Between 2-4 April 2025, I attended the very first edition of the Born-digital Collections, Archives and Memory conference, together with my colleague from the Algorithmic Archive Project, Pierre Marshall. The conference was co-organised by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme at The British Museum, The British Library and Aarhus University. This international event offered the unique opportunity to bring together academics and practitioners from diverse disciplines, career paths and backgrounds to explore the transformative impact of born-digital cultural heritage. The diverse range of research, methodologies, and practices presented in this year’s programme offered valuable insights and reflections, particularly relevant to the Algorithmic Archive project and its goal of developing sustainable, persistent approaches to preserving born-digital heritage created on the web, especially on social media platforms.

The inspiring opening keynote by Dorothy Berry, Digital Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, highlighted the vital importance of preserving ephemeral and fragile forms of born-digital heritage (such as social media) —many of which have increasingly replaced traditional modes of memory-making, also drawing attention to the pressing need for a deeper understanding of what and how born-digital memory should be preserved. In particular, she stressed the need to record the “full context” in which born-digital records and materials were embedded before being collected and included in specific collections. However, she also highlighted the challenges many memory institutions face due to uneven resource distribution, an issue that may hinders both the development and long-term sustainability of innovative preservation efforts.

Given the richness of the BDCAM25 program, it is incredibly difficult to summarise the many takeaways from the three-day conference. Nevertheless, it is worth highlighting sessions such as the one exploring the history, socio-technical dynamics and research conducted on corpora from platforms such as Usenet; the important reflections stemmed from a study conducted by Rosario Rogel-Salazar and Alan Colín-Arce exploring the presence of feminist organisations in web archives; and the research conducted by Dr Andrea Stanton exploring Palestine and the concept of Palestinian heritage through the analysis of accounts and hashtags on Instagram. 

Particularly valuable insights came also from Dr Kieran Hegarty’s paper, which explored the challenges posed by the unpredictable and frequent changes to platform design and policies, underscoring how this significantly influence what is included in web archives and how the material is made available.

Overall, the conference provided a valuable opportunity to learn about new research and to network with scholars and practitioners from around the globe. During lunch and coffee breaks, I had insightful conversations with several delegates about the challenges of preserving born-digital materials, particularly data generated on social media platforms. We exchanged ideas and reinforced the importance of developing shared practices to safeguard these resources. This theme strongly resonated in the closing session, which brought together voices from diverse career paths and regions to reflect on the current state of born-digital archives, collections, and memory, and to identify future directions.
Among the key takeaways were the need to foster data literacy and building digital citizens from a young age, as well as the importance of connecting with activists and minority communities to help them tell and preserve their stories.