This poster explores collaborative work by the University of Sheffield and the Digital Preservation Coalition which explored what good practice looks like for the digital transfer process. We use the term “Digital Transfer” to refer to the means by which born-digital or digitised content is given to an Archive from a donor or depositor (either an individual or an organisation). This is also referred to as a “deposit”. A digital transfer can be from an external or internal donor to an organisation.

Following the launch of HSBC’s Preservica-based cloud system for archival metadata management, digital asset storage and digital preservation, numerous opportunities for metadata enhancement have been identified. The two innovative projects described in this paper have provided significant improvements and efficiencies in the targeted search of custom catalogue metadata, allowing archivists to more readily and easily identify specific records. In the first project, we describe a methodology for the creation and population of a ‘Contains Digital Asset’ metadata field that allows users to identify catalogue entries with digital files. In the second project, the titles of folders within a catalogue entry’s archival hierarchy are made readily viewable and searchable through a custom metadata fragment, allowing users to narrow searches to particular branches of the archival tree and/or derive differentiating contextual information for catalogue entries displayed in search results.

This document details the creation and deployment of a Python script aimed at improving the descriptive metadata of video files within the digital preservation system, Preservica. The script addresses the challenge of numerous video files lacking detailed metadata, which hinders effective retrieval and management. By leveraging advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques, the script transcribes video content, removes stop words, tokenizes the text, and, if necessary, chunks the content for summarization using ChatGPT-4o. The generated summaries are then uploaded to Preservica, enhancing the metadata and thereby improving the usability and accessibility of the video files. This solution ensures that the vast amount of video content in Preservica is more searchable and manageable.

The World Bank Group Archives’ Digital Preservation work program is documented as part of an agile value stream diagram for the World Bank unit to which it belongs. The value stream diagram enables documentation of the partnerships and coordination necessary to ensure that those born-digital records of World Bank Group staff that must be preserved will be appropriately captured and ultimately guided into the Digital Preservation platform. This poster will show both the broad context, as well as drill into details of the Digital Preservation Program. Takeaways will include insights into ways digital preservation programs can leverage value stream diagrams to support team strategy and cross-organizational communication, improving digital preservation outcomes.

This poster is about a project to share and receive guidance on Lebret Indian Residential School photos from the University of Saskatchewan to the Starblanket First Nation, Peepeekisis Cree Nation, Okanese First Nation, Little Black Bear First Nation, and Métis people in and around Lebret, Saskatchewan, Canada. A community engagement will be held at the same time as the Treaty 4 gathering in September 2025 to ask for appropriate descriptions to be able to repair metadata records and seek guidance for stewardship decisions around the photos. This poster will share the results of this first engagement along with reflections to improve future engagements. It will demonstrate the importance and necessity of incorporating Indigenous communities and Indigenous Knowledges into preservation practices and strategies to uphold Indigenous data sovereignty.

I propose a 7-10 minute prerecorded lightning talk presented solely by me. I am in the process of completing an analysis based on data from questions in Section 4 of the 2023 Storage Infrastructure Survey which takes a look at preservation planning and organizational commitment. Although this survey was created with a specific goal in mind, the data collected can be reused to ponder other ideas. This lightning talk would take a look at my reuse of this data to ask: Do organizations who see digital preservation as a core service show continued dedication through planning for appropriate storage needs and requirements? Then I will present some ideas around other trends that a new perspective on this data can offer. Lastly, I will invite others to pursue their own analyses by reuse of data offering as an example the iterations of NDSA’s longitudinal studies that are available through the OSF platform and include survey data and published reports.

Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), particularly Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), are essential tools for preserving and responsibly sharing Indigenous knowledge. Grounded in oral traditions, and cultural practices, Indigenous knowledge often remains invisible or is misrepresented in scholarly and digital infrastructures. DOIs—such as those registered via DataCite—support long-term access, proper attribution, and global visibility of diverse knowledge outputs, including heritage materials, artworks, and more.

DOIs are most effective when paired with rich open metadata—structured, standardized information about each item, such as title, author, institution, and publication date. The DataCite Metadata Schema supports over 30 types of outputs, resources and activities, from dissertations and datasets to physical objects, software, artifacts, and samples. This flexibility makes it possible to meaningfully describe Indigenous knowledge and connect it to people, institutions, and related works using other persistent identifiers. Together, DOIs and open metadata enhance discoverability, ensure proper attribution, and support ethical reuse across systems and borders.

DataCite also integrates with the Local Contexts platform, enabling the inclusion of Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels and Notices in DOI metadata. These Labels, assigned by Indigenous communities via the Local Contexts Hub, communicate governance, access protocols, and responsibilities. Notices, which can be applied by researchers and repositories, act as placeholders to acknowledge Indigenous interests until Labels are applied. These identifiers can be included in DOI metadata using the rightsIdentifier and relatedIdentifier fields, linking to descriptions hosted by Local Contexts.
This allows culturally appropriate terms of use to be associated with metadata across platforms.

