Digital Preservation in 2025
Why It Matters More Than Ever
In the swirling sea of digital transformation, one question is quietly gaining urgency: What happens to our digital information in five, ten, or fifty years? As organizations generate more content—from emails and databases to AI models, audiovisual materials, and 3D engineering files—many are waking up to a crucial fact: data isn’t durable by default. Without action, today’s records risk becoming tomorrow’s unreadable noise.
Welcome to the world of digital preservation
What Is Digital Preservation?
At its core, digital preservation is the practice of ensuring long-term access to digital content that has enduring value. But this isn’t about keeping files in cold storage or dumping them on the cloud. It’s about maintaining the authenticity, usability, integrity, and accessibility of digital materials across time and technological change. Think of it as future-proofing the knowledge, evidence, and memory that societies and organizations depend on.
Why It’s Time to Care
Over the past several years, digital preservation has evolved from a specialist concern of archivists and librarians to a strategic business issue. Here's why:
Data volume is exploding, but so is format fragility. Proprietary systems, changing file standards, and shifting platforms mean that files created today may not open tomorrow.
AI is creating new classes of content that must be preserved: trained models, training data, metadata, and decision logs.
Financial and legal sectors are producing high-value digital records essential for compliance and operational continuity.
Media and broadcasting organizations face a loss of unique cultural assets without proper digital preservation strategies.
Scientific and academic institutions rely on reproducibility, which requires preserving data, code, and context.
Archives and public institutions must preserve democratic memory in a born-digital world.
In short, everyone—from government agencies and banks to museums and research centers—has a stake in digital preservation.
Six Sectors Leading the Way
Engineering and Industrial Design: CAD files, simulations, and equipment maintenance logs must be retained for decades. Many of these exist in proprietary formats that quickly become obsolete. Forward-thinking firms are transitioning to neutral formats like STEP or 3D PDF and embedding preservation workflows into product lifecycle management.
Healthcare and Genomics: EHRs, diagnostic images, and gene sequences are critical for patient care, legal protection, and future medical research. Preservation efforts include metadata-rich repositories, adherence to standards like ISO 21547, and data de-identification for long-term reuse.
AI and Machine Learning: Preserving trained models is essential for transparency, compliance, and reuse. That includes source code, data pipelines, model weights, and execution environments. Without preservation, we lose the ability to audit or explain automated decisions.
Financial and Legal Services: Transaction histories, contracts, and compliance records are increasingly digital. These must be verifiable and accessible long after the technologies that created them disappear. Blockchain-based trust models and ISO 19005 (PDF/A) are increasingly used for durability.
Cultural Heritage and Media Archives: From digitized artworks to born-digital films and oral histories, audiovisual content is vulnerable to format decay and hardware failure. Standards like ISO/IEC 12246 and the widespread use of METS, PREMIS, and FFV1 are critical in these contexts.
Scientific Research and Higher Education: Replication and long-term analysis depend on preserved datasets, software environments, lab notebooks, and scholarly communications. Institutions are investing in FAIR-aligned repositories and implementing ISO 20652 for digital curation.
How to Do It Right: Standards That Matter
Fortunately, digital preservation has a mature and evolving ecosystem of international and community-developed standards that guide practice:
ISO 15489: Lifecycle records management—the foundation for identifying what needs preservation.
ISO 14721 (OAIS): A conceptual model for digital preservation systems, including roles, functions, and workflows.
ISO 30301: Organizational governance of records management, embedding digital preservation into enterprise strategy.
ISO 19005 (PDF/A): Standardized file formats for long-term electronic document preservation.
ISO 16363: Audit and certification criteria for trusted digital repositories.
ISO 20652: A framework for information and documentation related to digital curation processes.
PREMIS (Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies): Widely adopted metadata standard for documenting digital preservation activities.
METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard): A structural metadata framework for complex digital objects.
Dublin Core: A foundational standard for resource description and discoverability.
BagIt: A hierarchical file packaging format used to ensure file integrity across transfers.
W3C PROV: A provenance data model used in research and government to track data lineage.
NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation: A pragmatic, tiered set of recommendations for institutions developing preservation capacity.
Together, these ISO, W3C, Library of Congress, and community-based standards provide a robust framework across strategy, systems, metadata, file formats, and repository governance.
Challenges Ahead
Of course, it’s not all smooth sailing. Some of the biggest challenges include:
Technological Obsolescence: Formats and platforms change rapidly.
Resource Constraints: Preservation takes time, money, and expertise.
Policy Gaps: Many organizations lack a digital preservation policy or strategy.
Legal Complexity: Especially for health data, AI artifacts, and IP-sensitive content.
Interoperability Issues: Particularly acute in multi-institution collaborations and international contexts.
But we can meet these challenges, especially when digital preservation is framed not as a cost but as an investment in resilience, transparency, and future-proofed capability.
Preserve or Perish: The Case for Action
In 2025, the business case is clear. Whether you’re safeguarding intellectual property, enabling scientific reproducibility, protecting public trust, or preserving cultural heritage, digital preservation is essential infrastructure. It protects against loss, supports innovation, and ensures that today’s knowledge doesn’t become tomorrow’s ghost.
If your organization hasn’t yet started down this path, now is the time.
Because the future isn’t just digital—it’s preserved.
Andy Potter is Convenor of ISO/TC 46/SC 11/AHG 9 Digital preservation and Principal at MetaArchivist Consulting.
Great text.
Well said