This is the story of my journey into Digital Preservation. This tale charts my early experiences, with limited knowledge and access to expertise, through to today, where I am often acting as a mentor. It’s a call to action for the digital preservation profession to create and foster a community of digital preservation practitioners in organisations of every level. From community groups to local government, these are our grass root guardians of digital files and as such, really need assistance.

The NDSA Staffing Survey is designed to gain insight into current staffing realities for digital preservation programs. In the past, it has been used by practitioners and organizations to advocate for digital preservation resources, identify key digital preservation competencies, and benchmark digital preservation programs.

The 2025 Staffing Survey is the fourth iteration of this longitudinal survey, which allows the NDSA to gather data about staffing trends and changes over time. This iteration of the survey builds on the previous instruments, adding new questions to reflect community feedback and changes to the landscape of cultural heritage labor over the last few years. The survey closes in October 2025; this lightning talk will present preliminary insights from the data and give conference attendees a preview of the forthcoming report.

Through this Lightning Talk, we will share our experience with communities to deliberate on optimal strategies for promoting digital preservation, fostering expanded collaborative networks, and effectively advancing our mission to safeguard digital assets.

The Chinese National Digital Preservation Program for Scientific and Technology Literature (NDPP) is committed to advancing digital preservation awareness and efforts in China. Between 2016 and 2019, NDPP organized training courses and academic seminars to promote digital preservation.
In 2023, a survey conducted in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, with over 190 responses, revealed widespread misconceptions, such as equating backups with digital preservation. To address this, NDPP developed a strategic advocacy plan based on the 5W Model to boost awareness, collaboration, and support.
Who: NDPP member institutions.
Says What: The advocacy emphasizes (1) the importance, concepts, and methods of digital preservation to raise public awareness, and (2) NDPP’s mission, values, innovations, and resources to encourage collaboration.
In Which Channel: NDPP employs national seminars, open-day events, posters, brochures, its official website, social media, and promotional videos.
To Whom: Senior management, publishers, libraries, partner organizations, and potential users.
With What Effect: A new survey is being designed to assess the advocacy’s impact, understand user needs, and refine strategies to further enhance digital preservation awareness and collaboration in China.

In a perfect world, digitisation and digital preservation standards would be in place well before starting large-scale digitisation projects. That, however, is not always the case and these projects can test organisations, forcing them to quickly grow and adapt. From establishing standards and better understanding storage environments, to file verification tools and preferred file formats, mass digitisation projects can highlight gaps in organisational knowledge and practices.

As is often the case, the knowledge and resources developed during large-scale digitisation projects tend to flow through to born digital collecting and preservation practices. These projects can be seen as a unique opportunity to rapidly upskill staff and provide strong advocacy for establishing good and ongoing digital preservation practices.

This lightning talk reflects on how digitising large collections of AV material allowed the State Library of Western Australia to implement new policies and practices, while rapidly increasing its digital preservation knowledge and maturity levels.

At the Digital Preservation team of the National Archives of the Netherlands, understanding the information objects we work with is essential. Currently, governmental organisations have 20 years to transfer their information objects to us. When they come to the National Archives after 20 years, we often do not know what file formats they have and the condition of those files. To gain this understanding, we run a range of analyses. We check for both adherence to standards as well as checking our own policies. However, the sheer volume and complexity of the information objects continues to grow, putting our workflows increasingly under strain.

To address these issues, we have sought to level up the way we work and have started learning R, a programming language primarily used for statistical computing and data visualisation. With R, we can automate analyses, identify issues in large datasets, and generate more meaningful insights into the materials we seek to preserve. Moreover, it can aid us into addressing the issues with the creators of the information objects, by creating visuals that can show the issues we have identified in an approachable manner.

In this lightning talk, I will share practical examples of how R has helped us up our game: from building a WARC conformance checker to building dashboards that draw on several datasets. Our experience shows how integrating data science can make digital preservation work more scalable, transparent, and insightful. Not only within just our own team, but also in our department.

Digital preservation assessment is often seen as a solitary or institutional task - conducted behind closed doors, with limited support or shared reflection. The POWRR Peer Assessment Program offered a different model: one rooted in community, trust, and collaborative learning. Through a year-long process combining structured curriculum, self-assessment, peer mentorship, and cohort discussion, participants engaged deeply with core digital stewardship frameworks while building confidence and connection. This paper explores how the program created a supportive environment for interdisciplinary reflection and action, offering a replicable model for community-centered capacity-building in digital preservation.

Over the past decade, the Digital POWRR Project has undertaken a journey from research initiative to a trusted source of hands-on, community-centered digital preservation training. Informed by participant feedback and an evolving curriculum—including multi-day institutes and the POWRR Peer Assessment Program—this paper shares ten key takeaways from that journey, highlighting what makes digital preservation instruction effective, human-centered, and worth sustained investment, especially for those working in under-resourced contexts.