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What Is Digital Preservation?

Digital preservation is the process of maintaining and preserving access to digital materials over time. It addresses issues like hardware and software obsolescence, file corruption, and ensuring organizational sustainability and skills development to properly manage digital assets. Digital preservation aims to retain important institutional information by addressing compliance needs, enabling information reuse, maintaining good governance practices, and documenting historically significant events. It involves selecting important digital records like documents, emails, databases and multimedia for long-term preservation and retaining necessary metadata and context to allow future understanding and use.

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29 views2 pages

What Is Digital Preservation?

Digital preservation is the process of maintaining and preserving access to digital materials over time. It addresses issues like hardware and software obsolescence, file corruption, and ensuring organizational sustainability and skills development to properly manage digital assets. Digital preservation aims to retain important institutional information by addressing compliance needs, enabling information reuse, maintaining good governance practices, and documenting historically significant events. It involves selecting important digital records like documents, emails, databases and multimedia for long-term preservation and retaining necessary metadata and context to allow future understanding and use.

Uploaded by

Moni Terán
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Digital Preservation Topical Note 1

What is Digital Preservation?


Digital Preservation is the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital
materials for as long as necessary. Digital records are at risk from technology-related issues such as
hardware and software obsolescence and bit rot, but IT solutions, such as reliable digital storage and back
-up, are only a part of the bigger picture. Digital Preservation addresses a wide range of organisational
and resourcing issues too. These include risk assessment, sustainability planning, skills development and
change management. As well as maintaining the original digital files, it is also important to capture
information about the file’s context and any relevant documentation as these will allow future users to
open and understand the files.

Key Term: Obsolescence Key Term: Bit Rot


Technology moves rapidly, new versions of software and Bit rot is the gradual decay
hardware are regularly released with no guarantees that it will of storage media where the
be compatible with older systems and files. File formats, individual bits (1s and 0s) of
software packages and storage media can all become obsolete digital files ‘flip’ leading to
quickly and this is one of the key issues addressed by digital a corrupted or inaccessible
preservation. file.

Why do we do Digital Preservation?


We preserve digital records to retain important information about the
work carried out by our organisation. This can be motivated by issues
such as:
• Legislative and regulatory compliance
• Efficiency and financial gains from information reuse
• Good governance
• Documenting events of historical significance
• Retaining corporate memory

This Digital Preservation Topical Note was produced with the kind support of the National Archives of Ireland
What can be considered a digital record?
Digital records for preservation can exist as any type of digital file. This can include: text documents,
spreadsheets, emails, databases, images, websites, audio, video and social media posts. To qualify as a
digital record a file should provide evidence of an event, transaction or decision that needs to be
documented.

Can’t we just print it out?


Digital material can often only be archived well in digital form: there is no non-digital equivalent that
retains all the essential information and functionality. For example, a print out of a spreadsheet loses all
annotations and formula, and without this important information future users may not be able to
understand the contents. This type of embedded information is also often key to a document’s value as
evidence .

Does everything need to be preserved?


Not all digital files produced need to be retained as archival
records. The question is less what can be preserved but more,
what should not be lost? Selection and disposal are significant
aspects of any digital management activity. Consideration should
be given to whether a digital file acts as a record of an important
event, transaction or decision and these records should be
selected for preservation.

Key Term: Metadata


Metadata is information which describes significant aspects of a digital record and is required
successfully to interpret, manage, and preserve the records over time. This often includes
important contextual, historical, and technical information.

How can I help?


It has been consistently proven that preserving digital material is more
successful and easier to do if best practice is followed from the point of
creating the file. Simple steps to aiding preservation efforts include: creating
files in preservation-friendly formats with consistent file names (see note on
File Naming and Formats), making sure files are stored in the appropriate
location (see note on Back-up and Storage), understanding which files will be
required for preservation as records (see notes on Preserving the
Authoritative Record, Preserving Email, Preserving the Web), and that any
necessary accompanying metadata and documentation is also captured.

For more information on Digital Preservation visit the DPC Website: https://www.dpconline.org
All Illustrations by Jørgen Stamp, digitalbevaring.dk CC BY 2.5 Denmark

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