Digital Preservation Made Practical: Immediate Actions and Long-Term Strategies

Digital Preservation Made Practical: Immediate Actions and Long-Term Strategies

Presenter: Rachel Appel

Date/Time: Monday September 29, 2025 from 1:00pm-3:00pm

Location: Zoom

Description:

This workshop introduces participants to the essentials of digital preservation and provides hands-on opportunities to put key practices into action. We will start with core concepts and low-barrier activities that repositories can implement right away, such as organizing file structures, checking fixity, and documenting basic metadata.

In the second half, participants will engage directly with sample evaluation matrixes. Working in groups, attendees will practice customizing criteria, weighting priorities, and comparing features to see how different digital preservation systems align with their own repository’s needs.

By the end of the session, participants will leave with a starter toolkit of immediately usable practices, along with practical strategies for evaluating and planning toward larger-scale digital preservation solutions.

Speaker Bio: 

Rachel Appel is the Digital Preservation Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. In this position, she develops, documents, implements and oversees preservation workflows, procedures and policies for the Penn Libraries' digital collections and assets, both digitized and born-digital. She also collaborates with stakeholders across the Libraries and the University to develop programmatic and sustainable policies and workflows to address digital curation and long-term digital preservation needs for the Libraries and related campus assets.