Preserve Together has its 1st birthday today! Time really has flown. It seems like only yesterday that I was planning out a new business offering with my co-director, Sharon. Both from a personal and professional perspective it has been tremendously exciting to see our business grow so quickly in our first year. And there are of course benefits for the wider world in having us off the streets and gainfully employed in all sorts of digital preservation things!
Indeed, 2026 has already been really busy for Preserve Together with a number of new work activities underway. This is in addition to our training offerings and our contract with the British Library, where we’ve been project managing the implementation of a new digital repository since October 2025.
Firstly, we are part way through delivering a programme of digital preservation training for the Archives and Records Council Wales. Across the series we’re covering introductory digital preservation skills as well as web archiving, email preservation and access provision. It’s great to be working on some instructor-led content in addition to our own self-directed training offerings.
Next up, we have recently begun a project for the Chief Archivists in Local Government Group of the Archives and Records Association UK & Ireland on the preservation of adoption and care records of young people. These records are typically held in "line of business" systems but often have very long retention periods. This leads to a challenging preservation conundrum, and one to which we will be seeking pragmatic solutions. We hope the outputs of this work will be useful to those not only managing adoption and care records, but also for those hoping to preserve records from other types of line of business systems.
Another really exciting project we have begun this year, sees us partner up with Informu Solutions. Together we are leading the Environmental and Sustainability strand of the N-RICH Prototype project. This work will deliver practical recommendations on digitisation and digital preservation activities in relation to carbon costs. The work was made possible by funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund Preliminary Activity grant awarded to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project is being delivered by the Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme in close collaboration with AHRC.
We are really looking forward to being able share the results of our project work later in the year. In the meantime, we will be heading to the DPASSH conference in Belfast in June. We are very proud to be sponsoring the event, and we will be bringing along something that attendees will hopefully find rather fun and inspiring from a digital preservation perspective. Hope to see you there.
Paul