TCDL 2026

New Horizons: How APTrust Developed a Community-Centered Technical Roadmap Process for Digital Preservation
By: Melissa Iori

This presentation will discuss APTrust’s journey in creating a new technical roadmap planning process. APTrust is a consortium based at the University of Virginia, dedicated to digital preservation and providing preservation storage across multiple geolocations to a variety of academic and non-academic member institutions. In 2025, our aim was to develop a new technical roadmap planning process driven by direct feedback from our members. Our new process included a comprehensive survey, focus groups, and data analysis. We were able to use the analysis from this new, feedback-driven paradigm to produce a robust technical roadmap organized into software goals, infrastructure goals, and security and risk management goals. As Lead Developer at APTrust, I am excited to share our process and answer questions from the audience about developing a technical roadmap for a digital preservation organization.

Preserving the Scholarly Web: Portable Web Archives for ETDs
By: Mark Phillips & Lauren Ko

Since 2022, the University of North Texas Libraries has implemented a new approach to preserving web-based scholarship cited in Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). As with many institutions, UNT Libraries serves as the long-term repository for graduate research. For nearly 30 years, ETDs have included links to web content as part of the scholarly record. However, link rot and content drift mean that much of this cited material is now unavailable or altered, weakening the integrity of the research.

To address this growing issue, UNT Libraries developed a post-submission workflow that creates small, focused web archives for each ETD. URLs are extracted from submitted documents, crawled using a local instance of Browsertrix Crawler, and packaged into the portable WACZ (Web Archive Collection Zipped) format. These web archives are deposited alongside the ETD as supplemental files within the institutional repository. The repository interface signals the presence of archived web content and enables in-browser access through Webrecorder’s ReplayWeb.page.

This presentation introduces the concept of small, portable web archives as collection supplements, using UNT’s ETD program as a practical case study. We will share workflow design, tool choices, and implementation lessons, and highlight how similar approaches can help repository managers preserve web-based scholarship and enhance long-term access to locally held research materials.