Digital preservation

The formal activity of ensuring access to digital information for as long as necessary. It requires policies, planning, resource allocation (funds, time, people) and appropriate technologies and actions to ensure accessibility, accurate rendering and authenticity of digital objects.

A "lifecycle management" approach to digital preservation is taken, where action is done at regular intervals and future activity is planned. This includes policies and recommendations for appraising and selecting digital information to preserve, acknowledging resources are finite.

- defined by the Oxford Bodleian Library

There are two different kinds of digital preservation:

• bit level preservation is not full preservation but is the foundational building block necessary before logical digital preservation can take place. It is a term used to denote a very basic level of preservation of the digital object as it was submitted. (literally preserving the bits forming a digital object).
• logical preservation is the aspect of preservation management that is concerned with ensuring the continues usability of meaningful information content, by ensuring the existence of a usable manifestation of the digital object. Sometimes referred to as format preservation or active preservation, it is comprised of three stages:
  • Characterise: understanding what digital materials are in the repository
  • Plan: decision-making part based on the information gathered from characterisation. This will identify threats to continued availability and accessibility, and to plan the actions that will be taken for at risk digital materials.
  • Act: putting things into action and this should be a mechanistic process as all of the intellectual thinking was done as the plan stage

Digital curation involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to digital files throughout their lifecycle—not just at the end of their active lives. This active management of digital files reduces threats to their long-term value and mitigates the risk of digital obsolescence. Digital curation includes digital preservation, but the term adds the curatorial aspects of: selection, appraisal and ongoing enhancement of the object for reuse.

It is commonly used in the science and social sciences for research data and is often being replaced with research data management, especially when referring to active digital files.

Digital archiving is often used interchangeably with digital preservation in archives. It has two main definitions:

1. The process of storage, backup and ongoing maintenance as opposed to strategies for long-term digital preservation (DPC Handbook). This definition is often used by computing professionals.

2. the long-term storage, preservation and access to information that is "born digital" (created and disseminated primarily in electronic form) or for which the digital version is considered to be the primary archive (D-Lib magazine). This is the definition primary used by archivists and librarians.

It is important to recognize and understand both definitions of the term, as well as be aware of the audiences that use this term differently. Knowing your audience will help you understand what definition to follow - when it doubt, ask.