in institutions, policy, and public discussion that is better informed and more positively inclined towards digital preservation. Together, we are building a welcoming and inclusive global community, working towards a more sustainable future for our digital assets.

Thank you for being part of that conversation in 2025. We’re looking forward to continuing it with you in 2026.

And if you’re not yet a member of the DPC but would like to be part of a community that connects people, shares knowledge, and supports advocacy for digital preservation around the world, you can find out more about the benefits of joining us as a member on our website. We’d be delighted to welcome you!

*This blog is part of the DPC December Knowledge Wrap: a four-week series where we unwrap helpful resources, insights, and end-of-year highlights from across the Coalition. You can also catch up on *Week 1: The Community Gift, ** Week 2: The Workforce Development Gift and Week 3: The Good Practice Gift.