title: Building a User Group for a Digital Preservation Product 
creators: Euan Cochrane Remke Verdegem Jonathan Tilbury
abstract: Digital Preservation places a strong emphasis on building communities to share experiences and develop solutions. Traditionally these communities were built on geographic or functional alignment or created through external grant funded research activities. As commercial Digital Preservation products have emerged vendors have created User Groups for their customers that seek to fulfil this function. Using the lessons of the 11-year history of the Preservica User Group, this paper explores how these User Groups function and compares this to studies of User Groups in other domains.