Digital Preservation: DP Overview

"Saving" a file is keeping it locally for an undetermined time as it was last saved.

"Preserving" a file is converting a file into an ideal preservation format, verifying its integrity, and storing it in multiple locations with low-access and high-security measures in place to ensure continued access.

• Access to digitized and born-digital objects is technology-dependent
• Technologies can fail or become obsolete
• Less accessibility helps increase the odds of maintaining integrity
• Preservation is the solution to increasing the ability to access material in the future

See Brian Lavoie's DPC Technology Watch Report on the OAIS reference model for detailed information.

Digital Preservation Handbook

Digital Preservation Coalition

NDSA Levels of Preservation

Format Obsolescence: Assessing the Threat and the Defenses

by David S. Rosenthal

Northeast Document Conservation Center

List of digital preservation initiatives

"Digital preservation is the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary. Digital preservation is defined very broadly [...] and refers to all of the actions required to maintain access to digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological and organizational change."

--Digital Preservation Handbook, 2nd Edition, http://handbook.dpconline.org/, Digital Preservation Coalition © 2015.

Additional videos:

Digital Preservation at the Library of Congress: Past, Present and Future

Digital Preservation and the Nuclear Disaster: An Animation (series)

Over time, preservation maintains:

• Authenticity: establishing a record's identity and integrity to ensure that it's "free from tampering or corruption."¹
• Identity: "the distinguishing character of the record"¹
• Integrity: a record's "wholeness and soundness" that maintains that the record is "complete and uncorrupted in all its essential respects"¹

Maintenance occurs through preventative measures, including:

• Assigning unique identifiers
• Normalizing content
• Regular fixity checks and virus checks
• Regular hardware inspections, fixes, and migrations

Ideal format properties:

• Non-proprietary file formats: formats that are free and open-source
• Large/stable user community: provides documentation and support
• Lossless compression: "A mechanism for reducing file sizes that retains all original data"²

¹InterPARES Authenticity Task Force Report. (2001).

²Digital Preservation Handbook, 2nd Edition, Digital Preservation Coalition © 2015.

Below are a handful of preservation policies held by various libraries.

• Virginia Tech
• Duke University
• Yale University
• Columbia University Libraries
• Dartmouth College
• HathiTrust Digital Library
• The British Library
• ALA Preservation Policy
• MetaArchive Cooperative's Preservation Policy Guide