Excited to learn a defunct web forum for your favourite band as a teenager still exists in the Wayback Machine? Relieved to hear that a teaching resource will be supported even though the original platform has disappeared? Find it useful to cite a persistent link to your dataset you know will be there for decades to come when publishing new research?
There’s a day for that! World Digital Preservation Day celebrates good work in digital preservation across the community of practice responsible for the long-term care of digital resources. While we still have a long way to go, WDPD provides a moment to appreciate all the hard work already carried out against an avalanche of technological and social change.
To mark WDPD 2025, Library & University Collections is delighted to share the approval of a new, updated Digital Preservation Policy. The new Policy:
- describes the risk to digital resources without intervention
- outlines how the University of Edinburgh manages the full lifecycle of digital information assets in its custody
- provides clear roles and responsibilities for everyone in the University community, including staff and students
- names the standards and guidance that inform decisions about how to preserve digital resources
Using Lifecycle Management – keeping track of digital materials from creation all the way to the Archives or bin – Library & University Collections supports long-term access to our most important digital resources. Working with creators and staff responsible for the systems they use helps to manage the end-of-life for digital resources, either long-term presrvation or deletion.
Since the last iteration of the digital preservation policy in 2017, the University’s digital outputs and infrastructure have evolved and grown rapidly. The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a new digital-first or digital-only way of working for many teams across the University. The rise of AI prompted important discussion about the use and impact of digital technologies. The migration of EdWeb, the University’s web platform, instigated a University-wide effort to delete out-of-date content.
Secretary to the University, Martin Lowe, switching off final IBM mainframes in October 1995
As a result, this 2025 Policy reflects a more pro-active and collaborative approach to digital preservation and managing the ‘end’ of our digital resources. While Library & University Collections has made some progress towards implementing long-term digital preservation, meaningful progress will require interventions earlier in the lifecycle of digital information. This Policy facilitates a cross-directorate approach, such as that between L&UC and Learning Teaching Web, inviting collaboration from teams responsible for digital resources when they’re first created or still being developed.
Library & University Collections celebrates the achievements to date that have resulted in the preservation of important resources despite technological obsolescence. But we can’t do it alone – I hope next year you’ll mark this day in your calendars and celebrate with us even greater progress in digital preservation at the University of Edinburgh.
More Information
Updated guidance: https://library.ed.ac.uk/heritage-collections/collections-and-search/archives/digital-archives-and-preservation
Archiving web content (Sharepoint): https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/EdWeb2Hub/SitePages/Archiving-web-content.aspx