Blog post by Stephen Wyber
Today, 6 November, is this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, coordinated by the Digital Preservation Coalition. It offers a chance to highlight the unique opportunities and challenges involved in safeguarding and ensuring long-term access to digital materials.
This year’s theme is ‘why preserve’, focusing on bringing together and articulating stories from across the heritage sector about the difference that preservation can make.
For many in the library field, the answer will be similar to that around why they preserve in general – to support research, education and cultural participation, today and tomorrow, as well as giving people and communities the possibility to enjoy the right to be remembered.
We preserve digital materials because, increasingly, that is the format in which knowledge, creativity and information are being recorded and shared, as was previously the case with physical ones.
Legal Gaps, Real Problems
What is different between the physical and digital is the degree to which libraries and other heritage institutions can work with digital materials, including for preservation. A fundamental challenge, right at the beginning, is whether libraries can even build digital collections in the first place.
This topic – and the risk of a 21st Century black hole opening up – provided the focus of a session run by KR21 at the GLAM Wiki 2025 conference in Lisbon on 30 October – 1 November.
For example, the European Union’s provisions on preservation make clear that they only apply to materials held within permanent collections. This immediately discounts licensed content that is at risk of disappearance, either at the end of a subscription or simply at any time.
Meanwhile, e-Legal Deposit provisions do not exist everywhere, and even where they do often leave the possibility for access to be highly restricted.
Finally, there are private initiatives in the research sector, such as LOCKSS and CLOCKSS, which promise to allow people to continue to access journals even if the publisher closes or otherwise stops. However, this only focused on the research space, and is not universal.
The result is that the idea of developing a public record in the digital space is at risk. The theme is an important one for the wider open knowledge movement, which depends so extensively on the collections of heritage institutions in order to progress. And of course, digital preservation as a whole is only possible when the law leaves enough space for this.
A Chance for Change
While the situation is serious, it is not a lost cause. Indeed, a key reason for Knowledge Rights 21 existing is the need to intensify our advocacy for laws and policies that ensure that libraries can continue to support research, education and culture.
At the GLAM Wiki session, we discussed the various potential legislative ‘asks’ that could be made to achieve this goal.
A key one raised was simply the possibility for libraries and others to outright ‘buy’ digital materials on reasonable terms. This is a crucial step if libraries are to be able to build collections in the first place.
Connected with this is the need to protect libraries from unfair contract terms when seeking to sign agreements with publishers and others. Refusals to license to libraries (because it is more profitable to sell directly to those users who can pay), and tough terms limit how libraries can operate. eLending regimes that depend on permission will only survive as long as it is interesting for publishers to let them.
We also need clear provisions in law that prevent contract terms from undermining key preservation actions by libraries, as well as meaningful solutions for removing or circumventing technological protection measures that have the same impact.
Finally, participants also highlighted the need to extend and improve e-Legal Deposit schemes, ensuring that there is stronger coverage and reach.
Achieving these changes, of course, will take advocacy. We need to be able to make clear what the impacts of the impossibility of safeguarding digital heritage are, before they occur.
In doing this, the stories developed for Digital Preservation Day may have a particularly powerful application – helping to ensure that there is a future for our (digital) past.
6 November 2025
