Democratizing digital preservation skills in personal digital archives and activist community web archives

Over the last decade there has been a notable shift toward improving digital preservation skill capacities of collecting institutions staff in the United Kingdom. The DPC/TNA Novice to Know-How course and its ongoing development is a salient example. This poster uses interactive and asynchronous engagement to call on digital preservation community educators and policymakers to include individuals and community groups when developing “start 2 preserve”initiatives. This poster’s call is supported with empirical findings that contribute to the emerging issue of democratizing digital preservation skills amongst these groups in the UK. 

Using in-poster links to audiovisual evidence, the poster presents findings from two doctoral, qualitative, research projects. One project researched self-tracking personal digital archives, and the other researched activist community web archives. The first project used mobile and virtual data collection methods, researching eight members of the public who used self-tracking records to create personal digital archives of their running history. The second project used interviews and participant diaries to understand the engagement of UK activist-archives with web archiving also including data from Documenting the Now, the UK Web Archive and the Community Archives and Heritage Group. 

The poster discusses the findings in relation to the need to democratize digital preservation skills. Activist archives recognise the need for digital preservation skills but there is a skills gap for runners' personal digital archives. Runners often lack digital preservation knowledge and rely on third-party platforms. Both studies highlighted the need to empower individuals and activist communities to preserve digital content beyond commercial platforms through educational resources and capacity building. Empowerment through democratized digital preservation education could enable individuals and activist communities to make informed choices about their digital legacies and respect their agency to contribute to safeguarding further a shared digital heritage for future generations. 

This poster, with asynchronous digital learning tools, provides new knowledge about the digital preservation skills from the UK public and activist community groups. The poster wants to open a conversation with the international digital preservation community to help those wanting to get started with digital preservation to meet their personal and community digital archive needs.