Resources

Reports

These reports are great introduction to digital archives as a field, why it exists and why it is urgent. Sometimes, information science feels really ideological and abstract, and these reports help ground it in the reality of our current digital world.

Internet Archive (2026). Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record. https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026

This is a long but super readable report for a general audience focussed on media and culture. After the intro, it's broken up into a bunch of shorter essays, so you can easily jump around. If you're concered about streaming platforms burying films, or the preservation of video games, cookbooks, social media, queery history, African folktales, historic news reports, amateur radio broadcasts, this is the report for you! It's both alarming but also heartening -- so much work is already being done.

Digital Preservation Coalition (2025). The Global Bit List of Endangered Materials.

1. Interactive version: https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/champion-digital-preservation/bit-list
2. Full report: http://doi.org/10.7207/dpcbitlist-25

This report uses the framework of "endangered species" and "conservation efforts" to talk about digital material. It's more like an encyclopedia -- scannable rather than something you read beginning to end. The report extends beyond cultural heritage and looks at things like scientific data, hardware, and personal records. While the Bit List is a lot more technical, there is a report on material flagged 'For the Attention of Individuals and Communities' that flags the kind of material regular folk can help preserve without any insitutional backing.

Pew Research Center (2024). When Online Content Disappears. https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/

Did you know 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible? Yikes! This is a short and harrowing report on how quickly our beloved world wide web is deteriorating. It looks at the web itself -- how many pages are removed, the rate of link rot (links that no longer resolve) -- and introduces some of the big web archiving efforts.

General Resources

Digital Preservation Handbook

Really good general "getting started" resource targeted at information professionals, but with written accessibly enough to be understood by anyone. It's basically a textbook, but it's easy to scan and you can trust the information in it.

DigiPres Learning Resources

A huge list of digital preservation resources maintained by the Digital Preservation Coaltion. If you're looking to go *deeper*, you'll definitely find some good stuff here.

Data Hoarding

A non-profit effort to build the world's largest index of resources and archives related to data hoarding, web archival and digital preservation. It was inspired by the recent purge of online information in the United States by government agencies, corporations and others, and aims to provide easier access to tools and information. The goal is not only to hoard data, but curate and index it as well (making it distinct from /r/datahoarders).

Find archives

A great tool from Data Hoarding that allows you to find archives where can retrieve digital material or possibly submit additional material. Really fun to explore!

The Digital Preservation Publications Index

iPRES is an annual international academic conference on digital preservation, and papers and proceedings are published online, open to all! This can be a great space to browse and discover interesting projects that are taking place around the world. While this material is for an academic crowd, digital preservation is a cross-domain field so *generally* things are presented in a way that doesn't assume you're a professional digital archivist.

Online communities

Traditionally, conversations about digital preservation have taken place through conferences like iPres, and over professional listservs. That said, there are some important conversations that include both amateurs and professionals happening on social media.

digipres.club - Mastodon community associated with digital preservation. I've found Mastodon has that best presence from digital preservation institutions of any social media platform (honestly I haven't really figured out Mastodon yet and long for a forum).

https://www.reddit.com/r/internetarchive/ - note: a lot of conversation here isn't actually about digital preservation or web archiving and is very IA specific, but if you need help working with IA it is a very helpful space.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ - note: data hoarding isn't the same as digital preservation, but these information about scrapers and mass-downloading can be helpful as part of a digital preservation workflow

https://www.reddit.com/r/Archivists/ - note: this space is really for professional archivists, and most of the conversation is about physical archives, but it's still interesting to eavesdrop and great support if you are interested in starting a community archive.

File formats

Now we're getting technical! Some file formats are better for long-term preservation than others. For most people, just using a common file type will be good enough, but if you want to learn best practices or the technical information about file formats, by all means!

Library of Congress Recommended formats statement (best formats for preservation)

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/index.html

PRONOM (registry of fie format technical information)

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/Default.aspx

Essays

I just like these essays. These are mostly blog entries, not academic papers, so they haven't been peer-reviewed and I haven't even read them all, but I've found the information to be mostly high quality. These essays also reflect the emotional weight that's lacking in the more academic stuff. Digital preservation, nostalgia for the early internet, and the desire to care for what we love isn't a stuffy debate for people with too many degrees -- it's something that affects most people, and that so many of us are deeply invested in.

This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web by Jeff Huang

Collection of essays: The Internet Used To Be Fun