The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is inviting the digital preservation community to submit nominations for its 2019 edition of the Bit List. The Bit List is the DPC’s Global List of Digitally Endangered Species. Nominations to the BitList are being sought through the summer before being published on World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD2019) on 7 November 2019.
The Bit List highlights the need for action to preserve high-value digital content that is critically endangered, whilst celebrating the progress the digital preservation community has made to ensure a secure digital legacy.
Digital objects face multiple risks. In the past, nominations have been thematic rather than self-contained and frequently they overlap. For example, in 2018 politically sensitive data was listed, alongside unpublished research outputs, and material on obsolete media. In theory a digital object could fall into all three of these groups, such as politically inconvenient but unpublished data from research into climate change. So any given object can face a multitude of aggravating conditions which raise the threat level.
Members of the digital preservation community around the world are invited to add their nominations to this list. Nominators are asked to ascribe a risk level to the digital material and think about the significance and impact of its loss. Nominations must be made by 30 August 2019.
Once the nominations have been collected and collated, an international panel of digital preservation experts will evaluate the entries, before arriving at their final list which will be published 7 November 2019.