Our Story: Digital Preservation Coalition
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a not-for-profit membership organisation that exists to make our digital memory accessible tomorrow. We enable our members to deliver resilient long-term access to digital content and services, helping them to derive enduring value from digital collections and raising awareness of the attendant strategic, cultural and technological challenges they face. We achieve our aims through advocacy, workforce development, capacity-building and partnership. Our members represent a wide range of sectors including cultural heritage, government, banking, industry, broadcasting and higher education.
As a membership organisation, the DPC’s activities and interests are driven by the needs of our members. They have clearly identified a number of issues of pressing concern relating to interoperability, practical implementation of standards, and the preservation of specific data-types, including databases. As an example, the ability to transfer digital records between systems, particularly from EDRMS to long-term preservation systems, is a key issue raised by many DPC members.
As part of the E-ARK consortium, the DPC’s aims are twofold: to provide our members with direct access to the innovative tools and solutions developed by the project, and, using our well-established communications channels, to act as a multiplier for the outputs of the project. The E-ARK project is developing practical solutions to important issues faced by the preservation community and we hope to ensure these are well promoted and widely adopted.
The DPC brings to E-ARK a wide range of skills and experience relating multi-national digital preservation projects. This includes the delivery of training and communications outputs within a number of projects such as APARSEN, TIMBUS and 4C. As part of our core work we also provide training to our members through our roadshow series’ ‘Getting Started…’ and ‘Making Progress with Digital Preservation’, and through regular thematic briefing days. We publish in a variety formats on issues relating to digital preservation, most notably in our ‘Technology Watch’ report series and the Digital Preservation Handbook. We also administer the biannual Digital Preservation Awards, highlighting achievements in the field.
