Page 66 - Building Digital Libraries

Preservation Planning

cohesive preservation plan around an organizationally dysfunctional col-
lection development plan.
So, what exactly makes up a good digital preservation plan or strategy?
It should follow some basic guidelines:

1. For preservation to occur, long-term access must be
guaranteed. Materials that cannot be accessed have not
been preserved.
2. Preservation requires the maintenance of useful context,
because context provides objects with meaning. This
context may involve Dublin Core metadata, Archival
Information Packages (AIPs), file structures, and/or
otherwise structured and formatted data so people can
use it in their own contexts.
3. Preservation does not end when a digital object has
been saved—this is when it begins. Digital preservation
requires the constant curation of content, evaluating not
only the validity of the data through fixity checks, but
also the continual evaluation of how the content fits into
the collection development strategy, accessibility options,
and long-term risk identification (i.e., file formats).
4. Digital preservation is messy, and that’s okay. The process
is always an imperfect one. Organizations should strive
to do the best they can, while making the best use of
their resources to ensure the long-term access and
security of content.
5. Preservation is much more about people than systems,
even if preservation activities are often tied to specific
software or services. These certainly are helpful, and
they are tools that enable organizations to do large-scale
preservation activities at scale. But ultimately, successful
digital preservation programs hinge on people and their
ability to make the best decisions they can and then carry
them out. Too often organizations become paralyzed
by the perfect, and in this space, there is no one perfect
solution. There are certainly best practices, but even
these practices need to recognize that the boundaries
around digital content are never fixed—they are mutable.
This mutability requires not only flexible systems, but
individuals who are able to work and thrive in a space
that will likely be constantly changing.

One of the common misconceptions around digital preservation planning is
that it is largely a systems issue that can be fixed with storage and resources.
This goes back to the basic mindset that preservation is generally equiva-
lent to data backups, and that we can assume that our digital objects are

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