Chapter 5 Sustainability and preservation

Digital cultural heritage in danger

As cultural heritage organisations have moved to embed emerging technologies in their strategic visions, systems and services, researchers and cultural heritage professionals have increasingly realised the need for rapid digital and technological adaptation in their practices, methods and decision-making. At the same time, the potential for exploring, analysing and understanding cultural heritage objects in new ways, as well as the challenges arising from and within the adaptation of these technologies, have pushed the boundaries of the ever-changing cultural heritage landscape, including its structural, governance and financial ecosystems. In this context, huge strategic investments in digital research and resources have been put in place, initiating an era of research, experimentation and innovation. For example, since it was founded in 1998, the AHRC has invested ‘over £2.5bn in arts and humanities across the UK, supporting jobs, improving skills and focusing support in key strategic areas for the UK’s prosperity’.¹ More than £400 million of this investment has been directed towards digital research and innovation. This funding has enabled exciting interdisciplinary explorations in data creation, data management, computational access, storage and long-term preservation, but also in the systems and infrastructures that are built to support them.² The impact of this investment in the UK has been huge and it is matched by similar programmes in other Global North countries. The creation of research projects and programmes, knowledge exchange spaces and engagement activities has been driving change across the arts and humanities, cultural heritage and the creative industries while directly addressing the needs of their many audiences.

Although these investments have led to new partnerships and impactful research outputs across the cultural heritage sector, the reliance on short-term grant funding for digital innovation has resulted in major challenges for the sustaining of digital resources even in the short term. Cameron writes that ‘while paper-based information may be preserved by benign neglect, digital resources either exist or are lost forever’ (Cameron 2021, 30). Or as Neal Beagrie similarly notes:

in the right conditions papyrus or paper can survive by accident or through benign neglect for centuries, or in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for thousands of years … In contrast, digital information will not survive and remain accessible by accident: it requires ongoing active management from as early in the life-cycle as possible. (Beagrie 2006, 10)

However, it is important to highlight that the sustainability of digital resources, outputs, systems and infrastructures is not only a discussion about financial or technological decision-making, planning and management (Tucker 2022). It is also a discussion about human activities (such as key experts losing motivation, moving jobs or retiring and not being replaced) or anti-social human activities (especially hacking and cyber-attacks). Finally, it is a discussion about environmental impact.

In comparison with the often under-resourced public sector, private companies can paradoxically bring a degree of stability and sustainability. One example of this apparent contradiction is the sudden closure of Jisc Historical Texts. The service has been outlasted by the commercial resources – notably Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online – to which it sought to provide a more cost-effective alternative. A brief news announcement on 29 February 2024, no longer available on the live web, gave subscribing institutions in the UK only five months to arrange alternative purchase and access arrangements for the multiple collections that could previously be accessed through the single Jisc portal (Jisc 2024). It is worth noting that a closure on this scale has an additional impact on the sustainability and rigour of the scholarly ecosystem, in that it is likely to have resulted in numerous broken links in the books and articles that cited material from the Jisc resource.

Innovation and experimentation may be easier in small, relatively agile not-for-profit entities than in more bureaucratic institutions that suffer from persistent under-funding. A particularly interesting approach to the long-term safeguarding of cultural heritage is that of the Flickr Foundation, which has the stated aim that ‘One hundred years from now, future generations will have access to the unique visual content available on Flickr today as a result of the Flickr Foundation’s efforts to protect and preserve it’ (Flickr Foundation n.d.).³ The Flickr Foundation has developed the concept of the ‘data lifeboat’ as a means to combat the disappearance of important digital cultural heritage when online services and platforms are closed or collapse: ‘A Data Lifeboat is an archival piece of Flickr, not all of the 50 billion images and their metadata. We envision an archival sliver richer than a mere folder of JPGs: one where you can navigate the content to explore and understand its networked context’ (Flickr Foundation n.d.).

The work of the Flickr Foundation is an imaginative response to the challenges of sustaining and preserving content originally hosted by a commercial platform, but it remains something of an outlier. The past three decades are littered with commercial digital services that outgrew their usefulness or were overwhelmed by a competitor. One such is Friends Reunited, launched in 2000, which very quickly became a popular way of getting back in touch with old school friends, to share memories and photos and update them on the progress of your life. It was closed down on 26 February 2016 (Jowitt 2017), and while the company made best efforts to contact its users and give them the opportunity to download their own information, much personal data went with it. In 2019, MySpace announced to its users that it had lost more than a decade’s worth of material during a server migration (Hern 2019). The reliance on commercial entities as de facto archives poses a huge danger to the survival of born-digital materials, from the so-called ‘sunsetting’ of failing services to accidental loss or deliberate erasure. Leaving responsibility for the custodianship of important digital cultural heritage in the hands of businesses that do not have an explicitly archival remit is a huge societal risk.

