Every day, more of our creative lives unfold in the digital world. Artists design in code, photographers work in pixels, musicians compose through algorithms, and designers build immersive environments that exist only on screens. At the V&A, this shift is transforming how we collect, conserve, and care for our national collection of art, design and performance.
On World Digital Preservation Day, we join a global community of archives, libraries, and museums working to ensure that today’s digital creativity survives for the future. The theme for 2025, “Why Preserve?,” goes to the heart of what we do: because without preservation, digital heritage is lost not in centuries, but sometimes in a single hardware update or software patch.
What is digital preservation?
Digital preservation is the active management of digital materials so that they remain accessible, authentic and usable for as long as they are needed.
Unlike a sculpture or a painting, a digital artwork or record can become unreadable simply because the hardware or software it depends on no longer exists. A file on a floppy disk, a video encoded in an obsolete format, or an app written for an early iPhone can all fall silent without intervention.
Digital preservation tackles this challenge through a combination of technical, curatorial and conservation practices: capturing at-risk data, documenting how it was created, migrating files to stable formats, and recreating the environments in which they can be experienced again. At its simplest, it’s about preventing loss. At its most ambitious, it’s about keeping digital culture alive.
Why it matters
The V&A’s digital collections tell stories about how we live now, from interactive installations and mobile apps to architectural models, research datasets, and the museum’s own born-digital design archives. Preserving these materials safeguards not just the artworks themselves, but the ideas, processes and technologies that shaped them.
Digital preservation also protects the museum’s institutional memory, ensuring that research, exhibition design, and creative collaborations remain accessible to future generations. It reduces risk, legal, financial and operational, and directly supports the V&A’s wider digital transformation strategy.
Most importantly, it’s about trust. Audiences and researchers rely on museums to hold knowledge securely and to make it available over time. Digital preservation underpins that trust by ensuring that what we collect today will still be there tomorrow – authentic, verifiable, and usable.
What the V&A is doing now
Over the past year, the V&A has moved decisively from strategy to action. Several interconnected initiatives are laying the foundation for a sustainable digital future.
1. The Digital Conservation Studio
Located within the Conservation Department, the Digital Conservation Studio is where preservation meets conservation. It provides a controlled environment for working directly with digital and software-based artworks, archive and corporate digital information, analysing their code, recreating their operating environments, and planning for long-term access. Phase One of the Studio is now complete, with several artworks already stabilised and prepared for future exhibition. Next steps include integrating preservation software into our digital workstation and developing procedures for ongoing digital conservation, establishing the V&A as one of the museums in the world with an active digital conservation facility.
2. The Removable Asset Migration Project (RAMP)
Across the museum, thousands of files remain locked on ageing CDs, DVDs, and hard drives, including collection assets, born-digital archives and corporate information. RAMP tackles this head-on by systematically identifying, recovering, and securing content from these fragile carriers before it’s too late. Each recovered file is checked for authenticity, documented, and transferred into secure, managed storage. Recruitment for a new Digital Conservator will expand this work in early 2026, ensuring that valuable material, from design prototypes to digital photographs, is safely brought into the museum’s care.
3. Preserving mobile and app-based artworks
Some of today’s most innovative design works live on mobile devices; apps, interactive installations, and hybrid experiences. Yet these are among the most fragile forms of digital creativity, dependent on rapidly changing operating systems and hardware. The museum’s recent white paper on preserving iOS and Android apps sets out a practical framework for capturing, documenting, and emulating these works, ensuring that artists’ original intentions can be understood even as technology evolves.
4. The VARI Digital Research Repository
Through the V&A Research Institute (VARI), we are building the foundations of a digital research repository to preserve and share the museum’s research outputs – from datasets and publications to time-based media studies. This project aligns with international FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and with funder requirements for open research data. When implemented, it will make the V&A’s research more visible, discoverable, and permanently accessible as part of the national record of scholarship.
5. Governance and policy
Behind every technical intervention sits a robust governance framework. The museum’s Digital Preservation Policy and updated Acquisition Procedures now define how digital objects are acquired, stored, and managed across departments. Clear guidelines are emerging for questions such as “what counts as a digital collection object?” and “how should research data be preserved?” – giving staff a shared language and consistent practice across the institution
Working together
Digital preservation is not a single project but a shared responsibility. It connects curators, conservators, IT specialists, and researchers across the museum, and links the V&A to a global network of partners, including the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), Tate, LACMA, UCL, and others. Through these collaborations, the V&A contributes to international advocacy and helps shape emerging standards for digital cultural heritage.
Looking ahead
In the coming months, the museum will launch a Digital Preservation SharePoint site and internal Champions Network to support training, communication, and staff engagement. Together, these initiatives will help make digital preservation an embedded part of how the V&A works, not a niche technical task, but a cornerstone of caring for the nation’s creative memory.
In addition, we will be publishing regularly online about our challenges, successes and failures, to keep you, our audience, engaged with the evolving work of digital preservation. It is a journey we hope you will take with us.
World Digital Preservation Day is a reminder that digital preservation is about people as much as technology. It’s about the artists whose works might otherwise disappear, the researchers who rely on access to trusted data, and the audiences who expect their digital heritage to endure.
At the V&A, we’re proud to play our part in keeping the future in focus – ensuring that the creativity of today can still inspire the generations of tomorrow.
