In honor of 2025’s World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD), I am finally taking a leap back into posting here. My last post was in 2019 – and while I can see a half-dozen partially written posts lurking behind the scenes, none of them were ever finished “enough” to actually post.

So… Happy World Digital Preservation Day! I just spent the last 4 days attending iPRES 2025 virtually. I was in Maryland while most of the attendees were in person on the other side of the planet in New Zealand. Luckily, I’m a night owl, so attending sessions from 3pm – 10:30pm my time was just fine with me.

The conference closed last night (still Wednesday) for me – but now I’ve caught up to Thursday November 6th and have the time to reflect on this year’s WDPD theme of “Why Preserve?”. Please keep in mind that the contents of this post, along with everything here on Spellbloundblog, reflect only my thoughts as an individual.

First, some context about me. I love stories and I love connection of all kinds – connections among people, connections between the past and all our possible futures, and connections that build community. Somewhere at their intersection is where I see the role for preservation. Without our digital records (preserved in such a way that they retain their context, can be trusted to be authentic, and can be interacted with in a meaningful way) we will lose stories of the past and all the evidence they contain. We will lose may kinds of connection.

Many communities have decided that this reason for preserving means that time, energy, and funding should be allocated toward this goal. One of iPRES 2025’s themes was Tūhono (Connect). This thread ran through keynotes, posters, bake-off demonstrations, and presentations/panels of all kinds. And for me – the theme of Tūhono elegantly ties into my understanding of “Why Preserve?”.

We preserve to connect. To connect the past to the future. To connect with both our professional digital preservation community and with those whose records are being preserved. Digging into my copious notes from the last few days, here are a few tidbits from iPRES 2025 that kept the focus on connection.

• Late Sunday my time, I attended a workshop on Archival Resource Keys (ARKs). The ARK Alliance is a community that supports the ARK infrastructure. ARKs and the ARK Alliance are all about connection. ARKs are being used by libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and more. From their website “ARKs are open, mainstream, non-paywalled, decentralized persistent identifiers that you can start creating in under 48 hours.” Want to connect your stuff to anyone who wants to refer to it in a durable way? ARKs can help.
• Tuesday paper session 2 included a paper on “A Collaborative Framework for Migrations”, talking about digital preservation in Finland. The presenters highlighted that collaboration was key to success. Cultural institutions are experts in semantics and understanding while the digital preservation service is responsible for bit-level preservation, but you need both to ensure logical preservation. Without that collaboration, you can’t ensure the future usability of the information.
• Wednesday’s keynote on “Encountering Collapse: Power, Community, and the Future of Open Infrastructure” was delivered by Rosalyn Metz, Chief Technology Officer for Libraries and Museum at Emory University. There were so many compelling elements to this talk, but I’ll share the one that spoke to me most strongly of connection. Community is the backbone of open infrastructure: “The resilience of infrastructure depends on the relationships that sustain it. Communities, not technologies, make infrastructure possible.”.
• I spent pretty much all day Wednesday in the Bake-Offs, in which people demo tech tools and solutions. To my eye, it was a fantastic parade of people sharing. So many opportunities for speakers to literally demonstrate their expertise. I always love seeing what other folks are working on, especially open source projects that might be just the thing someone needs to move their own project forward. It’s like speed dating for future collaboration.
• I saw many posters and lightening talks – but one that jumps out as fitting this theme was presented by Amy Pienta, Research Professor at ICPSR at University of Michigan. She spoke about the role of data stewards in safeguarding public data. DataLumos is a great example of a community coming together to ensure crucial resources are preserved. I’m glad that they exist, doing the work — and perhaps serving as inspiration for others to work on whatever challenges they find.
• The closing keynote address from Peter-Lucas Jones, CEO of Te Hiku Media, specifically was tied to the conference theme of Connect. In order to understand traditional data, you must understand the importance of indigenous language. The efforts of Te Hiku Media include multiple ways of leveraging technology to both preserve the Māori language and give back to the community keeping the language alive (a few examples: teaching computers te reo Māori, creating a synthentic voice that can run on assistive devices and speaks te reo Māori, live bi-lingual captioning). He also emphasized that it was important to “empower communities to lead the change they need” – and that data licensing is key to prevent that what they are creating can only be used for purposes in sync with the communities wishes.
• The last session I attended was Panel 7: “Working with ICT in Digital Preservation”. My connection thread from this panel discussion was the need for all of us to support one another as we navigate the multi-fold challenges to building the technical environments we need to preserve at-risk records. Yes, we do need to plug in old tech bought off ebay to see if it will work (and hope it won’t catch fire!). Yes, we need to leverage other teams’ success and use it as a “hey it worked for them” kind of argument to help us go around institutional rules that are keen on standardization. And yes – we need to connect with as many parts of our organizations to explain what digital preservation work is, how we do it, and why it is important.

This list is far from exhaustive, but I hope it gives you a taste of why the strongest thread for me from iPRES 2025 was connection. And why that is also my answer to “Why Preserve?”. To Connect.

PS: I’d like to thank the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) who apparently created this fantastically useful named character reference list of all the character names that HTML recognizes so that I could appropriately publish two of the words I wanted to in this post accurately (Tūhono and Māori) via the WordPress text HTML interface. If you are curious, the answer to making the characters ū and ā display is preceding the strings umacr; and amacr; with an &. Yes, I needed the help of a community to share my ideas on connection.