The MySpace example illustrates the speed with which digital data can disappear and it has become increasingly apparent that even digital archives that have become knitted into the fabric of scholarly and archival infrastructure can be highly vulnerable. Libraries and platforms around the world have been subject to damaging cyber-attacks. On 9 October 2024, for example, the Internet Archive found itself subject to a data breach and Deliberate Denial of Service attack. The hackers inserted a pop-up message on the site that asked: ‘Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach?’ (Davis 2024). The Internet Archive restored functionality relatively quickly, including to the Wayback Machine, but this was a sharp reminder of the fragility of digital systems and infrastructure as well as digital archives. In this instance, fortunately, the content of the web archive itself was not accessed. But the hacking of digital archives, the changing of the record, is something that has to be planned for.

Recent British history has shown that even the most well-established cultural institutions can be vulnerable to such bad actors, as anti-social cyber/human activities disrupted most services and activities at The British Library. In October 2023 Rhysida, a hacker group, attacked the online information systems of the library, demanding a ransom of 20 bitcoin, at the time worth around £596,000, to restore services and return the stolen data (British Library 2024a). When the British Library did not agree to pay this ransom, Rhysida publicly released approximately 600GB of leaked material online (Adams 2023). The attack led to the disruption of most library services for months, with some being entirely or partially unavailable for long periods (for example, it was only three months after the attack that the British Library catalogue became available in a read-only format) (British Library 2024b). At the time of writing, almost two years after the attack, the vast UK Web Archive remains inaccessible, its data intact but the infrastructure to deliver it critically damaged.

The vulnerability of the means to find and access digital archives introduces an additional layer of risk. The use of shortened URLs to link to online content became common as a means of saving character space on social media platforms or of presenting a tidier, more readable reference than a long string of characters generated by a database. The URL shortener is now built into much social media, automatically truncating what the user may have pasted in to their post. In July 2024, Google announced that it would be turning off its URL shortener, having previously announced the deprecation of the service in 2018. The blog post where the announcement was made notes that ‘Over time, these … URLs saw less and less traffic as the years went on – in fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month’ (Chandel and Babu 2024). But that means that a little under 1 per cent did have activity, and in any case current attention is not a proxy for archival value. Digital pathways can disappear in the same way as data, leaving a landscape strewn with error messages – ‘page not found’.

The coincidence of the attacks on the British Library and Internet Archive (Bridge and Zoledziowski 2024) in 2023–4 highlighted the importance and urgency of designing and building stable, secure, safe and sustainable infrastructure, systems and services for accessing digital resources across cultural heritage and information-holding institutions. In order to ensure that digital resources will remain authentic and accessible in the future to anyone who needs them, information-holding institutions (such as the National Health Service⁴ and Office for National Statistics⁵ in the UK) and large-scale national programmes (such as Smart Data Research UK)⁶ have started investing resources in building Safe and Trusted Environments for safe and secure access to data. As these services rely not only on physical and human infrastructures but also on cloud-based and other networked storage systems, environmental sustainability becomes central to conversations about the use of raw materials and the energy that these infrastructures require.

It is perhaps worth unpicking some of the differences between preservation and sustainability and considering that in some cases a particular project or output may, and perhaps should not, be sustained for a long period after the lifetime of its funding. The Endings Project is particularly useful here in its consideration of practical solutions to address the fact that ‘our ability to produce digital information continues to outpace our capacity to preserve and access that knowledge for the long haul’ (The Endings Project Team n.d.). The project distinguishes five elements of digital projects – data, documentation, processing, products and release management – and highlights the complex interplay between them in the context of sustainability and archiving. It notes that ‘code is not expected to have significant longevity’ and introduces notions of ‘graceful failure’ for products such as interfaces and websites. Careful planning from the outset of a project can maximise the chances of sustaining both cultural heritage data and a specific means of access to it, but the data itself is key. ‘Digital cultural heritage operates as a dispersed dynamic assemblage of entangled elements and forces’ (Cameron 2021, 41) and while all of these can be identified and acknowledged, they cannot always be preserved.

