World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is celebrated on the first Thursday of every November. And this year WDPD takes place on November 6, 2025! Let’s hear what our Archives and Special Collections Librarian, Ryder Kouba, says about digital preservation.
Happy World Digital Preservation Day 2025! This annual event celebrates the work being done in universities, libraries, and archives around the world to help ensure digital content created today is available in ten, 25, or 100 years.
Often people think of archives as dusty places with old, mysterious books, and while that can be true (I have seen a lot of old books in my career), we’re also responsible for preserving the digital content. Imagine a historian 50 years from now trying to reconstruct what it meant to study or teach at DKU in 2025. They would need more than printed reports; they would need access to websites, social media posts as well as work materials such as Word documents, emails, databases, and images once stored on servers, cloud platforms, or even old hard drives.
At first glance, it might seem easier to care for modern digital records than for fragile manuscripts or rare books. After all, centuries-old paper requires careful handling and special storage, while a PDF or JPEG is just a click away. But when we think in terms of decades—or even centuries—digital files can actually be much more fragile: formats become obsolete, storage devices fail, and without care, important memories can vanish.
Digital preservation is essential for saving DKU’s history and is something that we can apply to our everyday life and work. Many of us have thousands of photos of travel, children, and pets that we presumably want to be able to show our grandchildren. Some simple steps to help preserve your digital records include:
- Organize your files in a way which makes sense to you but is also intuitive to someone else. Descriptive file and folder names helps, and you can tag/add metadata to content to better find and describe files.
- Back up your data in different places. Having multiple backups on different media (external hard drives, cloud storage, etc.) can go a long way in ensuring something survives. Just having cloud storage is a bit risky, passwords may be lost and companies may fail. Hardware and software also change, so migrating data can be useful (it’s a challenge accessing files from my father’s 1980s WordStar floppy disks, for example)
If you have any questions regarding digital preservation in the DKU Archives and Special Collections please reach out to Ryder Kouba (rk391@duke.edu). The preservation of DKU history is something that everyone in the community can support and partake in.
Visit the DKU Archives & Special Collections webpage (https://library.dukekunshan.edu.cn/archives-and-special-collections/) to explore how we preserve the history and stories of Duke Kunshan University. From institutional records to rare materials, these collections capture our community’s growth and achievements.
If you want to know more about how archives are preserved or techniques to manage your own digital records, we will host a workshop introducing digital archives and preservation on November 21, you are welcome to join us!