This presentation explores how DOIs, open metadata, and tools like Local Contexts can help Indigenous communities protect their knowledge, share it in the right way, and ensure it is discoverable and recognized over time in digital knowledge infrastructure.

At the IPRES 2024 Conference in Ghent, Belgium, three Kenyan authors: Kiplagat, Chepken and Kiptoo, presented the paper: Digital Repository For African History Culture And Heritage: A Case of Keiyo Community of Kenya. This year they have done a lightening talk which presents an update of the Keiyo Community digital preservation project being undertaken by the KHCH Center. Joseph Kiplagat shall do the presentation.
The Keiyo community lives next to Kaptagat Forest ecosystem. It has an age-long strong cultural link to forests, valuing them not just for their resources but also for their spiritual significance. This rich cultural heritage has led to sustainable forest management practices. The project coded Collect, Digitize and Disseminate (CDD) entails collecting indigenous knowledge artifacts, of art, music and fashion and preserving them in an archive/museum. Kimore School currently being constructed at the edge of Kaptagat forest shall accommodate the first Cultural Centre with space for an archive and physical repository. Here also, traditional artifacts and attires shall be exhibited and showcased, as men and women glad in traditional attire perform cultural dances and rent the air with traditional songs, confirming the solid inter-relationship between the Community culture and the Community enviable environmental conservation traditions. A physical repository shall be developed followed by a digital repository platform, for item preservation and dissemination purposes.
The main project updates we are presenting include entity registrations and establishment of institutional partnerships. KHCH Centre is now a legally registered entity in Kenya. This has opened windows for among others, partnerships with various community, government and academic institutions. The local institutions are: Keiyo Cultural Groups, State Department of Culture, Kaptagat Integrated Conservation Programme, EM County Department of Culture, Moi University School of Information Sciences, Kenya Forest Service and Kimore School. Internationally we have partnered with the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in Chicago, USA under the project: Catalyzing African Community Archives for Social Good (CACASG).

5 minute pre-recorded VT offering a brief progress of the Digital Preservation project of Keiyo History Culture and Heritage Centre which we presented at IPress 2024 in Ghent.

A goal of digital preservation in a repository is to ensure items are preserved for its designated community. In pursuit of that goal, a collaborative project between researchers and library staff who support data management and preservation was developed. Our goal is to explore what would be required to provide meaningful preservation for their research programs. The specific focus was on research projects with complex intersections of needs, particularly projects with complex data types with both research-related needs (e.g., compliance with research data management policies) and cultural heritage components (e.g., the research creates collections or cultural heritage items). This lightening talk will present an analysis of conversations between the researchers, librarian, and archivist team members as we explored the ways the researchers collect and store their data and the collections their research creates. The conversations were recorded in the early phases of our project where we met to explore research data curation and preservation from both the researchers’ and service providers’ perspectives. Key insights identified by all parties in the conversations will be presented and implications discussed.

In recent years, the extensive use of instant messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, has become central to government communication and official business, producing valuable records while also presenting new challenges for digital preservation. Leading institutions, including the National Archives and Records Administration and the European Ombudsman, have recently underlined the importance of preserving such digital communications as official records.
Focusing on the Unione dei Comuni della Bassa Romagna (local authority) as a case study, this session presents ongoing research on key challenges and best practices in managing and archiving instant messages. Based on internal survey data, the project examines how these platforms are used in routine processes and decision-making, identifies policy gaps, and addresses archival and curatorial concerns. The study highlights current issues, such as staff training, usage monitoring, privacy concerns, and accessibility, that are still under evaluation. A special focus on messages from political officeholders and significant historical events underscores their importance in shaping institutional memory and ensuring public accountability. The research aims to develop good practices to support administrative efforts in safeguarding institutional information and preventing data loss.
From this session, participants will acquire an overview of the role and impact of instant messaging in a local institutional context. Archivists, records managers, and information professionals will not only hear the outcomes of this collaborative project but also receive recommendations to support data preservation—from routine updates to historically significant conversations—and the development of guidelines. By presenting our experience, we hope to contribute to the ongoing debate and encourage further research.
The project is led by professionals with expertise in archival science and public-sector governance: Alessia Del Bianco, (PhD student Archival Science) University of Bologna (presenter); Francesca Del Giacco (Archivist), Mariangela Baroni (Communication Service Manager) Unione dei Comuni della Bassa Romagna.

As Indigenous languages face accelerating endangerment, digital preservation efforts must evolve beyond static archiving. Emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR), offer new possibilities to support language revitalization through immersive, relational, and context-rich experiences.

