Efforts to Develop Systems for Digital Preservation

Courtesy: University of Alberta-Library

As defined by Wikipedia, digital preservation is a series of organizational activities to safeguard sustained access to digital resources for as long as conceivable.  Regardless of the challenges of continual technological changes that take place on a rapid scale, digital preservation ensures that content will be accessible nonetheless.  Digital preservation encompasses many formats, including: photographs, documents, visual, audio, etc.  This is such a huge concept, that many governmental organizations are taking massive steps to contribute to digital preservation; The Library of Congress and the British Library are two governmental organizations leading the way in preserving for the future.

Science Daily, an online magazine editorial, suggests that there are fundamental dilemmas to the notion of preservation.  The article asks its reader to contemplate, what will survive 50 years from now, a framed photograph or a 10-megabyte digital photo file on your computer’s hard drive?   Jerome P. McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign points out that the photograph will yellow and fade over the time span, while technology 50 years from now will more than likely be unable to read a document saved on today’s technological device.  McDonough suggests that the issue at present is correlated to the abundance of information we have now and continue to obtain.  McDonough suggests that the real concern is, “If we can’t keep today’s information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture.”  To put into perspective the argument at hand, magnetic tape, which stores most of the world's computer backups, can degrade within a decade.  Another issue McDonough points out is that we are putting a lot of money into preserving data that will be unobtainable, at the rate technology is evolving, in just a couple of decades.  He suggests that “in order to avoid a digital dark age we need to figure out the best way to keep valuable data alive and accessible by using a multi-prong approach of migrating data to new formats, devising methods of getting old software to work on existing platforms, using open-source file formats and software, and creating data that’s “media-independent.”  With software companies developing their products on specific platforms to ensure their market well being, it has been a tremendous burden to facilitate digital preservation.  However, many countries, such as: Norway, Brazil and the Netherlands have mandated the use of non-proprietary file formats for government business, accelerating the demand for non-proprietary file formats from developing companies.

In addition to Wikipedia’s definition of digital preservation, Digital Preservation Europe lends examples to the actions of preserving through digital mediums, including: managing the object names and locations, updating the storage media, documenting the content and tracking hardware and software changes to make sure objects can still be opened and understood.  According to DPE, “long-term” preservation is only five years because of the rapid obsoleteness of technology.  Among the widely known reasons and challenges in the historical community for digital preservation are other benefits to preserving what we have: legal, national legal frameworks expect the documentation of business matters for future use if needed, along with the need to preserve them for protection from litigation and for accountability purposes; the information can be utilized to observe and identify long-term trends; protecting investment, since so much time and money was spent in producing works in need of digital preservation; and of course, the ability to reuse the works. 

Courtesy: digitalcollaboration.wordpress.com

In Conrad de Aenlle’s article Digital Archivists, Now in Demand, he explores the growing needs for digital preservationists in his interview with Jacob Nadal, preservation officer at UCLA.  Nadal confirms that there is an expanding need for people interested in preserving history.  He explains that he fell into his career by accident when he was a student at Indiana University, working for preservation projects.  Though it is true that the knowledge of information technology is essential to the duties of historic preservationists, it is possible to have “too much” tech background.  Victoria McCargar, a preservation consultant in Los Angeles and a lecturer at UCLA and San José State University explains that IT professionals usually solve issues of preservation by expanding storage, where the field is more in need of knowing what to preserve and avoiding “waxy buildup” — a lot of useless files that make it hard to find the good stuff.  McCargar predicts that along with the 20,000 current digital preservationists, she expects the field to triple in the coming decade.  She also notes that along with the growing demand for preservationists is the expected increasing pay.  As pay would vary from job to job, she notes that you can always expect to make more in the corporate world, though Nadal stresses he wouldn’t leave his work at a reputable academic institution for higher pay.

Student and faculty at the University of Michigan School of Information formed the Finding Aids Next Generation (FANG) Research Group. The goal of FANG was to rethink and re-imagine the exhibition and functionality of online finding aids using Web 2.0 technologies to provide better access to primary sources on the web. FANG’s research led to UM’s Bentley Historical Library’s Polar Bear Collection, a group of collections related to the event officially called the American Intervention in Northern Russia, 1918–1919.  The collections document a seemingly forgotten event in the aftermath of World War I.  After the research team selected the Polar Bear Expedition Collections as their data set they began the planning and designing stages. “The lead programmer started the process to select the system, and other team members began designing the interface and analyzing the existing metadata.”  The FANG research team was inspired by sociotechnical systems and then selected the following set of features and functionalities to enhance the finding aid: bookmarks, ability to add comments, link paths or “footprints”, browsing, searching, and the ability to create profiles.  Encompassing digitized photographs, letters, journal entries, maps, military records, oral histories and a motion picture film, the sixty-five fully digitized collections are the most important feature of the Polar Bear Expedition website.  An online survey disclosed that 5 out of 6 participants thought the digitized resources were very important, and only 1 respondent found them very unimportant.  The authors suggest that the importance of The Polar Bear Expedition site is “a virtual archives in the sense that it is self-contained and provides the ability to interact with other users or archivists. The digitized resources help to create this sense of place in the site because of their proximity to the descriptions.”  

In the LOC’s The Signal-Digital Preservation blog, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) aims at fine-tuning the digital preservation system by developing a tiered set of recommendations for prioritizing enhancements to digital preservation systems.  Their goals are to provide a basic tool for helping organizations manage and mitigate digital preservation risks.  Each level starts to address a new area. Level 1 addresses the most probable hazards in the short term. As you advance through the levels they address mitigation of risks over the long-term.  This is a recent development, as of November 20, 2012, taking hundreds of recommendations from posts.  View the project here.     
Digital preservation has taken leaps and bounds in the the direction of coming up with methods to preserve digital history without the constant need to re-preserve, wasting valuable time and money.  Only time will tell us whether or not these efforts have been successful.