The 2025 Fall APTrust Membership Meeting, held October 16-17 in Chicago, brought together members in person and online for two days of updates, collaboration, and shared learning. The meeting celebrated another year of growth in deposits and membership activity, alongside thoughtful discussion of APTrust’s evolving strategy, technical progress, and community initiatives.
State of APTrust and Organizational Updates
Executive Director Nathan Tallman opened the meeting with a welcome and overview, sharing that APTrust now preserves over 640 terabytes of unique data across 469,000 objects and more than 40 million files. New team member Melissa Iori, Lead Developer, was introduced, bringing expertise in full-stack development, cloud infrastructure, and user-centered design.
Tallman also outlined APTrust’s continued participation in professional communities, including the Digital Preservation Coalition and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, and congratulated Board Chair Tyler Walters (Virginia Tech) on receiving the 2025 NDSA Excellence Award in the Individual category.
Technical Progress and Preservation Infrastructure
Lead Engineer Flavia Ruffner and Lead Developer Melissa Iori presented the Fall Technical Update, highlighting a strong focus on infrastructure stability, cloud cost management, and new security features. APTrust has seen steady growth in deposits (9% since January 2025) and continues to advance its roadmap with community feedback.
Key developments included:
- DART 3, rebuilt in Go for long-term maintainability, with a public beta expected by year’s end.
- Registry enhancements, including soon-to-be-released multi-factor authentication options and a “Fixity Alerter” feature.
- Ongoing work on preservation storage criteria to guide future diversification of storage providers.
- Closure of the Wasabi pilot, with lessons feeding into next-generation storage planning.
Strategic Planning and Fiscal Stewardship
Members contributed to discussions shaping APTrust’s next three-year strategic plan (2026–2028), emphasizing agility, sustainability, and transparent community input. The consortium is working with PlanPerfect to facilitate this work, focusing on measurable outcomes across security, technical, and fiduciary goals.
Tallman also previewed plans to phase in revised membership and storage fees by FY2028, ensuring shared responsibility for sustainability while maintaining equitable cost recovery. The Governing Board will review these updated fees and their implementation timeline in February 2026. Members discussed potential uses for APTrust’s reserve fund, including accessibility improvements, integrations with tools such as Archivematica and ArchivesSpace, and seed funding for new initiatives.
Member Lightning Talks: Preservation in Action
As always, member lightning talks showcased the breadth of activity across the consortium:
- Georgetown University completed a significant repository migration to Hyku and welcomed Georgetown Law Library as a new associate member.
- Johns Hopkins University launched a university-wide Digital Preservation Strategy Task Force to develop policies, workflows, and infrastructure for long-term stewardship.
- University of Michigan’s Project DOR extended its timeline to prioritize a stable preservation core, with replication to APTrust planned for FY27.
- The University of Colorado Boulder has surpassed 21 TB preserved and is aims to deposit up to 50 TB more by next summer.
- Virginia Tech shared progress toward library-wide digital preservation pipelines and strategies for managing large datasets.
- William & Mary reported on a busy year that included negotiating with the W&M Law School to add them as an associate member and large ingests of digitized collections.
- Penn State, Arizona, and North Carolina State University highlighted ongoing efforts in digital curation, automation, and data growth planning.
Advocacy and Community Building
The session on Elevator Speeches as Advocacy encouraged members to refine concise, compelling ways to describe APTrust’s impact at their institutions, as part of a larger effort to equip members with advocacy tools to promote the value of digital preservation.
Friday’s sessions explored designated communities and representation information, associate membership models, and metadata preservation, emphasizing shared challenges and peer exchange.
Looking Ahead
In closing, Tallman thanked attendees for their collaboration and invited continued participation in shaping the 2026 technical roadmap through the upcoming November focus groups: November 18, 11 am-12:30 pm, and November 20, 1-2:30 pm. The meeting reflected APTrust’s enduring strength as a community-driven consortium, balancing innovation with shared stewardship of the scholarly and cultural record.