Kirchhoff (2008), in her article, Digital Preservation: Challenges and
Implementation, discussed about near-term access protection and long-term
content protection, whose steps can be placed along a continuum as shown in the
diagram below. She also mentioned that the key goals of DP are to maintain “usability,
authenticity, discoverability, and accessibility” of digital resources.
Both “backup” and “access system redundancy” are regarded as near-term
access protection. The unreliability of backup over a long period of time can
be easily understood. Access system design suggests there will be the copies of
the entire system from the very beginning. However, it is only an improved
version of backup as both of them cannot accommodate any development in technology
or data format.
Byte replication sounds better, but it does not solve the problem of
file format incompatibility either. However, it allows the storage of the
digital content in diverse geographical locations and no specialized software is
needed to access the content. In that sense, it achieves more goals than the
former methods.
Digital Preservation is the most reliable measure to ensure the
longevity of digital materials. However, it needs organizational efforts, as
well as government policy support.
There are also technological methods to solve the challenges of DP, according
to Kirchhoff (2008). These include migration-producing different formats of
digital content for future access, and emulation-the development of software
that can identify earlier hardware and software.
Right now the biggest threat to digital content is the development of technology.
Future technology are expected to be very different from today that it can no
longer be applied to formats used today. This incompatibility happened with floppy disk
once, and it might very possibly happen again. Therefore, the best practices
might be to store in as many formats as possible. For example, Memorial
University stored data in a variety of formats going back to 1977. They
include: “Access Databases,
Paper Files (14 filing cabinets), Excel Spreadsheets, Progeny files, Cyrillic
files, Slides of various testing images, JPEGs of various testing images, Powerpoint
presentations, and mostly importantly, Researcher’s
memory (Manojlovich, 2011).
As for my research materials, it seems the best I can do for them now is
to make backups in formats of both digital and physical.
References
Kirchhoff, A. J. (2008). Digital Preservation:
Challenges and Implementation. Learned Publishing. 21. 285-294. doi:
10.1087/095315108X356716
Manojlovich, S. (2011). Digital Preservation Best
Practices [Power Point Slides]. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/bpauwels/digital-presentation-best-practices-lessons-learned-from-across-the-pond
Yun Zhan, I think you're very astute in pointing out that the implementation of effective digital preservation strategies is contingent on strong government support. In the public sector and from what I know from the university library domain, organizations can only get serious about developing digital preservation planning that starts at the point of object creations, when fiscal and labour resources are devoted to the endeavour. For example, now that academic institutions are starting to better understand the need to authenticate digital records that are associated with the research process and maintaining the trace of their research outputs to the global community, they are investing more in research and tools to this end.
ReplyDeleteHi Bridgette, I agree you. And that seems to be happening to other projects in the field of information. The concept of information instrastructure and information network is becoming more prevalent, but none of them can function without government support.I wonder what would happen if one day these huge projects collapsed?
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