Challenges to Museums of Digital Preservation
Archives Consultant Simon Wilson undertook some work to support colleagues at the City of Doncaster Archives – the work was funded through The National Archives Resilience Grants programme. A key component of which was to engage with museum colleagues about the challenges of digital preservation.
What is Digital Preservation?
Digital Preservation is a series of managed activities designed to protect the authenticity and reliability of digital content for future generations. Many people believe that digital content simply needs to be ‘backed-up’, but this fails to take into account any measures designed to ensure the file will still be readable in 20, 50 or 100 years’ time.
Digital preservation requires careful steps to be taken so that transformations over time from one file format to another has minimal impact. The researcher in the future needs to be assured that this is an authentic and reliable copy of the content. Imagine the questions that might rise if a document in a literary archive is ‘last updated’ two years after the author died.
The challenge is an exciting one, but it is not uncommon for people to be overwhelmed by the scale of the challenges. Digital preservation entails new methodologies, new terminology and new perspectives.
Terminology:
– Born-digital archives relates to material like Word documents, photographs from a digital camera and emails – content that originated in digital format that is worthy of permanent preservation.
– Digitisation is the process of converting analogue material into a digital format.
– A forensic workstation is a dedicated PC/laptop, usually offline, that is used solely for processing born-digital archives to check there are is no virus before copying the files onto the organisation’s network. Additional hardware/software is likely to be needed to read a range of legacy media formats to confirm the content is of interest (as per your collecting policy).
Museum Development North – 3 online sessions were given under the Elevenses programme:
1. Introduction to Digital Preservation – aimed at colleagues who have born-digital assets in their collections but are unsure of what steps to take or where to start. In introducing digital preservation we will focus on what it is, why it matters and how to talk about it with your peers and your managers.
2. Practical first steps – how the creation of a digital asset register can form the basis for future activities and planning.
3. Taking Stock – introducing the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Rapid Assessment Model self assessment tool which allows a service to identify its current digital preservation capability and to identify the current barriers and issues faced.
These resources can be found at https://simonpwilson.com/client-area/museum-development-north/
Paper vs born-digital archives?
A key difference between paper and digital archives is the scale of material: instead of talking about the number of boxes or linear metres, digital material is usually quantified in terms of number of files (10,000+ is not atypical) with extent measured in GB or TB. Using these metrics together provides the clearest context (eg 12,345 files and 6.7TB). It is also important to note that digital archives might arrive on a range of media (e.g. floppy disks or an old laptop) and being able to safely extract content from a range of carriers is another challenge that needs to be addressed.
The digital preservation community is a tremendous source of advice and support, with individuals and services happy to share experiences. Many of the tools used by the digital preservation community receive input and suggestions for improvement from their users.
Key pointers to getting started
– DPC Handbook, Technology Watch reports are both excellent places to start
– Novice to Know-How – a free online introduction to digital preservation concepts, it currently has 4 modules: Digital Preservation Skills for Beginners; Providing Access to Preserved Digital Content, Email Preservation and the Digital Asset Register.
– The National Archives guidance on preserving digital collections includes guidance, workflows & case studies
– Digital Preservation Coalition – Policy Toolkit, be inspired by others – there are lots of examples out there!
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