This year, we're celebrating World Digital Preservation Day a little later than usual! While it was officially on November 6, APTrust was busy attending iPRES. Now that we're back, we are excited to highlight some of the excellent scholarship that has emerged from our membership over the past year. We are also working on a publicly accessible Zotero library to showcase our members' research. If you are a staff member at an APTrust member institution and you would like your research to be recognized, please fill out our APTrust Research Google Form.

SAA 2025 was held in sunny Anaheim from August 24, 2025, to August 27, 2025, with a panel on using DART featuring multiple DART users and our Executive Director, Nathan Tallman.

• Nathan Tallman, APTrust, and Michael Dulock, University of Colorado, Boulder (panel) “Expanding Access and Collaboration: DART as a Versatile Tool for Digital Preservation Workflows.”

NDSA 2025 was held online from October 9-10, 2025, with presentations from three APTrust member institution staff members and our Executive Director, Nathan Tallman.

• Nathan Tallman, APTrust, and Kara McClurken, University of Virginia, “Expanding the Circle: Incremental Progress Toward More Inclusive Digital Preservation.”
• Stacey Jones, University of Arizona, “From Tools to Trust: A People-Centered Approach to Digital Preservation Assessment.”
• Grayson Murphy, University of Alabama at Birmingham, “Utilizing Archivematica’s METS files to Conduct a Large-Scale File Format Analysis of our ETD Collection.”
• Lance Stuchell, University of Michigan, “Hitting the Reset Button: Creating a Shared Digital Preservation Vision at the University of Michigan Library.”

APTrust staff and members were well represented, presenting at iPRES 2025 in windy Wellington, New Zealand, with more members attending in person and online. Special shoutout to Stacey Jones for her THREE papers, including one that won Best Paper! The proceedings haven’t been released yet, but we’re linking to the program descriptions.

• Shelly Black, North Carolina State University, and Stacey Jones, University of Arizona, “Navigating Transitions: Sustaining Community Collaborations in Digital Preservation.”
• Stacey Jones, University of Arizona,
  • “Beyond the Checklist: Building Community and Confidence in the POWRR Peer Assessment Program.”
  • “Confidence, Community, and a Course of Action: Takeaways from Ten Years of Digital POWRR Train” - Which won Best Paper!
• Alex Kinnaman, Virginia Tech University Libraries, “Out There, In Here: Preservation Strategies for Multimodal Cultural Heritage in 3D and XR.”
• Rosalyn Metz, Emory University, gave a keynote presentation, “Encountering Collapse: Power, Community, and the Future of Infrastructure.”
• Flavia Ruffner, APTrust, and Michael Runyon, William & Mary Libraries, “Digital Preservation Repository as a Disaster Management Solution.”
• Flavia Ruffner, APTrust, and Nathan Tallman, APTrust, facilitated the workshop “Navigating Digital Preservation in the Cloud: Lessons, Strategies, and Good Practices.”
• Nathan Tallman co-facilitated The Great Digital Preservation Bake Off tool demonstration track.

Our consortium had an active year of rich scholarship. We are proud of the contributions our members and staff have made to the digital preservation community this past year; we look forward to seeing what 2026 brings for APTrust!

This post was written by Michael Runyon.

Members, Presentations