We’re moving form an industrial to a digital age. Acceleration, mobility, connectivity, real time information for free are the new normal. Everything seems to happen now. We live in a world of presentism: Search and social are now the main sources of information, breaking news and live tickers surround us. Boundaries between the public and the private are collapsing.

People everywhere have higher expectations. Where does this lead? Each new medium creates new communication styles and designs information differently. What is the future importance of images, symbols, voice vs. written language? The software invention turns out to be as important as the invention of money or the written language. What new needs are emerging?

How will the human-machine relationship evolve with ever better AI? Is AI am the new I am? When everybody becomes a creator and a maker, and generated data volume increases exponentially, what is important and what is unimportant? Who is in control? Who is going to make decisions?

Will we think of the past and the future the same way like today? Hardly. Our world is already a living museum – ever more data and things are either put on shelves or in the cloud. Will an idealized past become more important? Probably. Will the future create positive connotations? We hope so.

From the very beginning, the importance of collaboration in digital preservation was emphasized by many professionals in the field. Facing the rapid technological developments, the growing amount of digital material and the growing complexity of digital objects, it seems clear that no one institution can do digital preservation on its own. Digital preservation related tasks and responsibilities concern multiple spheres of competence, and over the last two decades, a network of relationships has grown between the stakeholders involved.

In this paper, we suggest adjustments to best practices for persistent web referencing; adjustments that aim at preservation and long time accessibility of web referenced resources in general, but with focus on web references in web archives.
Web referencing is highly relevant and crucial for various research fields, since an increasing number of references point to resources that only exist on the web. However, present practices using URL and date reference cannot be regarded as persistent due to the volatile nature of the Internet, - and present practices for references to web archives only refer to archive URLs which depends on the web archives access implementations.
A major part of the suggested adjustments is a new web reference standard for archived web references (called wPID), which is a supplement to the current practices. The purpose of the standard is to support general, global, sustainable, humanly readable and technology agnostic persistent web references that are not sufficiently covered by existing practices. Furthermore, it can support better practices for precise references in spite of the temporality issues for web material as well as issues related to closed web archives.
In order to explain needed change of practices based on the wPID, the paper includes a thorough description of the challenges in web references. This description is based on the perspectives from computer science, web collection and Digital Humanities.

Research and Development (R&D) websites often provide valuable and unique information such as software used in experiments, test data sets, gray literature, news or dissemination materials. However, these sites frequently become inactive after the project ends. For instance, only 7% of the project URLs for the FP4 work programme (1994-1998) were still active in 2015. This study describes a pragmatic methodology that enables the automatic identification and preservation of R&D project websites. It combines open data sets with free search services so that it can be immediately applied even in contexts with very limited resources available. The “CORDIS EU research projects under FP7 dataset” provides information about R&D projects funded by the European Union during the FP7 work programme. It is publicly available at the European Union Open Data Portal. However, this dataset is incomplete regarding the project URL information. We applied our proposed methodology to the FP7 dataset and improved the completeness of the FP7 dataset by 86.6% regarding the project URLs information. Using these 20 429 new project URLs as starting point, we collected and preserved 10 449 947 Web files, fulfilling a total of 1.4 TB of information related to R&D activities. All the outputs from this study are publicly available [16], including the CORDIS dataset updated with our newly found project URLs.

Today's scholarly works can be dynamic, distributed, and complex. They can consist of multiple related components (article, dataset, software, multimedia, webpage, etc.) that are made available asynchronously, assigned a range of identifiers, and stored in different repositories with uneven preservation policies. A lot of progress has been made to simplify the process of sharing the components of these new forms of scholarly output and to improve the methods of preserving diverse formats. As the complexity of a scholarly works grows, however, it becomes unlikely that all of the components will become available at the same time, be accessible through a single repository, or even stay in the same state as they were at the time of publication. In turn, it also becomes more challenging to maintain a comprehensive and current perspective on what the complete work consists of and where all of the components can be found. It is this challenge that makes it valuable to also capture and preserve the map of relationships amongst these distributed resources. The goal of the RMap project was to build a prototype service that can capture and preserve the maps of relationships found amongst these distributed works. The outcomes of the RMap project and its possible applications for preservation are described.

