Sticky Notes, Big Questions: Exploring Digital Preservation Standards in Practice
An Ad Hoc Workshop at iPRES 2025 – The 21st International Conference on Digital Preservation
When it comes to digital preservation, the theory is sound. We have our landmarks — OAIS (ISO 14721), ISO 16363, PREMIS, and an expanding ecosystem of guidance that defines what trustworthy, sustainable digital stewardship should look like. Yet in daily practice, the road from those elegant diagrams to actual implementation is often winding, resource-constrained, and occasionally discouraging.
That tension — between principle and practice — is exactly what we’ll tackle in my upcoming session, “From Principle to Practice: A Roundtable on Implementing and Improving Digital Preservation Standards,” on Tuesday, November 4, 2025, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. in Makāro Meeting Room 1C at iPRES 2025 Wellington.
This isn’t a lecture. It’s an interactive workshop — sticky-note brainstorming, shared frustrations, flashes of insight. We’ll unpack why, after two decades of standards work, implementation still feels elusive for so many institutions and how we can evolve the standards themselves to be more adaptable, comprehensible, and achievable.
Why It Matters
For archives, libraries, and research institutions worldwide, the challenge is no longer convincing leadership that digital preservation is essential — it’s operationalizing the “how.” Standards give us the scaffolding, but interpretation and scaling vary widely. The goal of this session is to expose those lived realities: the improvisations that make theory workable, the workarounds that hint at what needs to change, and the shared vocabulary that can carry us forward.
A Forum with Purpose
This roundtable also feeds directly into the work of the ISO/TC 46/SC 11 Ad Hoc Group on Digital Preservation, which is examining the continued relevance and usability of our core standards in light of new realities — cloud dependency, AI-assisted curation, distributed trust models, and sustainability imperatives. The feedback gathered in Wellington will help shape that conversation internationally.
Three Themes
Journey — tracing how preservation standards migrate from conceptual models to organizational routines.
Encounter — identifying the persistent barriers: scale, funding, expertise, and complexity.
Connect — linking practitioners, policymakers, and standard-setters in an honest exchange about what actually works.
Why I’m Looking Forward to It
As someone who’s spent years both writing standards and trying to implement them, I’ve learned that the richest progress comes from rooms like this — where people bring lived experience, not just theory. The “aha” moments often arrive not from the policy documents but from the post-it wall.
If you’re attending iPRES 2025, I hope you’ll join the conversation in Wellington. Together, we can translate our collective expertise into something that strengthens both practice and principle — and ensures that our standards evolve as fast as the world we’re preserving.