Preserving Digital Content

Parts of this week's question actually already occurred to me, about documenting what I'm studying when we were talking about fieldwork in week 5. To document archives' use of certain types of social media, web archiving is the only real answer, and I already covered many of the problems with that in week 5.

In looking to preserve digital content into the future, there are still a few other concerns which I did not talk about all that much in that earlier post. File format plays a big part in preserving digital content, and concerns like disclosure, or how much documentation is available for that format, as well as how widely it has been adopted and whether there are any other dependencies, like requiring proprietary software, all play roles in determining a format's longevity. This is not an exhaustive list. Making sure that the information a researcher wishes to preserve is in a format which will still be accessible years into the future is an extraordinarily important concern. No format is completely free from the risk of obsolescence, but pdf, as an example, does not appear to be hard to get access to in the future (Pearson and Webb, 2008). Planning for migration or emulation in the future for all content which a researcher wishes to keep available will be absolutely vital to properly preserving it, as will routinely looking at the environment for files of that type, and looking into migration options. Like all preservation, proper risk assessments will help make sure that there is nothing being forgotten, at least as much as this is actually possible.

To actually answer how I personally would keep track of the materials which I am talking about, I would look at current developments in web archiving and do everything else I practically could to save the content. Mostly, this would be keeping multiple backup copies of everything I produce, and ideally checking them regularly for bitloss or other forms of corruption. I'd do everything I could to use web archiving software to gather as many of the postings related to the topic as possible, store the resulting records as safely as I could in as open and widely adopted a format as I can find, and plan to migrate it to another format before the one I started becomes obsolete. I do hope that the technology involved improves in the future and solves these problems for me, but ultimately I would have to accept that, as I talked about in week 5, there really only is so much that can be done to properly preserve online content at this time. No matter how much effort I devote to this during my research, a great deal of what I am researching will one day simply disappear without any real trace.

Sources:

Brown, A. (2013). Practical Digital Preservation: a how-to guide for organizations of any size. London: Facet Publishing.

Giaretta, D. (2011). Advanced digital preservation. New York: Springer.

Kasioumis, N., Banos, V., & Kalb, H. (2013). Towards building a blog preservation platform. World Wide Web, 17(4), 799–825. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-013-0234-4

Pearson, D., & Webb, C. (2008). Defining File Format Obsolescence: A Risky Journey. International Journal of Digital Curation, 3(1), 89–106. http://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v3i1.44

Webber, J. (n.d.). What is still on the web after 10 years of archiving? - UK Web Archive blog. Retrieved March 3, 2016, from http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/webarchive/2014/10/what-is-still-on-the-web-after-10-years-of-archiving-.html