Preservation and Trust in Scholarly Communications, Part Two: Preserving the Past / Writing the Future

Trevor Owens, Chief Research Officer for AIP Publishing served as the moderator for this program.

The following questions were posed to our speakers:

What are you currently tracking, most interested in, or most concerned about in long-term digital preservation?

Looking five, ten, or fifteen years ahead, what should the digital preservation and cultural heritage communities be paying the most attention to?

How does reliance on short-term and grant-based funding affect the sustainability of digital preservation infrastructure, staffing, and services?

How is generative AI changing the volume, quality, and character of the content that libraries, archives, publishers, and other cultural institutions may need to collect and preserve?

How are AI-driven demand, climate change, and supply-chain constraints affecting the availability, cost, and sustainability of the computing infrastructure required for digital preservation?

How should preservation institutions think about risk when infrastructure and storage are increasingly outsourced to a small number of commercial cloud and technology providers?

Given deep uncertainty about climate, economics, technology, politics, and institutional stability, how should digital preservation organizations plan for multiple possible futures rather than a single expected future?

Do we need to preserve less—and how should appraisal and selection change when storage, funding, energy, and staff capacity are constrained?

Could more local, community-based, and lower-resource approaches provide more resilient alternatives to the pursuit of scale and centralized infrastructure?

Do preservation practices need to move beyond storage-centered models toward approaches such as migration, emulation, reinterpretation, re-performance, standards, certification, and collective action?

Related Information and Shared Resources:

NDSA Climate Watch Newsletter - Climate news for the digital stewardship community

Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary - This is the site for an Open Access and Open Review volume under contract with MIT Press. Each chapter provides a critical review of a key term in digital preservation

Frank: Sustainable funding is the greatest challenge in digital preservation (From the University of Michigan School of Information),By Rebecca D. Frank - The biggest threat to digital preservation isn't technical. It's financial.

Writings by Jon Ippolito - In recent years, Jon has been publishing his texts with ThoughtMesh, which makes them easier to navigate and cross-link. You can find all his meshed essays and presentations here.

Readings on the variable media preservation paradigm:

Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach - The publication Permanence Through Change: The Variable media Approach is published by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation, in Montreal. The texts are in English and in French.

Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, By Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito - Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory is the first academic book on new media preservation. Its authors make a startling claim: that the historical record of our era will be unretrievable without a drastic change in the technologies, institutions, and laws that now govern cultural preservation. 

What Uses More? Compare the environmental footprint of digital tasks - This nonpartisan calculator is an attempt to provide a more objective comparison of the energy and water usage of various AI tasks versus other common digital activities, like watching Netflix or searching Google. The calculations are based on academic papers, industry reports, and expert estimates.

Who Will Keep Research Data Infrastructure Open and Running? By Jennifer Gibson, Kaitlin Thaney - The global research enterprise relies on information infrastructure to power scientific discovery, medical breakthroughs, and evidence-based policymaking. But the data repositories, digital asset management services, and preservation systems that ensure research data remains open and accessible are often overlooked—until they disappear. Many of these tools and services are vulnerable to policy changes and funding cuts.

The Data Resilience Funding Landscape: A Preliminary Analysis (Blog post From Invest in Open Infrastructure) - Mapping where the money is (and isn't) going in the data rescue movement. 

Repository Resilience in Practice: Findings and Strategies from a Community in Crisis, By Talisha Sutton-Kennedy, Alycia Crall, Amy Trice, and Joseph Gum - Data are integral to daily life, underpinning weather forecasting, disaster response, healthcare, transportation, education, and evidence-based policymaking. Yet the worldwide repositories that store and provide access to these data are under growing pressure, from funding instability and political disruption to workforce loss and technical fragility, often simultaneously and without adequate support. When data repositories are weakened, censored, or removed, there are harmful consequences beyond the loss of information. 

Recent articles regarding financial uncertainty/instability as it relates to questions about risk in digital preservation/curation —

Frank, R. D. (2026). Structural Assurance Inflation: Perspectives on the Value of Trustworthy Digital Repository Certification. Journal of Documentation, 82(7), 271–288. Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2025-0197

Frank, R. D. (2024). Constructing Risk in Trustworthy Digital Repositories. Journal of Documentation, 80(6), 1508-1527. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2023-0157 Open Access: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/194298

Frank, R. D. (2022). Risk in Trustworthy Digital Repository Audit and Certification. Archival Science 22, no. 1: 43–73. Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-021-09366-z

Prepare for the Textpocalypse, By Matthew Kirschenbaum - Our relationship to writing is about to change forever; it may not end well

2023 Risk Assessment Update (From RAND Corporation) Assessing Risk to National Critical Functions as a Result of Climate Change, By Michelle E. Miro, Susan A. Resetar, Andrew Lauland, David Metz, Vanessa Wolf, Rahim Ali, Jay Balagna, Jason Thomas Barnosky, R. J. Briggs, Edward W. Chan, et al. - ritical infrastructure systems meet communities' needs for safe drinking water, reliable electricity, and dependable internet access. Climate change poses a threat to these systems in that the increasing frequency and severity of many climate hazards heighten risks of disruption and challenge the assumptions used to design and protect these systems. Understanding these risks can help critical infrastructure owners and operators and other stakeholders allocate resources, make investment decisions, and prepare these systems for future hazards.

LinkedIn Post by Jon Ippolito – How my website became "ensloppified" - Connected Knowledge promoted responsible sharing. Ensloppification does the opposite, repackaging knowledge for ulterior motives. Left unchecked, the trend could risk transforming the web into a wasteland of unreliable content detached from human authorship and accountability.

Relevant ISO Standards:

ISO 14721:2012 Space data and information transfer systems — Open archival information system (OAIS) — Edition 2, 2012 (Withdrawn); ISO 14721:2025 — Edition 3, 2025 (Published)

ISO 16363:2012 Space data and information transfer systems — Audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories — Edition 1, 2012 (Withdrawn); ISO 16363:2025 — Edition 2, 2025 (Published)

ISO 16919:2025 Primary Trustworthy Digital Repository Authorisation Body Ltd (PTAB) - accreditation for auditors to administer 16363) — Edition 2, 2025 (Published)

August 13, 2026 News Story - PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history - Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year. 

Open Science Foundation is shutting down its open data repository features for new projects starting in November - The Center for Open Science (COS) has a mission to increase openness, integrity, and trustworthiness of research. The Open Science Framework (OSF) opened in 2012, before COS’s incorporation as a charity in 2013, and is an instrumental part of advancing that mission.

Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (From RAND Corporation) - Deep uncertainty describes the simple fact that we often do not know what the future holds. When decision makers assume otherwise, they risk overconfidence, missed opportunities, and pursuing policies brittle to surprise. 

Atari Video Game Burial site (From Wikipedia) - The Atari video game burial was a mass burial of unsold video game cartridges, consoles, and computers in a landfill site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, undertaken by the American video game and home computer company Atari, Inc. in 1983. Before 2014, the goods buried were rumored to be unsold copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), one of the largest commercial video game failures and often cited as one of the worst video games ever released,[1][2] and the 1982 Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, which was commercially successful but critically maligned.[3]