Page 65 - Building Digital Libraries

CHAPTER 4

a cultural value that permeates every aspect of an organization’s digital
strategy. And to be clear, this is hard. Digital preservation is difficult. It’s
more than difficult—in many ways, it’s impossible when viewed in the same
light as preservation within an analog space. It requires a significant shift
for cultural organizations that have traditionally focused on the preserva-
tion of a physical object to move to a digital space where preservation is
focused on the long-term curation of an object’s digital content and digital
representation.

What Is Digital Preservation?

Let’s start with what preservation is not—backing up data is not a preser-
vation plan. This is often a point that needs to be clarified for many in the
information technology space, since data backups are the way in which IT
staff protect data on a network. Data backups are an integral part of a digital
preservation plan, but they cannot be the preservation plan. The difference
isn’t simply one of semantics, but one of goals. When organizations perform
data backups, these backups are designed to restore production data quickly
so that access to a specific program or dataset can be resumed. For example,
if the server that stores your e-mail account is corrupted, the organization
managing the system needs data backups to restore your information effi-
ciently. In a sense, data backups are a passive action—they are a function
of the system that works with them.
Digital preservation is an active process. Preservation is concerned not
just with making copies of the content, but with the ability to provide long-
term access as well. Preservation data must be actively curated, selected,
handled, and even repaired (migrated) in order to preserve long-term
access. While preservation does involve many of the same processes that
are found in doing data backups, the need to provide long-term access
complicates the process, and injects a human, curatorial element into the
preservation process.
And when considering preservation, it is this active process of cura-
tion that is important to remember. A successful preservation repository
cannot be a digital attic, a place in which to just toss digital objects. Pres-
ervation requires the curation and maintenance of the context of objects,
which means the development of an active collection development strategy.
Strategies built around the hoarding of digital content will be apt to fail,
since this approach creates a disincentive to actively curate content. For
digital repository managers, this is particularly important, since organiza-
tions have historically been so starved for active community participa-
tion in their repository platforms that they accept nearly any content and
effectively create a digital dumping ground. This simply places unrealistic
expectations on the organization’s ability to provide long-term access, and
dilutes the repository’s overall impact. It also places the repository owners
in a difficult position, since they are ultimately responsible to develop a

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