This document discusses the key aspects and challenges of digital preservation including: - Ensuring the authenticity, renderability, viability, fixity, understandability, and identity of digital materials over time. - Threats such as media and format obsolescence and the need for periodic copying and migration to new formats. - International efforts to develop standards, strategies, and software for digital preservation. - Obstacles including issues around preserving links, original look and feel, and personal digital materials scattered across media.

1. The Preservation of Digital Materials29 October 2009Information Technology

2. A set of activities aimed towards ensuring access to digital materials over time“Digitization for preservation” vs. “digital preservation”Digitization for preservation results in digital materialsDigital preservation is taking digital materials and ensuring their long-term safety and accessWhat is Digital Preservation?

3. AuthenticityRenderabilityViabilityFixityUnderstandabilityIdentityAvailabilityPreservation Goals

4. The library doing the preserving must have some control over the item being preservedWays to get copies of published materialDeposit agreementsLicenses to the archival copyContracts with publishersAvailability

5. Digital objects should carry descriptive metadata within themUnderstandabilityPreserved material must be independently understandable to its user communityFixityDigital objects must be protected from unauthorized changes Identity

6. “the quality that an object is what it purports to be”The source and content of an article should be verifiedThere should be policies and procedures to ensure data integrity The chain of custody and all authorized changes should be documentedDigital provenance: the event history pertaining to a digital objectAuthenticity

7. Viability is the quality of being readable from mediaThreats to viability are media damage and deterioration Another threat to viability is media becoming obsoleteFiles should be copied periodicallyViability

8. Renderability is ensuring that a digital file is usableRenderability

9. Technology PreservationComputer museum approachIf a format depends on a particular software and/or hardware, then keep a few working examples of that software and/or hardwareEmulationthe use of hardware and/or software that allow computer instructions written for one platform to be run on another platformPreservation Practices and Strategies

10. Providing an intermediate layer between the emulator and the current platform, isolating the emulator from these technology changesUniversal Virtual ComputerFiles of a given format are translated to a simpler Logical Data View by a “decoder” program written to run on the Universal Virtual ComputerUniversal Virtual Machine

11. Can open a file written by an earlier version of the program and save it in the current formatFormat Normalizationsome formats are more “preservable than others, so some preservation systems “normalize” all incoming documents Format Migration

12. Technology preservationEmulationFormat migrationFormat normalizationPreservation strategies for potentially obsolete file types

13. Consider the following in creating new digital objects:Is the format open and non-proprietary?

14. How well documented is the format?

15. Does it allow imbedded metadata?

16. How widely adopted is the format and how understandable is it?The Commission on Preservation and Access1996 Seminal Report

17. Summary by the Commission on Preservation and AccessIssues of cultural fragility in the digital age

18. Obsolescence of certain media

19. Integrity and authenticity

20. Archival roles

21. Recommendations Pathfinder for the Data Structures of the OAIS modelhttp://hdl.handle.net/2081/51

22. Information package-Preservation description information

23. “Digital formats are at the heart of digital preservation activities”Knowledge of formats is necessary to ensure long term access to digital recordsSupport for Digital Formatshttp://neatorama.cachefly.net/images/2008-06/ibm-pc.jpg

24. “Properties of objects that must be preserved over time through preservation treatments such as migrations or emulations in order to ensure the continued usability and meaning of the objects.”What are the essential characteristics of the record? What must be saved so we can still make sense of it?Categorized as:Content: What the document containsContext: metadata for the recordAppearance: layout of the recordStructure: metadata linking the record to a larger wholeBehavior: Other connectionsSignificant Properties