Digital Preservation Is a Wide World
Digital preservation is also important for museums and national libraries that are digitizing physical collections. The digital versions of these cultural artifacts are a long-term record of human heritage.
In addition, many digital artifacts are created at universities for teaching purposes and research. In the arts, the use of born-digital works is increasing. In the commercial world, hospitals have electronic patient records and financial institutions have key business data.
Such collections of high-value digital information should be preserved for the long term.
Preservation Is More Than Storage
There is a broad spectrum of preservation approaches. The National Digital Stewardship Alliance publishes “Levels of Digital Preservation,” which shows four levels of preservation for each of five key categories.
Some people think that if they have more than one copy they are in good shape. But that is far from satisfactory from a preservation viewpoint. Multiple copies in geographically distributed locations under multiple different governances are needed to avoid a single point of failure. And there must be a way to validate that the preserved bits remain healthy and are not victims of bit rot or other mishaps. Finally, there must be excellent security to avoid inadvertent or hostile access to the content and damage to or unauthorized use of the data.
Digital Preservation Is Not Free
There are costs related to preserving digital content for the long term. The beneficiaries of long-term preservation are authors and readers. In the scholarly community, the costs are borne by publishers and university libraries, who in effect act as proxies for authors and readers.
Digital content is becoming more dynamic and complex. Publications have developed as the Web has evolved. Authors are creating works that integrate multimedia, third-party features, and real-time functionality. Some of these features are a challenge for a preservation system. If the content is ever-changing, what should be preserved?
Preservation systems confront these challenges and collaborate with publishers, libraries, and authors to address them. The Mellon Foundation supports a few projects that aim to improve our understanding of the technical, operational, and financial aspects of these new requirements. Guidelines for authors are needed so they can be aware of what works versus what might be unsupportable.
The goal is a sustainable, robust, integrated, and heterogeneous environment that ensures that high-value content will not disappear and will always be available for users.
About CLOCKSS
The CLOCKSS Archive is a leading long-term digital preservation system for scholarly literature.
A not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization governed by libraries and publishers, CLOCKSS has twelve copies of all of its preserved content at leading academic libraries around the world. CLOCKSS uses the open source LOCKSS software to ensure the validity of the bits, with its unique polling-and-repair capability. CLOCKSS preserves 32 million digital journal articles, 85,000 books, and an evolving collection of supplementary materials and metadata. The archive is growing by 4 to 5 million items each year.
Disclaimer: This is to inform readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the article belong solely to the author, and do not reflect the views of Amnet.
Copyright © 2020 Amnet. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to John Purcell, Executive Editor- Amnet, addressed “Attention: Permissions” and email it to: [email protected]
