Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues invites submissions for a themed issue on Digital Preservation.

The scale and diversity of digital collections in national memory institutions has grown immensely over the past decades. The challenges of maintaining and preserving these collections for future generations have been recognized and addressed in various forms, and solution maturity at an international level is diverse. To reflect this diversity and share experiences across the international stage, we are seeking articles on practical implementation models for digital preservation, staffing and embedding digital preservation expertise, holistic and sustainable solutions, and the implications of local, national and collaborative strategies.

A process of double peer review will be applied. Abstracts are due Tuesday 1 November 2016 and the full manuscript for selected articles will be due Friday 31 March 2017. The themed issue will be published in Summer 2017.

Abstracts should be no more than 1000 words.

Full articles should be between 4000 and 7500 words long.
Short communications should be no more than 3000 words long.
Author guidelines are available at https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/alexandria/journal202510#submission-guidelines

Suggested topics include but are not limited to:
• Technical infrastructures to support large- or small-scale digital preservation
• Partnerships and consortia approaches to digital preservation
• Holistic digital preservation programmes
• Implementation of macro-level solutions
• Policy frameworks to enable digital preservation
• National digital preservation strategies and policies
• Challenges in funding and sustaining digital preservation
• Automated quality assurance and solutions for digital preservation actions
• Monitoring digital collections for obsolescence
• Digital collection profiling
• Preservation planning and delivery of preservation plans
• Active preservation of legacy digital collections
• Infrastructures to coordinate preservation planning over time
• Metadata standards and practices for digital preservation
• Approaches to organizational upskilling and training in digital preservation
• Sustainability of digital preservation toolsets
• Format assessments, risk management, and recommendations
• Pre-ingest processing and normalization
• Unique endeavours in digital preservation
• Lifecycle preservation solutions
• Lessons learned from implementation practices within a national library
• Digital preservation communication programmes
• Benchmarking and lessons learned from other national libraries’ digital preservation programmes

This is not a prescriptive list: Alexandria wishes to present the widest possible range of papers relating to digital preservation, including papers from the perspective of academic libraries, public libraries and other archiving institutions. All submissions make clear their collecting context and we particularly welcome submissions on new and emerging programmes within developing countries.

This themed issue will be edited by Maureen Pennock (Head of Digital Preservation at the British Library) and Libor Coufal (Assistant Director, Digital Preservation at the National Library of Australia). Queries about the suitability of a topic should be addressed in the first instance to the Journal Editor, Monica Blake (info@blakeinformation.com), or Assistant Editor, Lyn Robinson (L.Robinson@city.ac.uk).