At the very first meeting of the Australasia Preserves digital preservation community of practice in February 2018, there was discussion around the idea of developing “digital preservation carpentry” lessons. These lessons would be taught in the Library Carpentries style, focussing on hands-on activities and experimentation with tools to manage digital content for long-term preservation.

Throughout 2018 more discussion and activities revealed the importance of making sure we tightly coupled digital preservation concepts with tool experimentation, so that essential digital preservation elements such as authenticity and integrity could be clearly demonstrated. We also created a survey to find out what people were interested in learning most.

As a next step, a small group of us have put together some potential content for a digital preservation carpentry lesson. We are trialling this at a workshop as part of the 14th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC2019).