This collection consists of papers presented at DPASSH 2015: The 1st Annual Conference for Digital Preservation in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, organised by the Digital Repository of Ireland in Dublin, June 2015. These papers here are pre-print versions. Final versions have been published in a special double issue of New Review for Information Networking Vol. 20 Nos. 1-2, November 2015.

The Call for Papers, identifying themes, was as follows:

“Shaping our Legacy: Safeguarding the Social and Cultural Record”

On the last day of June of 1922, the western block of Dublin’s Four Courts exploded, engulfing the Irish Public Record Office in flames. As smoke billowed from the eighteenth-century construction and the fire brigade struggled to bring the flames under control, debris fell onto the surrounding Dublin streets, and the Irish Times reported that a priceless library was left in ashes. The fire, caused by the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, hit at the heart of government records, destroying hundreds of years of Irish history that had been housed centrally since the 18th century. A few days after the fire, the Provisional Government issued a notice asking citizens to return to public custody any and all of the burned fragments of the public record that had “blown to other districts.”

In the current digital age, our social and cultural record is also at risk, but its degradation occurs over time. Instead of burning rapidly, digital records are threatened by a slow-burning fire that can go undetected as a result of insufficient data management practices. Additionally, the preservation of our digital social and cultural heritage is subject to domain- and community-specific requirements. These issues demand that we reflect critically on the purpose of digital preservation, and ask fundamental questions about how requirements should shape our practices. Similar to the public appeal in 1922, we are looking for public, academic and industry engagement on the issue of digital preservation, to help identify the fragments that have been, or are in danger of being lost, as well as to build the digital preservation strategies that will shape and safeguard our public record.

To address the complexities of long-term digital preservation in the social and cultural realms, we are hosting the first Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DPASSH 2015) conference, titled “Shaping our Legacy: Safeguarding our Social and Cultural Record.” The conference will take place on June 25-26, 2015 at Croke Park, in Dublin, Ireland, and will include international keynote speakers, networking, expert panels, peer-reviewed papers, and posters.

Submissions are invited from all sectors and perspectives (academics, researchers, students, industry, cultural heritage institutions, preservation infrastructures, etc.) for a variety of presentation formats that critically reflect on all areas relating to digital preservation in the humanities and social sciences, arts, and cultural heritage sectors.
Conference themes include but are not limited to:

• Cultural Responsibility & Preservation: critical reflections on preservation, challenges in choosing what to preserve, digital curation, digital stewardship, archiving processes.
• People & Preservation: stakeholder engagement, community approaches, partnership building, education & training, knowledge transfer.
• Policy & Preservation: advocacy, national approaches, sustainability, open access, open data.
• Sharing & Preservation: content curation, contextual information and metadata, aesthetics of preservation, sharing of research data, user tools, crowdsourcing.
• Technology & Preservation: Technical challenges posed by datasets in arts/humanities/social sciences, digitisation vs. the born digital record, preservation infrastructures, software and tools.
• Trust & Preservation: TDRs, provenance, authenticity, certification, security, data protection, copyright, licensing.