Introduction#
In digital preservation, it seems like every question has the same answer:
…it depends…
But what does it depend on? What are the contextual factors that affect our decisions?
Note
This is an experiment, and right now there’s only a handful of articles, mostly drawing on my own experiences.
If you’d like to see more of this kind of thing, or less, or if you can share practical examples that either align or break these patterns, please let me know!
This site aims to draw out distinct design patterns, based on real-world examples of digital preservation in practice. These patterns, and the contextual factors they depend on, build a map of the landscapes we work in, and help us find our path.
The goal of digital preservation is to maintain access to digital resources over time. But what this means in any given context is difficult to determine. Many decisions need to be made: What kind of storage? What kind of system? Or systems? Which risks should we attempt to mitigate? How will we know what works? In the digital preservation community, this difficulty has caused a split between the universal and the specific.
Standards like the Open Archival Information Systems reference model can provide useful high-level frameworks, but cannot provide concrete guidance when it comes to how to actually implement a digital preservation program. At the other extreme, over the years the digital preservation community has done a good job of sharing information on local implementations and workflows (through conferences like iPres, and via things the Community Owned Workflows wiki). These individual reports are a rich source of information, but synthesising this information is a very difficult challenge for a newcomer to take on, as they are least well equipped to know how relevant or current any particular piece of work might be.
The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation have helped bridge this gap from the top down, by providing a concrete roadmap of goals. But any such universal path necessarily must remain abstracted away from the details that depend on context.
And working from the bottom up, summaries of recent work, like the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Technology Watch Publications provide very helpful in-depth summaries of known areas of interest. But this is still a lot to work through, and it remains difficult to quickly find and filter through the wide range of information on different approaches, and understand how the details depend on your context.
The goal of this site is to build a bridge between the universal and the specific, and understand how our work should adapt to our context.
Who is this for?#
This site can help you preserve and maintain access to digital resources, whether you are handling digitised versions of print materials or born-digital content. But it is intended for people who already know a bit about digital preservation and have some degree of familiarity with the core concepts and terminology.
However, if you are just starting out, here are some recommendations that I think should help:
For a high-level overview, the Wikipedia page on digital preservation is pretty good, and Ashley Blewer’s training slide decks (especially the slides on Digital Preservation, the Open Archive Information System (OAIS) standard and ‘fixity’) provide a good introduction to some of the key terminology.
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) provide more detailed resources like the Digital Preservation Handbook, while maintaining a keen focus on practical issues.
I also strongly recommend reading The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation by Trevor Owens, particularly for those with a background in cultural heritage (see here for the open access version). This book does an excellent job of framing digital preservation as a craft to be honed, and positions these practices in the wider cultural heritage context while providing a concrete framework for making progress.
Curiously, there does not seem to be many equivalent publications for those coming to digital preservation from the information technology side [1] – but be warned, even if you know a lot about IT, digital preservation requirements can be seem strange at first. These communication issues are usually more subtle than they seem, so be prepared to clarify what you mean by terms like ‘archive’!