Poets who draft on phones, publish experimental work on websites, or create poems that combine text, image and code face an invisible—but real—risk: the digital environments that create and display their work can disappear or change. That problem is not abstract. File formats, platform policies, obsolete media and scattered personal archives together threaten the survival of late 20th‑ and 21st‑century poems.
From pilot archive to a practical guide
Washington University Libraries in St. Louis aimed to address that gap with a multi‑year effort called Born‑Digital Poetry: Planning for the Future of Literary Archives. Funded through the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge program, the project combined hands‑on processing of a living poet’s archive, public programs and a poet‑facing handbook. The result: a downloadable resource called The Poet’s Guide to Digital Preservation and a searchable, documented pilot that demonstrates how archivists and poets can work together to stabilize born‑digital material.
The guide (released by WashU Libraries on April 28, 2026) lays out simple, immediately usable steps for creators: keep clear filenames and file inventories, preserve original source files alongside rendered versions, export text from platforms that do not offer archival exports, and gather account and platform metadata so future stewards can reconstruct context. The WashU team also assembled examples, templates and short checklists aimed at small presses and individual poets who often lack institutional technical support.
A poet’s archive as a testing ground
Rather than only theorize about digital stewardship, the project used a concrete pilot: the Modern Literature Collection at WashU has long collected the papers of living authors, and the library worked with the papers of poet and translator Mary Jo Bang to test its procedures. That approach let the project team confront everyday preservation issues—heterogeneous file types, drafts in cloud services, email and multimedia—while preserving the poet’s creative process as well as final texts.
The work was paired with an exhibition, Some days, everything is a machine: The Poetic Practices of Mary Jo Bang, which ran in the John M. Olin Library Ginkgo Reading Room from February 7 through April 12, 2026. The show traced Bang’s creative practice across analog and digital formats and made visible the kinds of material—handwritten notes, annotated proofs, image files and digital drafts—that archivists now need to manage.
Why it matters for poets, presses and libraries
Born‑digital materials present technical and curatorial challenges that differ from paper manuscripts. A single misplaced line break or a migrated file saved in an unfamiliar format can change a poem’s appearance or make it unreadable. Unlike printed books, which can survive for centuries in stable formats, digital works can depend on software, server policies or multimedia plugins that age out quickly. Preservation requires metadata, workflow decisions and storage systems; it also requires makers to make deliberate choices about how they keep and hand off files.
The WashU project addresses those needs on multiple levels. For poets it offers a low‑barrier checklist and export options. For small presses and literary journals—many of which operate on shoestring budgets—it supplies pragmatic recommendations for packaging deliveries from authors. And for repositories and special collections, the project provides a tested pipeline for acquiring, describing and providing controlled access to born‑digital creative material.
Modeling collaboration, not policing
Project leaders emphasize that preservation is collaborative. The most effective outcomes came when poets, archivists and technical staff worked together—poets articulate how they create and what matters to them; archivists document the technical environment and choose preservation actions that respect authorial intent. That ethic reduces the friction that can otherwise keep living creators from donating or documenting digital materials.
WashU’s work also adds to an emerging body of practice at research libraries and cultural institutions. Digital preservation specialists and organizations—such as the Library of Congress and the Digital Preservation Coalition—have long warned that born‑digital cultural heritage requires active stewardship. Initiatives that produce poet‑friendly guidance, and that openly share templates and examples, help make that stewardship practicable across institutions of different sizes.
What poets can do tomorrow
- Keep a simple “contents” file (a short manifest) listing files, formats and where they were created or published.
- Export texts from platforms (blogs, Substack, social media) in archival formats when possible, and save screenshots or capture pages if exports aren’t available.
- Store original source files (plain text, Word, InDesign exports) alongside rendered PDFs and any media assets.
- Record account metadata—platform names, usernames and the email tied to the account—so future stewards can trace provenance without exposing credentials.
- Talk with local archives, university libraries or small press partners about donation options and their digital intake workflows.
Those steps are modest but meaningful: they increase the likelihood that digital poems—whether minimalist text files, multimedia pieces or website‑based experiments—remain readable and discoverable a generation from now.
A small project with wide implications
Born‑digital poetry will not be preserved by chance. Projects like Washington University’s turn preservation from an abstract problem into practical guidance and tested processes that poets and institutions can adopt. By pairing a pilot archive with public outreach and an accessible guide, the project shows how cultural memory for contemporary literature can be defended without forcing creators to become technicians.
For poets worried that their work “lives” entirely on ephemeral screens, the message is simple and hopeful: with a few intentional steps—and a willingness to collaborate with libraries—today’s digital poems can become tomorrow’s readable heritage.
