The Digital Curation Exchange, commonly abbreviated to DCE, was an online meeting point for people working with digital collections, digital preservation, research data and professional education. References to its former website survive in academic library guides, research papers, conference records and preservation resource lists. Those references are evidence of the role a shared web portal can play: even after a site becomes unavailable, institutions may still need the resources and conversations it once brought together.
This page documents the historical Digital Curation Exchange, points readers towards surviving primary sources and explains how its subject matter connects with digital preservation practice today. It is a new, independent editorial record published by TwoSquares, not an official continuation of the original DCE or a claim to represent its former contributors.
Why was a digital curation exchange needed?
Digital collections cross organisational and disciplinary boundaries. An archivist receiving a hard drive, a librarian supporting research data, a museum curator preserving interactive work and a university teaching digital preservation face overlapping technical questions but may work in separate professional communities.
What file formats have been received? Which preservation tools are appropriate? How should access copies be created? Who records the context in which a digital object was produced? Which training resources are dependable? Shared knowledge resources can reduce unnecessary duplication and make technical guidance easier to discover.
That is the context in which the DCE appeared. Contemporary references connect it with the professional exchange of digital curation guidance and with the Closing the Digital Curation Gap initiative. The latter involved the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the US Institute of Museum and Library Services and partners in the United Kingdom. Its published goals included improving the flow of practical knowledge between research, education and small or medium-sized cultural heritage organisations.
The surviving record does not establish that every file formerly hosted by the DCE is still available or that all archived content may be republished. We therefore distinguish a historical reference, an accessible original publication and a newly written explanatory resource.
Related initiatives and notable resources
Closing the Digital Curation Gap
The programme was designed to address the difference between developments in digital preservation research and the resources available to practitioners. Rather than assuming every institution could build an advanced preservation infrastructure, it considered the needs of organisations with limited staff, budget and specialist skills. Read our historical overview of Closing the Digital Curation Gap, with links to the original funder documentation.
Education across professional boundaries
The workshop Spanning the Boundaries of Digital Curation Education, held on 22-23 September 2010 in Vienna in connection with iPRES 2010, considered ways for educators and practitioners to share teaching materials and coordinate activities. The original event is referenced by researchers and by the Library of Congress. Our workshop record provides verified details and context.
Digital forensics in collecting institutions
Links from university and archive resources point to Martin Gengenbach's 2012 master's paper, “The Way We Do It Here”: Mapping Digital Forensics Workflows in Collecting Institutions. The research addressed how digital forensic techniques could fit existing collecting-institution workflows. We provide a research guide and an individual bibliographic record directing readers to identifiable research sources.
Tools, registries and shared infrastructure
The former DCE linked to preservation tool information. Today, a relevant, actively maintained place to begin is COPTR, a community-owned registry of tools and workflows. Its development responded in part to the duplication of tool lists spread across separate websites. See our guide to digital preservation tools.
Cross-national alignment
The January 2013 Amsterdam workshop Aligning Digital Preservation across Nations brought together practitioners concerned with collaborative planning and shared preservation challenges. Read our event and research record, which also links to surviving conference documentation.
How to use this resource responsibly
If you followed an old citation to the DCE, begin with the exact subject of the original link. For a conference programme, use an event record. For a thesis, use the author's research record or authorised repository. For tools, consult the current community registry rather than a static legacy list. Where the original item cannot be located or its rights are uncertain, do not treat a modern article as a verbatim replacement.
Our research library maintains bibliographic records for important DCE-linked documents, including work by Martin Gengenbach, Sheila Corrall and Paul Wheatley. This approach provides useful context without implying that TwoSquares wrote, commissioned or owns those papers.
Why this history still matters
Digital preservation is vulnerable to a recurring paradox: the guidance on how to preserve digital material can itself disappear from the web. Links in a university reading list may outlive the website they point to. Resources scattered between personal websites, project portals and institutional servers are difficult to maintain as research funding, staff and hosting arrangements change.
The lesson is not that every defunct website needs a decorative replica. It is that lasting access depends on metadata, rights information, discoverable source records and maintainable links. The more carefully these are recorded, the easier it becomes to make old knowledge useful again.
Questions about the former Digital Curation Exchange
Is this the original DCE website?
No. This is an independent historical and editorial record on TwoSquares. It does not impersonate the former DCE, its project partners or its contributors.
Can I still access papers formerly linked from the DCE?
Some papers have surviving copies or records in university and research repositories. Others require further archive research or permission before redistribution. See the research library.
Can old DCE citations be updated?
For an academic publication, prefer linking to an author's primary repository or an authoritative document identifier. A modern historical record can be useful context, but it should not replace an available original scholarly source.
Are you affiliated with UNC, the Library of Congress or the Digital Curation Centre?
No affiliation or endorsement is implied. Those organisations are cited because their public documents help verify the historical record.
Original source material
- IMLS announcement: International Collaboration to Close the Digital Curation Gap
- IMLS grant record LG-05-09-0040-09
- UNC: Christopher (Cal) Lee
- DCC: 2013 conference workshops
- COPTR: About the community registry
For assistance rebuilding a vanished research or project website, see legacy website restoration and digital archiving.