Digital Preservation Registries: What We Have & What We Need
Andrew Jackson Paul Wheatley
How do we cope with growing collections and complexity when our budgets are not able to keep up? How do we learn about the formats and software we care for? How can we find the information we need to improve our workflows and services? Since at least 2004 [1], the iPRES community has been well aware of the need to address this challenge together. But in the years since then, a succession of projects and proposals have come and gone [2], undermined by the institutional and financial constraints we operate under. Given the realities of the situation, how can we improve our digital preservation practices?

The "Registries of Good Practice" Project is a two-year collaboration between the Digital Preservation Coalition and Yale University Library, aiming to explore new ways to make the most of the sources of practical knowledge we have, without demanding large-scale change or expensive infrastructure. This workshop will present our prototypes for searching across format registries and for finding relevant publications, our approach to sustainable design and our vision for building a shared understanding of the landscape of registries and records relevant to digital preservation.

This will be followed by hands-on exploration of our new tools, to help attendees understand the range and coverage of the available registries, and learn new ways to find relevant records of technology and practice. This will help us to gather the user feedback that is critical to the success of the project and steer our future work. We will also use this workshop to document the wide range of records and registries that the digital preservation community depends on. This will help us build a better shared understanding of the current state of digital preservation, and of the wider landscape of information sources that we can all take advantage of and contribute to.

[1] Aschenbrenner, Andreas. ‘File Format Registries - a Global Infrastructure for Local Persistence’. In iPRES 2004 Conference Proceedings. Beijing, 2004. https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/detail/o:295015.
[2] McGath, Gary. ‘The Format Registry Problem’. The Code4Lib Journal, no. 19 (15 January 2013). https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8029.
approaches to preservation scaling up