Celebrating World Digital Preservation Day 2026: Save our Stories (SOS)
Happy World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) 2026!
Organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and taking place the 5th November 2026 (Happy Bonfire Night to those of you in the UK!), WDPD focuses on celebrating all things digital preservation.
This year’s theme, “Save our Stories (SOS): Our Digital Heritage in Danger”, seeks to highlight the importance of digital heritage, and encourage action to protect the records, research, memories and cultural assets that shape communities around the world.
To help promote the day, I’m sharing some of the most interesting digital preservation stories we’ve seen over the last year.
EOSC EDEN and the development of Core Preservation Processes (CPPs)
As a reminder, the EOSC EDEN project is an EU funded project seeking to advance digital curation and preservation across the European scientific research community. Started in January 2025, Arkivum is proud to be a member of the project team.
Part of the project has focused on the creation of a set of Core Preservation Processes (CPPs), a set of 30 processes that every digital archive should use.
To quote the EOSC EDEN website, these processes “…aim to provide practical implementation guidance for digital preservation processes and workflows. They close the gap between high level reference models and dispersed implementation descriptions for digital preservation workflows.”
The processes were presented at iPres 2026 and were also a finalist at the 2026 Digital Preservation Awards.
University of Warwick providing secure researcher access to digital content
The Library and Archives Services at the Modern Records Centre of the University of Warwick are responsible for preserving nationally significant collections (including the archives of major UK trade unions), electronic theses and sensitive university records.
As the collections continued to grow, with a varied range of access requirements, the team needed to evolve their digital preservation programme to meet these challenges.
The team shared their story as part of the ArkFest 2026 virtual conference – that session was then transformed into a written case study which can be read here.
Building the case for investment in digital preservation with LEO Pharma
A common challenge for organisations is to build the internal business case to justify investment in digital preservation.
This year LEO Pharma shared how they successfully made the case for their centralised digital archive, realising ROI in under 12 months through the decommissioning of two legacy systems.
This is a great example of how an organisation can identify and quantify financial benefits/savings to help fund a wider digital preservation project.
This story was another ArkFest 2026 presentation recreated as a written case study, you can read the full story here.
New UK Clinical Trial Regulation shifts clinical record retention timeline to 25 years
The last story I wanted to share is that of the new UK Clinical Trial regulation that came into effect earlier in the year.
The new regulation brought in a raft of changes, but from a digital preservation perspective, the most significant was the introduction of the requirement to retain clinical records for at least 25 years.
With most trial records now generated digitally, this placed digital preservation as a core capability requirement for the UK pharmaceutical market.
The more industries that require digital preservation can only be a good thing for increasing the visibility and awareness of effective long-term data management.
What digital preservation stories will emerge in 2027?
Wherever you are on your digital preservation journey, I hope these stories have helped. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing the community is effectively highlighting the risks to digital content over the long-term and communicating the value of digital preservation.
Looking ahead over the next 12 months, I’ll be interested to see the new digital preservation stories that emerge.
Evolving challenges and opportunities can be seen in AI adoption, environmental sustainability, the security of (long-term) data and wider commercial constraints.
At Arkivum we will continue to support the community, providing useful content, guidance and advice to help overcome those challenges and adopting a successful approach to digital preservation!
Tom Lynam
Tom is the Marketing Director at Arkivum. He joined the business in January 2020 tasked with driving new business growth and building the brand into new sectors such as Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences. He has over 12 years’ experience in several diverse marketing leadership roles across technology and professional services organisations.
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