This short talk, presented by a language teacher and expert in immersive technologies and AI, explores how these tools can reframe digital preservation not simply as the storage of linguistic data, but as a dynamic process that fosters living engagement with language. It will outline how VR can simulate culturally meaningful environments (e.g., landscapes, ceremonies, everyday interactions), providing opportunities to experience Indigenous languages as they are rooted in land, story, and practice. These virtual spaces offer more than pedagogical novelty: they represent a means of restoring intergenerational language transmission in ways that transcend geographic and generational divides.

At the same time, AI tools are opening new frontiers for corpus development, automatic transcription, speech synthesis, and conversational modeling, especially when adapted to the morphosyntactic complexity and oral character of many Indigenous languages. Used responsibly, these tools can help communities build high-quality, culturally relevant corpora that serve as foundations for education, research, and future technological applications.

Ultimately, the goal of this solo presentation is not to offer a single solution, but to share emerging ideas and foster reflection among digital preservation practitioners: How might immersive and intelligent technologies shape the future of language preservation? How can we ensure these tools serve the needs and values of Indigenous communities? In line with the iPRES 2025 themes of tūtaki, tūhono, and haerenga, the talk invites open dialogue on the role of digital innovation in sustaining the world’s ancestral voices.

The Academy of Arts digitally archives artists' estates for the long term. It is not possible to formalise the respective transfers according to OAIS (SIP) as is the case in libraries, for example. The requirements and the implementation or workflows of transfer, pre-ingest and ingest, data management are presented.
The Akademie der Künste shows the implementation in its existing infrastructure:

OAIS: LIBNOVA EUROPE/ Libsafe
Archive database : Startext GmbH / ActaPro
Own developments and tools

My lightning talk will explore why games, from board games to immersive experiences, are not just fun, but essential tools for learning and community building. As the creator and manager of a Digital Preservation Games Group (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/90770a6910c8440a8834b33a3e2ad5d2) I've witnessed how gamification transforms abstract concepts into tangible, low-stakes challenges, making learning accessible and engaging. I want to talk about the games I have made, and how they make digital preservation less scary!

This proposal offers originality and innovation by highlighting a unique, interactive pedagogical approach to digital preservation. I want to structure my talk along the conference themes.

"Haerenga (Journey)" resonates with how games guide practitioners through the evolving landscape of digital preservation. They simulate real-world scenarios – data migration, format obsolescence, risk assessment – allowing individuals to experiment, fail safely, accelerating their professional journey.

"Tūtaki (Encounter)" reflects the unique spaces games create for innovation. They allow us the chance to reframe problems and identify solutions in a low stake no risk environment. I also want to talk about the use of AI and cutting-edge research to make games and incorporate best/current practice.

Finally, "Tūhono (Connect)" highlights how games bring people together. Our group events foster informal gatherings, breaking down barriers and encouraging collaborative learning. We've attracted participants from across the globe, including Nigeria, the United States, Scandinavia, and South America, truly embodying the spirit of global "Encounter." These playful environments facilitate open discussion and the sharing of experiences, leading to unexpected insights and stronger professional bonds.

Lastly, regardless of my success I wish you the very best! And note my Digital Preservation Games Group is also open to anyone in the games category who would like a safe place to practice their game before iPRES.

Over 50 years ago, a group of MIT researchers were commissioned by the Club of Rome to model the effects exponential economic and population growth would have on world systems. The resulting report, The Limits to Growth, has been updated and re-evaluated several times since its publication, and its model has continued to be proven prescient. Using this model as the basis for scenario creation when scenario planning for digital preservation (as discussed in my iPres 2024 paper, Energy, Digital Preservation, and the Climate: Proactively Planning for an Uncertain Future) what can we say about the challenges digital preservation is likely to face in the future? Knowing the likelihood of these challenges, are there changes we should make now in our digital preservation practice? And finally, as the future unfolds into the present, what indicators are available to help us track our path and adjust course as needed?

Digital preservation initiatives often require close collaboration between archivists, digital preservation specialists, and IT professionals. However, communication gaps, conflicting priorities, and differing working languages can create friction or inefficiencies that undermine project goals.
This lightning talk will explore how to build productive relationships with IT professionals and developers, whether you're maintaining a repository, building custom ingest workflows, or advocating for long-term access needs.
Drawing on real-world experience navigating technical infrastructure projects, this talk will identify common pitfalls in cross-functional collaboration and outline concrete strategies for aligning user needs with technical priorities. There will be candid discussion of challenges such as unclear scoping, assumptions about functional requirements, mismatched understandings, and emotional labor on both sides. It will also cover techniques for bridging these gaps, including user story building, effectively utilizing product owners, and being willing to say the hardest thing: “I don’t know.”
The goal of this lightning talk is to equip practitioners at any stage with actionable strategies they can add to the toolkits for advocating for preservation priorities, while building mutual understanding and trust with technical teams.

