Page 72 - Building Digital Libraries

Preservation Planning

to come together to develop a shared set of language around preservation
tasks and goals. This process forced the library/archival staff to identify those
implicit assumptions that were being made around preservation, while at
the same time, the process allowed library/archival staff to gain a better
understanding of how the institution’s system staff discussed the preserva-
tion of content in their space. By coming together and developing a shared
language, the organization was able to start moving together, rather than
often being at odds within itself.

Getting Comfortable with Good Enough

One thing that becomes painfully obvious when starting a digital reposi-
tory or library program is that someone is almost always doing it better
than you are. If you are at a small organization, you are likely looking at a
larger organization and wishing you could work on a bigger scale or have
more resources. If you are at a larger organization, there will be peers with
better websites, better tools, or novel workflows. The fact is that everyone
is learning in this space. This means that changes can happen swiftly, and
that guidelines or best practices can shift as new formats or research is done.
The guidelines that we use for preserving digital video today may not be
the same guidelines that we use in 3–5 years (in fact, they likely won’t be).
This often can leave organizations wanting to wait to see how things shake
out. But this isn’t a good preservation strategy, and likely will put an orga-
nization’s collections at long-term risk. So, what can an organization do?
The answer is—something, and now. Preservation will always be a moving
target, filled with data and system migrations. For organizations developing
a digital library, it is imperative that they pick a path, and then move forward
consistently, understanding that things will and should change in the future.

People, Not Software, Enable Preservation
Cultural heritage institutions have seen preservation as a curator- or archivist-
centric process—at least in the analog world. Physical materials must be
handled, described, repaired, and regularly evaluated. However, in the
digital world, the opposite appears to be true, since most often, preservation
activities are cached as functions of systems. Can Fedora identify at-risk
content? Does Rosetta provide automated data migration? How does the
system ensure long-term access? People are part of the equation, but in the
digital preservation context, they are often described as tools of the system
that has been put in place. This is a paradigm that needs to change. Just like
in the analog world, digital preservation is a very people-centric process.
Yes, digital preservation practice will be very reliant on the tools and services
that the digital library platform provides, but these systems are just tools to
be leveraged; they should not drive or determine the extent of the digital
preservation plan.

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