The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Our Heritage, Our Stories project researched the community archives landscape in the UK in order to document the challenges, issues and barriers facing community groups working to preserve both born digital or digitized content. It suggests the post custodial framework as a potential solution.

The post custodial framework encourages established archive and digital preservation services and qualified professionals to provide support and guidance to community groups which will enable them to preserve, manage and provide access to their collections in a way that best suits them. The Digital Preservation Toolkit for Community Archives was designed as a resource to help facilitate this support while also allowing community groups to work on their digital collections in line with available resources and budget.

The creation of the toolkit was a collaborative effort between the Digital Preservation Coalition and a wide range of community archive representatives based across the UK. After a consultation period, a toolkit matrix was produced, comprising of a framework with ten topics broken down over three levels. Working through the levels in order will lead to a functioning digital preservation workflow. Additional resources have also been created to provide additional support. The toolkit is now freely available online. Anecdotal feedback has highlighted issues with the toolkit, including the UK centric focus and the DIY user format.

Further expansion and adaptation of the toolkit is now planned to enable it to be a globally relevant resource which will be of use to a wide range of community groups across the world. A feedback process will be built into this process to make sure the toolkit remains relevant and useful to as many people as possible.

How can the history of a city's citizens and communities be preserved? The preservation of non-official documents is a new challenge for archives. Citizens and communities themselves have little capacity to build up archives and preserve them in the long term. However, their digital data is an essential element in preserving a picture of the present for the future. For historical research, they will be an important element in depicting the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The long-term preservation of photos, emails or social media accounts of citizens and communities, as well as future access to them, represent a great unknown for archives. In order to break down barriers and make it easier to hand documents in, the Graz City Archive and the Aschaffenburg City and Abbey Archive developed archival educational measures and the Citizen Archive Platform within the scope of the Creative Europe Program project “Dialog City”:

The measures in the field of archival education include a training program that can be adapted to the respective needs. In the pre-custodial area, we pursue the approach that supporting private individuals is also one of the tasks of archives. People should be enabled to preserve their digital documents for themselves, their descendants and potentially for an archive. We teach the basics of personal digital archiving in courses. This is not so much a top-down process, but rather a process of self-empowerment for the participants: Taking back control of their own digitality.

The Citizen Archive Platform (CAP) is a technical tool that supports archives in the transfer of data from non-administrative entities. Citizens and communities can use this web tool to offer both born-digital and retro-digitized data to an archive. The users enrich their submissions with metadata in an intuitive, user-friendly form. After reviewing and evaluating the submitted data, an OAIS-compliant Submission Information Package is downloadable. The CAP is an open source solution and designed for institutions to collect cultural heritage.

The diverse cultural heritage of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region faces significant threats from modernization, environmental change, and historical marginalization. While digital technologies offer preservation tools, their uncritical use risks reinforcing inequalities and diminishing the contextual meaning of heritage. This paper argues for a community-centric approach as essential for sustainable and ethical digital preservation in APAC. Drawing on the School on Internet Asia (SOI-Asia) project and its Digital Humanities focused sub-project, DHASH (Digital Humanities Asia/And Scientific Hub), we demonstrate how prioritizing community engagement fosters necessary inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration. SOI-Asia's established network across 13 countries provides a foundation for partnerships with local institutions and experts. DHASH case studies in Indonesia and Nepal illustrate how collaborations between humanities scholars, community experts, technologists, social scientists, and designers lead to richer, more contextualized preservation outcomes. This approach informs the development of a community-focused Open Science Infrastructure (OSI), aiming for inclusive design and accessibility using open-source tools. Despite challenges, including the digital divide, data standardization complexities across diverse cultures, long-term sustainability, and ethical considerations regarding intellectual property, placing communities at the core ensures relevance, empowers local narratives. Furthermore, this project offers a viable model for preserving APAC's vibrant heritage, ultimately returning the right of narration to the communities themselves. This model holds valuable lessons for global digital preservation efforts.

The BitList of Endangered Digital Species [1] was first published by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) [2] in 2017 as an advocacy tool, highlighting the risks associated with digital materials and consequently the need for Digital Preservation. However, as the size and complexity of the digital world has grown, so has the BitList and its associated maintenance. Twords the end of 2024, the DPC enlisted the help of a diverse group of regular BitList contributors to review the structure and processes associated with the BitList with a view to streamlining the review process while retaining or improving its utility to users. This paper describes a work-in-progress and will be updated with the outcomes of this process.