Looking back at World Digital Preservation Day 2022
On 3 November 2022 it was World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD), an annual event hosted on the first Thursday of every November by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC). This is a registered company and charity established in 2002 as a collaboration between several agencies operating in the UK and Ireland, among which research institutes such as CERN and the University of London.
The goal of WDPD is to celebrate and raise awareness at global level about all things digital preservation and showcase how Digital Preservation enables ‘digits to flourish’. With digital preservation is meant in fact all processes aimed at ensuring safe storage of digital information, which can be revived and interpreted whenever the information is needed. This is necessary to safekeep digital data from being lost, especially from technological threats.
The theme of the 2022 WDPD was ‘Data for all, for good, forever’. Among many activities, such as webinars and events, a digital making-baking-crafting competition - #BitListBakeOff - was initiated, challenging participants to bake an at-risk digital material, crochet a file format, or reconstruct a process in Lego. Moreover, DPC also published the updated BitList of ‘Digitally Endangered Species’ and the conference proceedings from the iPress 2022, the International Conference on Digital Preservation held in Glasgow in September.
At EU Level, the European Union´s Publications Office (OP) is certainly a pioneer in digital preservation, having implemented their first electronic archiving system already in 1987. Since then, OP has continued to master eArchiving to ensure long-term preservation of all official publications published by the European Institutions (Decision 2009/496/EC, EURATOM), as well as the number of documents that need archiving is ever growing.
The European Union´s Publications Office also manages our data.europa.eu portal, which aims at fostering not only the preservation of public sector open data, but also its reuse in new and innovative forms.[Z(4]
If you want to know more about the services provided by data.europa.eu or the topic of digital and data preservation, visit the portal and discover its 176 catalogues and more than 1.5 million datasets, including on data preservation repositories.
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