8. Digital Preservation

Key Concepts

definition
challenges
technical strategies
organizational
  strategies

additional reading

WHY IS DIGITAL PRESERVATION SO CHALLENGING?
Challenges are multi-faceted and can be grouped into two categories:

Technical Vulnerabilities
• Storage media, due to physical deterioration, mishandling, improper storage, and obsolescence.
• File formats and compression schemes, due to obsolescence or over-reliance on proprietary and unsupported file and compression formats.
• Integrity of the files, including safeguarding the content, context, fixity, references, and provenance.
• Storage and processing devices, programs, operating systems, access interfaces, and protocols that change as technology evolves (often with limited backward compatibility).
• Distributed retrieval and processing tools, such as embedded Java scripts and applets.

Organizational and Administrative Challenges
• Insufficient institutional commitment to long-term preservation
• Lack of preservation policies and procedures
• Scarcity of human and financial resources
• Varying (and asynchronous) stakeholder interests in the creation, maintenance, and distribution of digital image collections
• Gaps in institutional memory due to staff turnover
• Inadequate record keeping and administrative metadata
• Evolving nature of copyright and fair-use regulations that apply to digital collections

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