Ready, Set, Preserve! Making Space for Play in Digital Preservation
The complexity of the field of digital preservation grows in scope each year, making it challenging for any one person to go it alone. The range of competencies required to actively manage diverse digital assets over time, ensuring their continued relevance, usability and authenticity, may include everything from specialised technical knowledge to people skills. Perhaps as a direct result, the profession has seen the appearance in recent years of digital preservation games as essential tools for cross-community collaboration, lowering the barriers to adoption of complicated systems while also providing space for the diversity of ideas required to tackle an ever-changing digital world.
At DPASSH 2026, the concept of ‘play’ is used to encourage connections between digital preservation professionals with a range of backgrounds and skills, such as software developers, collections managers, curators, educators, researchers, citizen scientists, arts and business professionals. We particularly welcome submissions that reflect playful and creative approaches to the day-to-day work of digital preservation and which are not afraid to demonstrate the lessons that can be learned from failure. Our theme also subtly points to challenges inherent in certain media types that need to be ‘played’ to be useful (like games, VR, AV, etc.) and the importance of collaboration to successful gameplay (e.g. multi-player games & team sports).
We invite the submission of posters, presentations, and workshops on any topic related to the theme of play, such as:
- Collaborative approaches to digital preservation
- Issues in media and videogame preservation
- Equity and inclusion in digital preservation work
- Taking a chance with new tools or workflows
- Making connections in unexpected places
- Adapting to changing policies and responsibilities
- Creative reuse of digital collections
- The role of AI in digital preservation
- and more!
We would also like to encourage attendees to consider contributing case studies to demonstrate the importance of context in the application of traditional digital preservation techniques, as well as creative practices that reveal the potential of digital collections to put historical and cultural objects in dialogue with contemporary society. What are the challenges for preserving not only our digital history but the shifting experience of digital assets over time?
Can you navigate the hazards of the conference paper submission process to deliver your proposal on time? Try your luck with the DPASSH 2026 Conference Proposal Submission Maze, developed using bitsy.