Digital preservation

Digital preservation matters because there are many risks to our digital materials. It matters because we need to provide access to these digital materials now and into the future. We need ongoing work to make this happen; we need digital preservation.

"Any digital object can be considered in scope for digital preservation: born digital or digitised, corporate or personal, innovative or routine. Digital preservation can encompass texts and images, databases and spreadsheets, vectors or rasters, programs and applications, desktop files and enterprise systems, email and social media, games, movies, music and sound, entire web domains and individual tweets. Digital collections can derive from laptops or desktops or smart phones; from tablets, souped-up servers or hulking great mainframes. They can be snapped at the end of a selfie stick or beamed from sensors deep in space; they can be generated by tills and cash machines, by satellites and scanners, by tiny sensitive chips and massive arrays. They can be stored in repositories or data centres or USB sticks. There is no digital object or system that is not provisionally within scope for digital preservation.

But digital materials - and the opportunities they create - are fragile even if they also have the capacity to be durable through replication. Digital platforms change and the long chains of interdependence on which they depend are complicated and fluid. Their longevity and utility is threatened where contents or contexts are lost: engagement and exploitation are enabled when digital materials endure. The greater the importance of digital materials, the greater the need for their preservation: digital preservation protects investment, captures potential and transmits opportunities to future generations and our own."

For more information on why digital preservation matters, please visit: https://dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/why-digital-preservation-matters 

Risks to digital materials range from technological to organisational and cultural. There are internal and external risks to consider. The rapid pace of technology and the growing rate of digital information (sometimes called the data deluge) are urgent risks that digital preservation must mitigate against. While not an exhaustive list, below are some of the risks to digital materials.

• Obsolescence Hardware, software and storage media are constantly being superseded by newer and better models. This means that digital materials are at risk of no longer being usable when the software and hardware they rely on become obsolete. When the storage media that digital materials are saved on becomes obsolete, recovery of the material can become difficult and costly.
• Transfer failure and corruption This is a high risk and transfer of digital materials happens often during its life. Often transfer failure is not discovered until it is too late to recover. Transfer failure can occur at any stage, including the copying of digital materials to backup tapes. System failure can also lead to the corruption of digital materials, not just transfer failures.
• Storage media failure Storage media often fails due to lack of refreshment policies. All storage media has a shelf life and must be refreshed regularly or failures can happen. This not only leads to corruption or complete loss of digital materials, but can cause a downtime in services while restores must happen from tape backups.
• Human error and inappropriate access (deletion, alteration, corruption, bad management) These are mistakes we cause and inappropriate access can lead to accidents like alteration or deletion. This is something that can be damaging when considering compliance and data protection issues. It is important to control access to content internally not just externally in order to prevent against human errors and compliance breeches.
• Non-compliance What do we have to comply with? It is a risk if we do not meet our legal obligations. This includes laws, policies (internal and external), and standards. Non-compliance may result in financial loss, loss of reputation and trust, which can mean that we become an undesirable repository for material so that donors and vendors may look elsewhere.
• Institutional risk Lack of funding and political climate can be at risk. There is also a risk using third parties for preservation services as they can go out of business.