Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation

In March 2020, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) hosted a webinar on ‘Enacting Environmentally Sustainable Preservation’. This webinar was based on a recent article in American Archivist. In the paper, the authors (Keith Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, Tim Walsh and Laura Alagna) call for a paradigm shift to create environmentally sustainable digital preservation. They focus in particular on three key areas, asking to consider how we view and enact appraisal, permanence, and the availability of digital content. They encourage to make sustainable choices by integrating environmental sustainability into existing decision-making criteria and follow with detailed discussion and a framework for helping more effectively consider the choices made.