Digital preservation definition:
Digital Preservation is the management and protection of digital information to ensure authenticity, integrity, reliability, and long-term accessibility.
(Society of American Archivists)
Most records are now created and stored as digital objects, whether these are intended for permanent preservation or not. From digital plans for factories, to minutes of government meetings to camera phone photographs, these are all digital objects that need to be managed and perhaps preserved in the archives. The aim of archivists is to preserve these items in their original format wherever possible, retaining their full functions and characteristics.
Archives should be preserved permanently so taking steps to preserve digital objects and information is vital as these items are less likely to be useable in the future than paper or other hard-copy records.
When you update your software or devices, older digital objects and information may not be readable. Files might become corrupt, particularly when moved or copied, or seemingly for no reason at all. Digital items can decay and unlike paper this decay isn’t immediately physically visible and you may find it difficult to access digital items when staff changes or a volunteer leaves the group.
Having a clear plan to manage digital items means that a group or organisation understands whose overall responsibility it is to plan for the preservation of digital objects and that active steps are being taken to achieve this.
Steps to take
- Identify your digital items. These might be on a range of media including: floppy disks, hard drives, cloud or network storage and on individual devices. It is useful to have a high level view of the types of information, where its stored, how you access the data and who is responsible for the items. This will enable you to understand the size of your task.
- Appraise which items have long term value/are most significant. The loss of which digital items would have the most impact? Do these need further steps to preserve?
- Label and organise your digital objects consistently from creation, using the same conventions across your organisation or group. File naming conventions should include a short descriptive name and date of the content. Don’t use spaces or special characters and include dates in one format only. Agree how to format each version of a document.
- Manage emails. Emails can be managed by retaining only those needed long term and placing others in the archive.
- Back up on a regular basis. Make at least two copies and store these in different places. Use an external solid-state drive rather than CD-ROMs or USB sticks. Think about how few devices now have floppy disk drives and how many people used these for storage in the past.
- Consider more active checking and preservation such as revisiting your digital items to ensure there has been no damage by fixity checking. For large organisations explore digital preservation systems to handle larger, more important materials.