Devising a framework that promotes and supports archiving and preservation that is ‘good enough’, which moves away from decades of work to develop best practice in relation to digital preservation, is a challenge for cultural heritage practitioners. It is also a challenge for researcher expectations about the representativeness and completeness of collections, or indeed the ease and readiness of access (Goudarouli et al. 2023). The required repositioning is made even more difficult because we are confronted with the loss of digital cultural heritage in real time. To look at the archives of the early web, for example, is to be faced immediately with what we no longer have. The text of a page may have been captured, but perhaps the images are missing, represented only by a symbol of brokenness. As you try to navigate through an archived website using the Wayback Machine, it is often not long before you are faced with the friendly message: ‘Hrm. The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL’. Research undertaken by the Pew Research Center revealed that, as of October 2023, 25 per cent of web pages that had existed at some time between 2013 and 2023 were no longer extant on the live web (Rivero et al. 2024). A study of seven million scholarly journals published digitally revealed what is described by Martin Paul Eve as ‘an alarming preservation deficit’, with almost 28 per cent of the sample ‘seemingly unpreserved’ (Eve 2024). Born-digital cultural heritage might appear to be slipping through our collective fingers.

There are numerous, well-documented examples of loss arising from the early years of mass digitisation. One of the best known in the UK concerns the heritage digitisation supported by investment from the New Opportunities Fund, which ran from 1999 to 2003. Funding of £50m was available for the digitisation programme (NOF-digi), from a wider budget of £230m for the creation of a People’s Network of ICT learning centres in UK public libraries (Woodhouse 2001). References to the programme persist in the UK Government Web Archive in press releases and annual reports, while the last capture of the NOF-digi website accessible via the Wayback Machine dates from 31 March 2005. The next capture of the URL, dating from 18 August 2007, reveals that the domain name had expired a week earlier on 11 August.⁷ In terms of the funded projects themselves, as of March 2009 almost a quarter were no longer available online (Jisc 2009), despite evident keen attention paid to the relationship between ease of use, open standards and preservation (Kelly et al. n.d.). Dunning suggested that ‘the feeling that the programme was something of a wasted opportunity; digitisation was a complex problem that needed much sophisticated strategic thinking before there could be a serious injection of further public funds’ potentially had a chilling effect on further public investment in the digitisation of cultural heritage (Dunning 2009). The history of NOF-digitise is not an easy one to reconstruct, reflecting an all-too-common failure by public bodies and cultural heritage institutions to record and preserve the stories of their digitisation and digitalisation. There is much scope for recovering this important aspect of digital cultural heritage through archival research in combination with oral histories. This is in stark contrast to the extensive coverage of philanthropic and commercial initiatives in this space, notably Google Books (see, for example, Somers 2017; Marcum and Schonfeld 2021; Milligan 2024).

So far, so bad? A sense of a looming crisis in preservation and sustainability is reinforced by the Global ‘Bit List’ of Endangered Digital Species, published by the Digital Preservation Coalition and revised every two years. Among the types of digital cultural heritage listed as ‘practically extinct’ are ‘Shutdown or Discontinued Video Games’, ‘Pre-WWW Videotext Data Services and Bulletin Board Services’ and ‘Non-standard Public Records’, by which is meant ‘Records created in the course of public administration and subject to public records legislation but created on unofficial channels and platforms and therefore subject to unlawful destruction whether by accident or design’. The ‘critically endangered’ category includes a range of digital archives, including those of community groups, music production and public enquiries and commissions. There is a notable trend towards increased risk of loss between revisions of the Bit-List and new categories of endangered heritage are regularly added (Digital Preservation Coalition n.d.).

But is this an overly gloomy picture of loss and decay, of ever-growing failure in relation to preservation and sustainability? Ian Milligan argues that ‘If, in the mid-1990s, commentators worried about a “digital dark age”, we are now in an age of historical abundance’, with memory institutions playing a crucial and leading role (Milligan 2024, 1). Digital data is being created and archived in vast quantities – petabytes of text, image, sound and video. Abundance comes with its own challenges, of course, for both archivists and researchers. How do you even begin to identify what an archive of seventy petabytes contains? What use is the now ubiquitous keyword searching, when looking for more or less any term will generate tens of thousands of results? How can individuals and their personal data be protected at this scale? But the fact remains that we already have more data than we quite know what to do with. This is a story of success, of quick action and the ingenuity of memory institutions and archivists, often working with very limited resources.

