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5 - Digital preservation storage and strategies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2018

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Summary

Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.

(Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Ebenezer Hazard, 1791)

The best practices of preservation, digital or otherwise, are a constantly developing subject in libraries, archives and museums. Along with this dynamism, there are a range of practices that can be listed under the heading of ‘preservation’ – the term can simultaneously describe the entirety of the work of an archivist and refer to specific tasks centred on the future legibility and usability of a document or object. The Multilingual Archival Terminology project features several explanations of the term, but this chapter will take the following definition as the most germane for our discussion: ‘The whole of the principles, policies, rules and strategies aimed at prolonging the existence of an object by maintaining it in a condition suitable for use, either in its original format or in a more persistent format, while leaving intact the object's intellectual form.’ Note here that preservation is an ongoing act – objects are kept in a state of use not in a single performance, but from continuous care.

We will be primarily focused on the preservation of groups of objects from an organizational perspective. For example, what policies can you put together to describe how your organization takes care of digital objects? What can you promise, and what can you not? What strategies will you use for storage of the objects, and what are the best practices for long-term retention of that digital data? All these concerns describe the work of preservation – again, the act of keeping from harm – at a scale larger than the individual digital object, accession or collection.

A note on acquisition

Digital objects are often born into environments which are unstable or fluctuating. Think of a comment in a user forum appending an online article; a Facebook wall entry you spotted the other week; or a tweet from a journalist one month ago. Or even more generally, recall a site you liked, an old software program located on a floppy disk or an e-mail you sent to a friend a few years ago.

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Publisher: Facet
Print publication year: 2018

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