Preserving digital heritage in libraries: challenges, strategies, and prospects for sustainable access

Libraries now hold a growing share of the cultural record in forms that did not exist a generation ago: born-digital manuscripts, archived websites, research data, digitised newspapers, audiovisual files and social media captures. Keeping these materials usable over time is harder than keeping paper usable, and the difficulty is not mainly technical. This article reviews scholarly and professional literature published between 2022 and 2026 on the preservation of digital heritage in libraries, with earlier standards and theory used only where they anchor current debate. Using a structured narrative synthesis, it examines what the recent literature says about the main challenges facing libraries, the strategies they are using in response, and the conditions under which access can be sustained. Four themes emerge. First, institutional resilience, including cybersecurity, funding continuity and staffing, now shapes preservation outcomes as much as file formats do. Second, legal and ethical constraints, from copyright litigation to Indigenous data governance, often decide what can be preserved and shown, regardless of technical capacity. Third, artificial intelligence is being adopted for description and discovery faster than the sector has developed norms for its use, and it raises new questions about authenticity and bias. Fourth, environmental cost has entered the conversation as a preservation concern in its own right. The article draws on a framework that combines the Open Archival Information System reference model, a sociotechnical view of stewardship, and care-based approaches to data governance. It concludes with recommendations for library managers, policymakers and researchers, and it identifies a pronounced gap in evidence from libraries in the Global South.