These apparently competing narratives swirl around born-digital cultural heritage, but they are far from mutually exclusive. We can exist in an environment of both digital abundance and loss, and indeed move from one to the other. Attention to loss and the mitigation of risk is essential if a balance is to be maintained between scarcity and abundance, between ephemerality and long-term preservation and sustainability. The stories of loss and destruction that have tended to dominate discussion overlook the diverse communities that have mobilised to identify, capture, archive, publish and preserve the digital record. This work is happening in cultural heritage institutions; it is happening in communities; it is being carried out by activist and volunteer groups; and it is being undertaken by individuals who either recognise the value of their own digital data or are collecting born-digital material for personal research. Very often it is happening collaboratively, with a cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary openness that is highly unusual. An early recognition of the challenges of securing and preserving digital cultural heritage – whether they arise from abundance or fragility – has brought together archivists, librarians, curators, digital preservation specialists, researchers and technicians to ensure that at least some of our digital past and present persist into the digital future. A striking example of what can be achieved is Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), an initiative of over 1,500 international volunteers collaborating online to digitise Ukrainian cultural heritage at risk from war. Their efforts have included archiving more than 5,000 websites and 50TB of data from Ukrainian cultural institutions in order to prevent these websites from going offline and/or being permanently lost.⁸

There is an important caveat to be made, however: the archiving and preservation of digital cultural heritage is an activity overwhelmingly in, by and for the Global North. Data abundance is not a challenge faced by all regions of the world equally; nor is there equality of access to digital cultural heritage. So long as this remains the case, what is preserved and sustained offers only a partial view of the world’s heritage, tangible and intangible.

Sustainability planning in digital cultural heritage extends beyond mere technological obsolescence considerations to encompass a dynamic network of ‘infrastructures, people, financial, and managerial decisions that are performing a constant tug-of-war with one another while battling about the longevity of digital outputs’ (Sichani 2022, 318). It is necessary to approach systems and infrastructures ‘as a human and community asset in need of maintenance and support, rather than a technical artefact in need of service management’ (Smithies et al. 2019, para 20). By paying attention to the human-intensive nature of digital projects, aspects of skills development, capacity building and inclusivity, as well as continuous user/community engagement and aspects of legacy management, can be considered as key factors in sustainability planning (Edmond and Morselli 2020).

Environmental concerns

Moving from digital and technological fragility to the environmental aspect of sustainability, one may wonder how unwelcome the technological obsolescence of digital infrastructure is in the context of an environmental crisis. In our everyday lives, we generate vast amounts of digital garbage, including outdated hardware, obsolete devices and unused data. E-waste pollution has long been recognised as the flip side of digital preservation efforts for born-digital cultural assets, and is just one of the environmental challenges intertwined with the digital age. What might now be required is a ‘paradigm shift in digital preservation practice in the areas of appraisal, permanence, and availability’ (Pendergrass et al. 2019, 165).

The environmental impact of digital cultural heritage content is not limited to its end-of-life but extends throughout its usage. GLAM institutions rely heavily on information and communication technology, involving networks, hardware and software, not only when archiving digital content but also when providing access to their digital holdings. Doing anything with digital data – whether digitisation, data acquisition, documentation, processing, visualisation, archiving, modelling, developing 3D models and virtual reality experiences or devising digital forms of public engagement via social media or online streaming – involves using energy, storage, hardware and software. And there is always an environmental cost that is almost invisible to those of us asking for access to more datasets or commissioning new forms of advanced analysis through machine learning, that is, energy consumption in power-hungry data centres and networks, often powered by non-renewable energy sources. The more digital data we generate, store and use, the more the environmental impact of our endeavours intensifies. Advanced digital processes, including AI systems, create and use even more data, which requires greater energy for storage, processing and reuse, leading to a vicious cycle of increasingly detrimental impact on the environment. In particular, Generative AI systems face a critical ‘energy problem’ due to the significant computational demands at every stage of their lifecycle, from training models and fine-tuning to computing resources and energy-intensive infrastructure, including data centres (Bashir et al. 2024). The figures speak for themselves and the news is not promising: the technology sector could produce 14 per cent of global emissions by 2040 (The Guardian 2017) and the data centre industry (employed by major players such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS)) is responsible for 2–3 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.⁹ Finally, the International Energy Agency predicts that energy consumption by data centres will double between 2022 and 2026, reaching 1,000 TWh – approximately equivalent to Japan’s total energy usage¹⁰ – while the global volume of stored data doubles every four years.¹¹ Questions of value, as discussed in Chapter 4, become even more pressing when these are the consequences of high computation and ever-increasing data volumes.

