From Toolkit to Playbook: An Update on the Digital Preservation Advocacy Project

Six months in, here’s what we’ve learned, how we’ve changed how we work, and when we’ll need your eyes on a draft.

When APTrust and CLOCKSS announced this project in June, we said we were building adaptable materials to help digital preservation practitioners make their case to the people who control budgets, staffing, and institutional priorities.

What we’ve done since June

We ran two rounds of interviews, conducted by Ryan Menefee at Group Project, the external consultant we are delighted to be working with on this project.

Wave 1 focused on decision-makers and the people closest to them: deans and university librarians, associate deans and AULs, library budget officers, campus CIOs, and colleagues in research administration and sponsored programs. We also spoke with people holding vantage points across many institutions rather than only a view from inside one. We wanted to understand how digital preservation actually surfaces, or fails to surface, in the conversations where institutional resources get allocated.

Wave 2 turned to practitioners: the people who do digital preservation and advocate for it. Digital preservation librarians, coordinators, and archivists; digital collections and special collections staff; colleagues who carry digipres alongside a much larger portfolio; people who’ve worked across several institutions with very different setups; and trainers who see practitioner realities across the field. We asked what they need and how they advocate to have these needs met, which messages have been powerful, which have landed flat, and where they feel underequipped. We also ran a sorting exercise with a set of proposed communication components, asking people to tell us directly which ones they need and don’t have, which they already have covered, and which they’d skip.

We’re keeping names and institutions out of these updates so people can speak candidly. The themes are worth sharing.

What we heard

Generic advocacy advice isn’t the gap. Practitioners were direct about this. The existing resources in this space tend to offer communications fundamentals repackaged for our field, and that’s not where people are stuck. What’s missing is content specific enough to be used immediately without adaptation: actual language, actual framing, actual documents.

Speak collections, not systems. Library leaders consistently told us that technology framing, and even preservation framing, lands mushily, while collections framing lands clearly. The stories that travel are about compliance with funder mandates, business continuity and disaster preparedness, records management, and the harder question of deciding what actually merits preservation.

The org chart isn’t the power structure. This was the most vivid theme in Wave 2. Think about  the official org chart as a map and influence as water moving across the terrain: related to the map, but not determined by it. Practitioners who advocate successfully have figured out where the water flows: who gets consulted informally, who can quietly veto, who lends credibility. That’s learnable, and it’s mostly not written down anywhere.

Coalitions matter more than pitches. Digital preservation touches people across the institution who don’t hold “preservation” in their titles — colleagues working with donors, licensing content, processing archival material, managing research data. Several practitioners described their real breakthroughs as coalition work rather than a single well-delivered request.

Everyone needs something ready to go. The five-minute hallway conversation with a dean is not a scheduled event. Multiple people told us the gap isn’t the formal presentation; it’s about having something crisp in your pocket when the opportunity appears.

Where the money sits is strategic. A recurring observation: when digital preservation lives in a membership or subscription line rather than in collections or staffing budgets, it becomes structurally easy to cut. Advocacy sometimes means arguing about accounting categories, not just about value.

Why we’re now calling it a Playbook

We’ve decided to stop calling this a toolkit.

Part of that is for clarity; several toolkits are already in circulation, with more coming, and the word is losing its edge. But the better reason is that “playbook” describes what we’re actually building. Different institutional situations call for different plays. You don’t work through a playbook front to back; you reach for the play that fits the moment. That’s closer to how the people we interviewed described their real advocacy work than any process-driven framing.

Our working title is now the Digital Preservation Advocacy Playbook for Academic Libraries.

And why “for Academic Libraries” is in the title

This is the bigger change, and we want to be plain about it.

The June announcement described a broad audience. What we deliver will be focused on North American academic libraries and the practitioners working in them, whether digital preservation is their whole job or one line in a long portfolio.

We narrowed deliberately, because our interviews made one thing clear: specificity is what makes a resource like this usable. Advice broad enough to fit every organizational context ends up fitting none of them closely enough to deploy. Governance structures, budget cycles, procurement processes, donor cultures, and the particular shape of who decides what vary enough that trying to serve every setting at once would flatten the detail that makes the content worth having.

That said, a substantial portion of the Playbook isn’t academic-library-specific at all. The material on advocacy fundamentals, on how executives actually communicate and decide, and on mapping influence within an organization applies wherever you work. Those sections will be written to travel.

How the Playbook is shaping up

The current architecture has five parts:

• Part 0 — Orientation: what this is, why it works, how to use it
• Part 1 — Universal advocacy principles: how leadership strategy and priorities drive decisions, the realities of executive communication, where advocacy fits
• Part 2 — Digipres advocacy in academic libraries: how universities set strategy, “why digital preservation” arguments that hold up, aligning your ask with your program’s maturity, key roles and potential allies, common advocacy scenarios
• Part 3 — Digipres advocacy at your institution: mapping your value proposition to your library’s and university’s actual priorities, identifying advocacy openings, audience analysis, an implementation roadmap
• Part 4 — Adaptable content and tools: talking points, elevator speeches, briefing documents and slides, case studies, infographics, presentation templates

Part 4 is where the copy-and-paste material lives, and it’s the part practitioners were most emphatic about.

What’s next — and where you come in

We’re drafting through the fall. Our aim is to have real draft content — not an outline, not a summary, but actual material you can react to — circulating for comment in Q4 2026.

When it’s ready, we’ll send it to folks who signed up to our stakeholder list (see below to sign up!) with a window for asynchronous comments. No meetings to attend and no standing commitment: read what’s relevant to you, tell us where it’s wrong, thin, or too abstract, and we’ll incorporate it. Reactions from people who’ll actually have to use this are worth more to us than another round of internal review.

After that, we hope to pilot with a small number of institutions, running from December into spring 2027. We’re also considering live, synchronous sessions around the Playbook’s launch — the details aren’t settled yet, but we’d rather this land as something the community works through together than as a PDF that appears one morning.

If you know someone who should be seeing these updates, please pass this along. The list is still open.

Stay Informed

If you received this secondhand, or know a colleague who should be seeing these updates, the list is still open. Whether you’re a librarian, publisher, archivist, practitioner, or institutional leader, there will be opportunities to contribute ideas, share experiences, pilot materials, and explore collaboration as this effort takes shape — beginning with the Q4 draft review.

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