Memory institutions face increasing volumes of electronic documents and other media content for long term preservation. Data are normally stored in specific formats for documents, images, sound, video, etc., produced by software from different vendors. This software is controlled neither by the institution producing the files, nor by the institution that archives it. This obligates memory institutions to carry out conformance tests before accepting transfers of electronic collections, but again these are beyond the control of the institution and can be unreliable. This poses problems for long-term preservation. Digital content, meant for preservation, passing through an uncontrolled generative process can jeopardise the preservation process. The objective of PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) – a Pre Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme – is to give memory institutions full control of the conformance testing of files created, migrated and ingested into archives. This is achieved through the development of open source tools which enable this process within an iteration that is under the full control of memory institutions. The project aims to establish a sustainable ecosystem involving interested stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds, including researchers, developers and memory institutions. The workshop will present the results of the project, including demonstration of the conformance checkers developed during the prototyping phase. This will inform a discussion with the digital preservation community – open source community, developers, standardization bodies and memory institutions – about the opportunities offered by PREFORMA and the challenges that are still to be addressed.

In this workshop, we show how researchers and information professionals are supported throughout the data life-cycle in order to ensure innovative and professional digital preservation in Switzerland.

In this paper, we describe the structure and contents for the
OSS4Pres 2.0 workshop.

Storage is arguably the most fundamental building block of any technical infrastructure designed to preserve digital content. All institutions responsible for preserving digital content must use storage systems or services, whether they are maintaining their own, sharing infrastructure with other institutions, or relying on a third party to provide this service. There are many decisions to be made as to what constitutes a storage infrastructure good enough to protect the integrity and viability of the content, at a cost affordable to the institution. To date each institution has had to independently make these decisions without guidance from the digital preservation community. This workshop will explore whether or not it is possible for the attendees to write a brief “principles of preservation storage” as a starting point for a larger discussion within the community after the conference.

This is the workshop for the novel, open source web archiving tool Webrecorder. Until now, web archiving has mainly been thought to be synonymous with “spidering” or “crawling,” meaning that a very basic, simulated version of a web browser travels paths of links and storing what it encounters, based on a certain set of rules.
Webrecorder introduces a new web archiving concept, symmetrical archiving, which makes use of actual browsers and actual user behavior to archive the web, as well. The software stack used for accessing or replaying archived material is exactly the same as during the capturing process. This allows for unprecedented fidelity in web archiving, enabling the preservation of items embedded complex, dynamic web applications, while keeping their whole, interactive context as well as any user specific content.
This new approach to web archiving requires new ways of working within institutions; the proposed workshop serves as an introduction to symmetrical archiving, using Webrecorder’s emulation-based browsers, defining object boundaries, and transitioning from or augmenting crawler-based archives.

Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) is a relatively recent topic in the landscape of digital preservation and new questions/challenges arise as devices, tools, and apps to capture and share information seem to appear every day. Individuals and community organizations can be overwhelmed with photos, email messages, texts, letters, and a wide array of other materials. This workshop seeks to discuss ways in which cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums, along with university researchers, and software and systems developers in this domain, can help individuals and groups come to grips with their digital collections and preserve content that is important to their lives, organizations, communities, and heritage in trustworthy, long-term ways. Very few initiatives are on-going worldwide on this topic, one of the most relevant, the PDA conference in the US, is presented to bring the discussion to Europe.
Cultural heritage organizations that are building trustworthy digital repositories along with tool builders and software/system developers have much to offer in this arena but roles and responsibilities as well as incentives and resources must be established. At the most fundamental stage, awareness needs to be raised among all stakeholders and guidelines to help individuals and organizations need to be developed, maintained, and disseminated. Of prime concern at this juncture is how public institutions such as libraries and archives can help community organizations and individuals?