World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is held on the first Thursday of every November, providing an opportunity for the international digital preservation community to connect and celebrate the positive impact that digital preservation has. Follow #WDPD2020 for discussion throughout the day. Our colleagues in the UK Web Archive (UKWA) have already blogged earlier for WDPD about their Coronavirus Collection, which includes preservation of the ‘Children of Lockdown’ project website.

 A number of WDPD online events are taking place, including a book launch party for Electronic Legal Deposit Shaping the library collections of the future, for which our collaborative doctoral research student Linda Berube co-wrote chapter 9; Follow the Users: Assessing UK Non-Print Legal Deposit Within the Academic Discovery Environment. 

WDPD is also when the annual Digital Preservation Awards are announced, #DPA2020, and we wish to offer our warmest congratulations to all today's winners, including our wonderful UKWA colleagues who have won the The National Archives Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy, recognising 15 years of web archiving work. You can read more about the UKWA's 15 year anniversary in 2020 here and watch a recording of the online Digital Preservation Awards ceremony in the video below.

Here in Digital Scholarship we enjoy collaborating with the British Library's Digital Preservation and UKWA teams. Last year we hosted a six month post-doctoral placement; ‘Emerging Formats: Discovering and Collecting Contemporary British Interactive Fiction’, where Lynda Clark created an Interactive Narratives UKWA collection and evaluated how crawlers captured web hosted works of interactive fiction.

This research project was part of the Library’s ongoing Emerging Formats work, which acknowledges that without intervention, many culturally valuable digital artefacts are at risk of being lost. Interactive narratives are particularly endangered due to the ‘hobbyist’ nature of many creators, meaning they do not necessarily subscribe to standardised practices. However, this also means that digital interactive fiction is created by and for a wide variety of creators and audiences, including various marginalised groups.

Two reports written by Lynda during her innovation placement are publicly available on the BL Research Repository; https://doi.org/10.23636/1192 and https://doi.org/10.23636/1193. Furthermore, a long paper about the Interactive Narratives collection is part of the proceedings of this week's International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS).^[1] This event is a great opportunity to meet both scholars and creative practitioners who make digital stories. I was delighted to be a reviewer for the ICIDS 2020 online art exhibition, which has the theme "Texts of Discomfort" and presents some very thought provoking work.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)

1. Clark L., Rossi G.C., Wisdom S. (2020) Archiving Interactive Narratives at the British Library. In: Bosser AG., Millard D.E., Hargood C. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12497. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62516-0_27  ↩︎