This year World Digital Preservation Day, November 6, 2025, coincides with the final day of iPRES 2025, the international digital preservation conference. The prompt for WDPD 2025, “Why preserve?” For The Ohio State University Libraries, we preserve the history of the University along with specialized collecting areas that enhance the mission and educational programs of the University.

This year, as I draft this between sessions at iPRES in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, I would like to reflect on the success of our Gray Digital Preservation Repository, launched nearly two years ago, as a repository ostensibly for born digital materials at scale.

After some initial growing pains, we are beginning to make headway migrating backlogged content for the University Archives from our network share (K-drive) for digital processing, as well as from our so-called Dark Archive; by the end of the year, we will have migrated all Archives and related collections from the Dark Archives, a feat more than 10 years in the making. Significantly, we have migrated over 1,000,000 files totaling 340GB for Presidents Gee and Drake, and Interim President Alutto. We will still have much more content to migrate from other collections, but this is a significant start!

The Digital Preservation Department has also begun to assemble a set of digital forensics equipment for analyzing and retrieving files from legacy media, beginning to allow University Libraries to provide access to materials within our collections that have been inaccessible for decades.

We look forward to 2026 as we will begin to expand the footprint of the Gray Repo to included migration of significant content beyond the University Archives. Further we will benchmark the current state of our program, in order to have a more holistic sense of our digital preservation efforts, allowing us to better design and implement a roadmap for future activities.