Lastly, it is crucial to recognise that the environmental impact of digital technologies reflects deep-rooted and inequitable financial dynamics. The technological advancements of the Global North have caused significant environmental and human costs, particularly in socio-economically vulnerable areas of the Global South, reminding us that the climate impact of these technologies tells ‘a dark tale of colonialism, genocide, devastated ecologies, toxicity, extinctions, and a shameful legacy that will take more than decades to make right’ (Cubitt 2017, 10).

The UK is committed to reaching Net Zero by 2050, which means that total greenhouse gas emissions would be equal to the emissions removed from the atmosphere, with the aim of limiting global warming and resultant climate change.¹² The EU also has a goal to be climate-neutral by 2050 with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, an objective at the heart of the European Green Deal, and a legally binding target thanks to the European Climate Law, on top of national long-term strategies.¹³ However, environmental concerns and sustainability strategies are often overlooked in digital cultural heritage contexts, and when they are considered, they tend to be treated as an afterthought, focused on managing legacy projects in need of repair, obsolete infrastructures or devices and existing data in need of maintenance (Richardson 2022). These issues should instead be approached as strategic, long-term considerations, essential for sustainability. It is to be hoped that the national and international strategic commitments towards a transition to a climate-neutral society will be viewed as an opportunity and indeed urgent requirement for researchers and cultural heritage professionals to adopt more environmentally sustainable methods, approaches and decision-making processes that place sustainability frameworks at the centre of their practice. There will be a key role for initiatives such as the Climate Heritage Network (CHN), whose manifesto and action plan aim to bring together GLAMs, government agencies, NGOs, universities, businesses and other organisations committed to encouraging greater synergistic collaboration on climate action to re-orient climate policy, planning and action at all levels to account for every dimension of culture, from arts to heritage (Climate Heritage Network n.d.). Aiding professional bodies and research institutions in their ambitions to achieve Net Zero means that plans and frameworks should be in place that address the act of not preserving, and consequently of discontinuing, access to digital cultural heritage, in a world where human impact on the environment needs to be carefully monitored and regulated.

Notes

1.   Arts and Humanities Research Council 25 Years of Excellence and Impact, https://www.discover.ukri.org/AHRC-impact/index.html [accessed 1 August 2025].

2.   UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Programme, https://www.ukri.org/what-we-do/creating-world-class-research-and-innovation-infrastructure/digital-research-infrastructure/; ‘Major Research and Innovation Infrastructure Investment Announced’, https://www.ukri.org/news/major-research-and-innovation-infrastructure-investment-announced/ [accessed 1 August 2025].

3.   Flickr is a video- and image-sharing service, whose Flickr Commons was often used as a platform for the dissemination of image collections by cultural heritage institutions, https://www.flickr.com/ [accessed 1 August 2025].

4.   ‘Trusted Research Environment Service for England’, https://digital.nhs.uk/services/trusted-research-environment-service-for-england [accessed 30 January 2025].

5.   Integrated Data Service, https://integrateddataservice.gov.uk/ [accessed 30 January 2025].

6.   Smart Data Research UK, https://www.sdruk.ukri.org/about-smart-data-research/ [accessed 30 January 2025].

7.   Interestingly, this is not the end of the story. A 10 May 2010 capture of the URL reveals a NOF-digitise home page bearing a copyright date of 2009. It had disappeared again by 10 January 2016.

8.   SUCHO, https://www.sucho.org/ [accessed 30 January 2025].

9.   ‘Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks’, https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks#tracking [accessed 30 January 2025].

10.   ‘Electricity 2024: Executive Summary’, https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024/executive-summary [accessed 30 January 2025].

11.   ‘Big Data Statistics: How Much Data is There in the World?’ https://rivery.io/blog/big-data-statistics-how-much-data-is-there-in-the-world/ [accessed 30 January 2025].

12.   ‘The UK’s Plans and Progress to Reach Net Zero by 2050’, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9888/ [accessed 30 January 2025].

13.   ‘2050 Long-Term Strategy’, https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/climate-strategies-targets/2050-long-term-strategy_en [accessed 30 January 2025].