World Digital Preservation Day 2026
In Wales, archive services have been working hard over recent years to develop and embed digital preservation into their normal working practices.
Digital preservation is the management, through preservation and access, of digital materials. The Welsh Digital Preservation Consortium is a group of those archive services who have come together to put in place a system to help them properly look after born-digital and digitised collections. Alongside the more traditional archive collections (such as those created on paper and parchment), more and more digital objects are making their way to archive services across Wales. Dealing with that material means a wholly different set of skills for the archivists.
One of the key challenges that archive staff have discovered in their adoption of digital preservation is accessing digital files on obsolete media.
Whilst a digital preservation system can help to access obsolete file formats and render them into a format that can be readable, that is only useful once you have retrieved the file from the floppy disk, memory stick or other media. We are working in a world where technology companies are constantly developing new ideas and new technology. Most people do not spend time migrating everything they have stored over on to the new version of hardware or software. So, archive services are often given laser discs, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs, memory sticks, external hard drives or a range of other media that they need to extract the files from.
To help with accessing this older material, services have been putting together pieces of old equipment that can extract the information needed and transfer it over onto equipment that is more modern. For example, Glamorgan Archives has acquired a Zip Disc Drive for accessing zip discs – a technology that has been obsolete for a number of years. Older equipment like this is often available second hand on well-known auction sites.
The issue that the team discovered with acquiring this reader was that the cables to use it are also obsolete, so this led to a search for an older PC with the right connectors and a USB port so that the files could be copied over onto newer technology before being loaded into the digital preservation system. This is just one example of the steps that archive staff have been taking in order to access these types of files.
The archive services have been incredibly grateful to Welsh Government for supporting with this work, from providing funding to support the adoption of a system as well as for the acquisition of equipment. Whilst there is a long way to go, considerable progress has been made across Wales to ensure that our digital heritage does not disappear.
