Digital preservation has significantly expanded over the past few decades,
renewing old and creating new challenges related to provenance, integrity,
completeness, and context in memory and preservation practices. In this
paper we explore how, perhaps counterintuitively, a more extensive digital
historical record offers greater opportunities to misrepresent reality. We
first review a set of concepts and socio-cultural approaches to memory and
preservation. We then focus on the multiplicity of digital memory and
preservation practices today, examining their limits, possibilities, and
tensions; specifically, we explore the challenges of decontextualized data,
personal versus institutional preservation, and ?outsider? digital
collections that are willingly and/or forcibly excluded from official
accounts. Through these discussions, we review examples of what we consider
good digital memory and preservation practices that take new approaches to
context and collaboration. Lastly, we explore the optimism inherent in
seeking to preserve human knowledge over the long term and to make it
accessible to all.