Preserving Digital Materials

Digital preservation is an extremely important part of archives in the 21^st century. The need and desire to preserve history forever digitally is forever growing. The idea that just by scanning an image into a computer means that it will be forever intact excites a lot of people, but it is that easy? It is proving to be just the opposite, the more technologically advanced we become the harder it is to keep up with outdated files, and changing software formats.

            Brian Lavoie and Lorean Dempsey published an article, Thirteen Ways of Looking at… Digital Preservation, in this article they discuss many of the issues that face digital preservation are more than just ensuring that the software is kept up today but, “to look at digital preservation not just as a mechanism for ensuring bit sequences created today are renderable tomorrow, but as a process operating in concert with the full range of services supporting digital information environments, as well as the overarching economic, legal, and social contexts.”(Dempsey/Lavoie) This is a way of looking at what they refer to as “Digital Stewardship,” I have never really thought about the field in this sense.  

            As this practice grows and more it becomes not just a process in preservation but as its own important part of the digital world. “…The view that digital preservation is not an isolated process, but instead, one component of a broad aggregation of interconnected services, policies, and stakeholders which together constitute a digital information environment.” (Dempsey/Lavoie)

            One of the thirteen ways was to look at digital preservation as a selection process. Its just not possible to preserve everything within a repository, or every collection, it is the responsibly of the archivists to make the decision as to what should be digitally preserved. They discuss two different approaches to choosing what should be preserved while dealing with born digital files.

            The first is the “save now, preserve later” approach, this is only possible with born digital materials. It is the idea that by saving everything and then choosing at a later date what should be preserved. Digital storage is always declining in price, making this financially appealing, but assuring that you will be able to go back and preserve files from years before is never certain.

            The second strategy “selection” is a little more hands on than the previous approach but in the big picture made more sense to me. “Determining from the outset which digital materials should be preserved and taking steps to curate them throughout their lifecycle. The choice of which materials to preserve is a difficult one, and will depend on a number of factors, including institutional mission, cultural preferences, economic practicality, and risk management policies. The question will also hinge on the digital medium's impact on the scholarly and cultural record...is an e-mail discussion list, for example, part of the scholarly record, and if so, should it be preserved with as much care as the contents of a peer-reviewed journal?” (Dempsey/Lavoie)

            “Selection” can be applied born digital materials, as well as the selection of what physical items should be transferred to digital. Is it worth to take the time and money to taking a document and digitizing it?

            The article also addresses digital preservation as an ongoing activity. Before I was formally introduced to this aspect of archival practices I was under the impression that once it was preserved digitally one could just forget about it and move on to the next project, I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is where viewing digital preservation as a process not just a mechanism can really be seen. “More and more digital materials come under the stewardship of collecting institutions, preservation will become less like an event occurring at discrete intervals, and more like a process, proceeding relatively continuously over time. As a consequence, it will become more difficult to distinguish preservation activities from the routine, day-to-day management of digital materials.”(Dempsey/Lavoie)

            This article really opened up my eyes to the many aspects of digital stewardship, much more than just maintaining software, there is a whole other side to digital stewardship that exists much like traditional preservation.

“In this sense, the focus of digital preservation has shifted away from the need to take immediate action to "rescue" threatened materials, and toward the realization that perpetuating digital materials over the long-term involves the observance of careful digital asset management practices diffused throughout the information lifecycle.”(Dempsey/Lavoie)