Abstract / topic summary
We often talk about preservation infrastructure in technical terms: storage, tools, workflows, and formats. But what about leadership, governance, and people?
This presentation shares an updated version of a peer-reviewed short paper accepted to iPRES 2026, based on a governance consultation at the Centre for Computing History (CCH), a small independent museum and charity in Cambridge. The presentation explores how leadership design, governance clarity, workforce sustainability, volunteer dependency, and operational infrastructure directly shape an institution’s ability to sustain stewardship of digital and hardware-dependent collections.
The presentation argues that organisational resilience is itself a form of preservation infrastructure. This perspective may be especially relevant for smaller institutions operating under financial and staffing constraints, but also raises broader questions for the digital preservation community about how we define preservation readiness and sustainability.
Speaker summary
Caylin Smith is Head of Digital Preservation at University of Cambridge Libraries and Archives, where she leads the development and delivery of new services for digital collection management. She is also a Trustee of the Centre for Computing History and a Deputy Editor for Archives and Records, the journal of the Archives and Records Association.
