"The Perils of Digital Preservation"

This article focuses on information that is "born digital" and the issues associated with digital preservation today. Many of these topics have been covered extensively before and beg for a solution. This article does provide some strategies to begin a set of standards, again, to decide what to preserve, how to access it, and how to store it.

"Born digital information has no physical original to refer back to."

"Digital preservation is increasingly driven by the need to give wider
access to information, and often by the commercial imperative to turn that access into a revenue stream.
Preservation strategies must include a comprehensive audit trail and will almost certainly bring the IT and archivist's functions closer together.
Strategies should include the establishment of selection criteria, and investment in standards-based technologies compliant, for example, with the Public Records Office standards for records management."

Ford, P. (2003). "The perils of digital preservation." Information World Review.
http://www.vnunet.com/information-world-review/features/2084000/perils-digital-preservation

Digital preservation: a time bomb for Digital Libraries by Margaret Hedstrom

"The purpose of preservation is to ensure protection of information of enduring value for access by present and future generations (Conway, 1990: 206). Libraries and archives have served as the central institutional focus for preservation, and both types of institutions include preservation as one of their core functions. In recent decades, many major libraries and archives have established formal preservation programs for traditional materials which include regular allocation of resources for preservation, preventive measures to arrest deterioration of materials, remedial measures to restore the usability of selected materials, and the incorporation of preservation needs and requirements into overall program planning."

"Digital preservation raises challenges of a fundamentally different nature which are added to the problems of preserving traditional format materials. By digital preservation, I mean the planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies necessary to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. I intentionally use the term "continuing" rather than "permanent" value to avoid both the absolutism and the idealism that the term "permanent" implies (O'Toole). My concept of digital preservation encompasses material that begins its life in digital form as well as material that is converted from traditional to digital formats.
Recording media for digital materials are vulnerable to deterioration and catastrophic loss, and even under ideal conditions they are short lived relative to traditional format materials. Although archivists have been battling acid-based papers, thermo-fax, nitrate film, and other fragile media for decades, the threat posed by magnetic and optical media is qualitatively different. They are the first reusable media and they can deteriorate rapidly, making the time frame for decisions and actions to prevent loss is a matter of years, not decades.
More insidious and challenging than media deterioration is the problem of obsolescence in retrieval and playback technologies"
The author continues on with a section on reserch and development of digital preservation formats including storage media, migration, conversion and management tools. Read more at
http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/hedstrom.html

The Digital Library Federation is committed to maintaining long-term access to the digital intellectual and scholarly record. They have a particular interest in practical initiatives and in research into most poorly understood areas.

In fall 2002, a small group of Digital Library Federation (DLF) members—spearheaded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—began the work of designing a central, shared registry of digital formats that all participating institutions may one day contribute to and use.

For more information and a list of other programs in the works please visit:

http://www.diglib.org/preserve.htm

Digital Dark Ages

I found a really interesting, pessimistic, but true, article on digital preservation efforts. Kuny outlines why he believes we are in the digital dark ages and ways to possibly remedy the issues facing digital preservation. It is agreed that the Internet has changed everything as far as information production, retrieval, storage, archiving and preserving, to name a few. Information professionals are not only concerned with these physical issues, but also on the impacts of the new technologies on society. Kuny (1997) says that "one important impact that these new technologies have on society is how we are to preserve the historic record in an electronic era where change and speed is valued more highly than conservation and longevity."(p. 1)

Kuny provides observations on the present environment of digital preservation to explain why we are living in what he calls the "digital dark age." Some of these are as follows:

• Enormous amounts of digital information are already lost forever.
• Many large data-sets in governments and universities world-wide have been made obsolete by changing technologies and will either be lost or subject to expensive "rescue" operations to save the information
• Unstable and unpredictable environment for the continuance of hardware and software over a long period of time represents a greater challenge than the deterioration of the physical medium
• Financial resources available for libraries and archives continue to decrease and will likely do so for the near future
• Increasingly restrictive intellectual property and licensing regimes will ensure that many materials never make it into library collections for preservation
• The challenge in preserving electronic information is not primarily a technological one, it is a sociological one.
• Corporate survival in the competitive capitalist democracy ensures the fundamental instability of hardware and software primarily because product obsolescence is key to corporate survival.

Kuny (1997) puts it quite bluntly by saying, "No one understands how to archive digital documents...Sustainable solutions to digital preservation problems are not available."(p. 4) We cannot archive the entire Internet. The key is selecting which digital resources to preserve and which ones not to preserve. To do this librarians and archivists must develop digital collection development and evaluation guidelines to assist in this process. Some other options discussed in this report are putting digital information on microfilm or printing out as documents on acid-free paper and then carrying out traditional preservation techniques. This, of course, is not an option for all digital materials.

The last issue that I will discuss from this article is the management of rights and access controls for digital objects. Kuny (1994) states that, "a library may have the rights to access and use electronic materials, but the right to preserve the materials may not be the same thing." (p. 8) Licensing and related issues are just another aspect of the complications concerned with digital preservation.

Kuny, T. (1997). "A digital dark ages? challenges in the preservation of electronic information" 63rd IFLA Council and General Conference.

http://www.ifla.org.sg/IV/ifla63/63kuny1.pdf