Yesterday was the last Thursday of November, so we celebrated International Digital Preservation Day. This day, an initiative from the British Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), aims to create wider recognition for the value of digital heritage, and for the urgent need to keep it alive. In the framework of International Digital Preservation Day, a Digital Preservation Roadshow was organised at Cambridge University. Prof. Natasa Milic-Frayling spoke there about ‘The Digital Future’. She chairs of the UNESCO PERSIST Technology and Research Group, and spoke of course about the plans of that Group to work for digital continuity, bringing together heritage institutions and the ICT-industry under the aegis of UNESCO.

The notion of ‘digital continuity’ demands of creators of digital technologies to enable the use of their technologies beyond their market prime. Emulation and virtualisation are particular techniques to run old software and access old digital content but they come with complex licensing issues. Researchers and scholars however can virtualise open source research codes used in experiments and we can easily package research data and software together so that is can be used for decades to come. Milic-Frayling also explored the issue of economic sustainability, drawing on her own experience of software sustainability within the vendor market and asking similar questions of sustainability within an academic context.

International Digital Preservation Day was also celebrated, among other countries, in The Netherlands.

• Read more on the event at the website of Cambridge University Library
• Read more on the International Digital Preservation Day
• To get a general impression of the worldwide celebrations of IDPD, see the IDPD hashtag on Twitter

Categories: PERSIST Programme