Inherited workflows can be deceptively rigid, especially when they were built to serve a narrow purpose but become generalized over time. This lightning talk will explore one such case study: a digital preservation workflow that has become too tightly coupled to archival description in ArchivesSpace, requiring full item-level processing before stabilization, preservation, or access steps can occur. While effective for one type of digitized content, the system created significant barriers for accessioning born-digital materials, effective processing of digital material, backlog management, and scalable practices.

We will walk through how I began to untangle this workflow by identifying where dependencies could be broken, parsing out core functions, and reframing the process into modular, flexible steps. I’ll discuss strategies for reverse-engineering workflows and empowering staff to approach digital preservation in smaller, sustainable increments.

This lightning talk will provide a practical reflection on how to work backward from a too-rigid system and move toward one that accommodates a wider range of materials and use cases. The aim is to help anyone facing legacy systems, inherited processes, or overly ambitious pipelines with every-day problem solving.

As Repository Managers, we have to decide upon a list of preferred and accepted file formats for digital preservation. This is just one of the may hats, besides those for tasks revolving around collection policies, preservation policies, legal matters and contracts, metadata, repository software and hardware etc.
The list of data types to be covered by some repositories is huge and the amount of formats is endless, especially when dealing with research data. How can we make an informed decision? How do we keep up with current developments? How often should or can we change our list? And is there a right answer and decision?

This session explores the digital preservation of documents, with a focus on libraries and museums. It addresses the challenges and solutions related to preserving printed, audiovisual and 3D documents, and outlines the best practices for securing these resources and making them accessible. The National Library of France is also a museum and preserves over 60 million files in its digital repository. It also provides nearly 11 million digital objects to the public via its free online digital library, Gallica.
The agenda begins with an introduction to the importance of digital preservation in the context of libraries and museums. Discussions will focus on specific challenges, such as data degradation and format issues, and solutions, such as the use of standardised formats and metadata management.
The session will also cover strategies for communicating digital documents, emphasising the use of advanced technologies to improve access and public engagement. The importance of collaboration among cultural institutions will also be emphasised.
The target audience includes librarians, archivists, museum curators and other cultural professionals. Expected outcomes include increased awareness and practical knowledge of how to protect and communicate digital assets in libraries and museums, as well as networking opportunities and actionable insights.

This session (lightning talk) will present the paper "The impact of digital transformation on the digital preservation of records in Brazil", which critically examines how public policies, strategies, and legislation related to digital transformation and e-government have shaped the field of digital preservation of records in Brazil. The purpose is to highlight the tensions and convergences between the agenda of digital innovation and the archival principles that underpin long-term preservation, authenticity, and access to digital records.
Participants can expect a comprehensive overview of Brazil’s legal and institutional framework for digital transformation, including key milestones such as the establishment of the gov.br platform, the implementation of the Digital Government Strategy (EGD), the regulatory framework defined by Decree No. 10.278/2020 (digitization) and the Digital Government Law.
The session will also explore the challenges posed by interoperability, metadata standards, system integration, and the adoption of trustworthy digital repositories (TDRs), as well as how Brazilian archivists and records managers are navigating this evolving landscape.
Through this case study, the session will contribute to global discussions on how institutional policies and digital innovation can either support or challenge the archival mission of ensuring long-term accessibility, authenticity, and trust in public records. It is especially relevant for institutions navigating similar transformations in the Global South.
The session will be presented by one speaker, with the possibility of a second co-presenter. Both of whom are archival professionals engaged in research on records management and digital preservation policies in Brazil.

No funds, no files, still archiving: How South Asian institutions preserve memory anyway is a five-minute lightning talk based on the everyday realities of working with archives in Pakistan. In many institutions, whether universities, libraries, hospitals, or government offices, there is little infrastructure for archiving. Records are scattered, budgets are tight or nonexistent, and digital preservation is rarely seen as a priority. But somehow, the work still happens.

This talk shares what it looks like to build an archive from scratch in such a setting. Based on experience from a university archive in Karachi, it also brings in short case examples from other Pakistani institutions facing similar challenges. The focus is not on best practices but on real practices, on what people actually do when they have to preserve memory without formal systems to support them.

Participants will hear about small wins and daily improvisations. These include digitizing fragile documents with smartphones, using Excel to create basic finding aids, storing materials in shared drives, and slowly convincing leadership that this work matters. These stories are not unique to one institution. They reflect a larger pattern across Pakistan, where archival work is often informal, invisible, and deeply necessary.

This session is for anyone who has worked in an archive or library where resources are limited but the need to preserve is urgent. It is also an invitation to think about how digital preservation can be more inclusive of people working in under-resourced contexts. What support do we really need? What can we share with each other? How can global conversations include what is happening on the ground in places like Pakistan?

This talk will be delivered in person by a single presenter and draws directly from fieldwork and experiences across local and national archival spaces in Pakistan.