Digital Preservationists are keenly aware of our responsibility to hold the memories others make meaning from. Can we allow for moments of playfulness in our own practice? Can fun be seen as small acts of resistance to our current circumstances? Where can practitioners embed play during difficult times? This is a call for digital preservationists, creative practitioners and our colleagues to consider how we collectively shape the digital future we desire to inhabit.

In the digital content lifecycle, Digital Preservation is positioned where it appears that all the fun has already taken place. We arrive as the party is ending. Yet we know archiving should never be an afterthought. Digital Preservation should not be the ‘bump out’ after the show has wrapped. It should be woven into the creation of digital content, and for the arts, humanities, and social sciences it should be a part of creative and daily practice.

In 2025 journalist Carole Cadwallader elicited that culture is now “just what’s next on your phone. And that’s AI. Culture is AI now.”[1] If this is the case, then we all play a role in creating a technological future where audiences can experience more than doomscrolling and digital preservationists arrive when the party is starting. To be successful, digital preservationists must connect with creativity. Engaging early in the creative practice process is essential; permitting participation and playfulness is necessary. Reducing the gap between creative practice and how creative outputs are preserved is critical.

In essence Digital Preservation is risk management. We imagine the possible and impossible risks and then mitigate them. There is a cognitive dissonance to discussing play and fun at this moment in time, while atrocities are being experienced and witnessed across the world. As author Rebecca Solnit (2016) reflects, “grief and hope can coexist.”[2] In Digital Preservation, we implement systems on behalf of our societies so as not to forget. As a result, digital preservationists spend considerable time virtually inhabiting the past. To consider and form our present and future, Rebecca Solnit signals that hope “locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act”.[3]

Somaya Langley has a background in the arts, broadcast, culture and festivals, and has worked in Australia, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom for organisations including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Electrofringe (Australia’s national electronic arts festival), the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, and the University of Cambridge.

Somaya is the Science Museum Group’s inaugural Digital Preservation Manager, Vice Chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Museums and Galleries Special Interest Group, and Co-Chair of the International Council on Archives’ Expert Group on Managing Physical and Digital Records. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Cultural Leadership from Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art. Somaya is the inaugural recipient of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives’ 2023 Lars Gaustad Award.