Thursday 29 November 2018

World Digital Preservation Day 2018


Today is World Digital Preservation Day.  It is the day when the digital preservation community around the world come together to celebrate the collections that have been preserved, the access has been maintained, and the work that is being done to preserve our digital legacy.

Organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition and supported by digital preservation networks all over the world, World Digital Preservation Day raises awareness of the strategic, cultural and technological issues which make up the digital preservation challenge. Since the first public website was launched nearly 30 years ago, there has been an explosion of digital content worldwide. This ‘born digital’ content is tomorrow’s cultural heritage, and it’s our job to ensure that we collect and preserve this digital history for future generations.

When I first heard about this day I was excited.  Ever since I attended the iPRES (International Conference on Digital Preservation) conference in 2014 when it was held in Melbourne, I have been fascinated, passionate, intrigued with digital preservation.  Unfortunately it isn't something that is shared with my institution.  Digital preservation costs money, sometimes a lot of money.  And that is something that my institution is very loathe to part with.  (I should know, I've been campaigning for a new institutional repository system since 2010 with no luck, and that is peanuts compared to a preservation system).

But, in my own way, I have been steadily pushing the preservation agenda, one step at a time.

So, many people don't really understand what digital preservation actually is.  Essentially it is the coordinated and ongoing set of processes and activities that ensure long-term, error-free storage of digital information with a means for retrieval and interpretation for the entire time span the information is required.  Preservation isn't just digitisation, however digitisationis part of preservation.

So with that in mind, this is what we have been doing in this space for the last few years.

Institutional repository (IR)
Our IR actually does preservation reasonably well (which is surprising as not much else works with it).  It produces a PREMIS datastream, which is the international standard for metadata to support the preservation of digital objects and ensure their long-term usability.  If only we understood how the IR platform actually uses it.....  Our IR also does versioning very well.  While not strictly 'digital preservation', it is a form of preservation as each version is maintained in the system (metadata and documents). However this is where our investment into digital preservation ends.  Our documents are at best stored as standard PDFs, at worst Word documents or other proprietary file formats.  And we do not actively maintain the files in the system, but rather just 'believe' that they will work when we next try to download one.

Digital collections
Our institution has a number of digital research collections and the degree of "preservation-ness" for each one varies.  One has PDF/A as a standard for any scanned documents, another has straight PDFs, and the third (a collection of images) has RAW, TIFF and JPG files.  However, like the IR, the files are not actively maintained for fixity and access.  This is a new focus area for us (and for the system that we use) and I'm hoping that it will further develop in this space in the future.

Research data
Unfortunately, beyond backup, no digital preservation activities are performed on our research data.  Like musch of our research infrastructure we are working with sub-standard ad hoc systems.  When we can better manage it from an administrative aspect, then hopefully we will be able to better manage the digital preservation of it.


Digital preservation is something that I get very excited about. However I'm not naive enough to realise that it can and probably is a very dry subject to many people. So, just to make it a bit more interesting, here are some websites that I think are pretty cool.

The Museum of Obsolete Media has over 500 current and obsolete physical media formats covering audio, video, film and data storage.

And the ‘Bit List’ of Digitally Endangered Species, a crowd-sourcing list of which digital materials the community things are most at risk.

But perhaps the coolest thing about World Digital Preservation Day is that it gives us a chance to have cake!

Happy World Digital Preservation Day everyone!

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