In an era where digital assets are crucial for cultural heritage, scientific research, and business operations, this session explores digital preservation, the security of digital repositories, and cyber protection measures. Objectives include understanding the importance of digital preservation, identifying key threats, learning best practices for securing digital repositories and exploring cyber protection strategies and collaborative approaches. The National Library of France experiences several thousand attacks every day. How can we improve security for our digital assets?
The session begins with an introduction to the importance of digital preservation, followed by discussions of challenges such as data degradation and format obsolescence, and solutions to these challenges. The security of digital repositories will be addressed, focusing on threats such as cyber-attacks, and best practices such as encryption and access controls. Cyber protection strategies will include the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence. The importance of collaboration between institutions, governments and the private sector is also emphasised.
The target audience includes librarians, IT professionals, researchers, academics and policymakers. Expected outcomes include increased awareness and practical knowledge of safeguarding digital assets, as well as networking opportunities and actionable insights.

Climate change poses significant risks to digital collections, memory workers and archives users. These risks extend beyond those inherent to the management of individual digital objects and preservation programs within an organization. The impact of climate change on the stability of our physical environments, infrastructure, and global networks will have cascading consequences for our work.

This session aims to create a friendly space for practitioners to engage with this urgent but often overwhelming topic in a low-pressure way. The format will be a guided discussion where participants are encouraged to exchange ideas, questions, experiments, or concerns relating to climate change mitigation and adaptation in their professional contexts.

Topics may include: mitigating the impacts of digital preservation on the environment; adapting our field to account for these evolving risks; reframing or rethinking foundational digital preservation concepts to meet these circumstances; developing and maintaining emotional and mental resilience; or integrating climate justice into digital preservation work.

The discussion will be facilitated by Julie Shi, Digital Preservation Librarian at Scholars Portal, Canada, and co-chair of the NDSA Climate Watch Working Group, and Sarah Lake, Digital Preservation Librarian at Concordia University, Canada.