This third volume in the Digital Futures series has been some time in gestation, and is intended as a contribution to the urgent debate about issues around the preservation of culture in digital form. It might seem ironic to some that we have chosen to edit and produce a book about digital preservation, rather than producing this work in some kind of digital form that could be updated regularly. However, we feel that the book still has validity as the appropriate format for sustained and reasoned argument, and we know that the book is a durable format for long-term preservation.

Digital preservation is a complex issue, with many different aspects and views, and we wish this volume to represent as many of these views as is possible within a single volume. We have therefore commissioned chapters from leading experts in the field, rather than producing a monograph, and we believe that the experts writing here are some of the best-qualified to share their vast experience on digital preservation. As with other volumes in the series, this book is aimed at the information professional who is interested in this area, but who is not an expert. Because this field gives rise to a great deal of new specialist terminology, we have provided a glossary of key terms, acronyms and abbreviations.

Chapter 1 offers a fairly detailed introduction to the field, and covers prevailing thinking on the different methods of preservation, as well as some of the practical and strategic issues not covered elsewhere. Some of the material covers the same ground as Chapter 8 (‘Preservation’) in Digital Futures, but this has been brought up to date and augmented considerably. In Chapter 2, David Holdsworth covers strategies and methods for digital preservation in more detail, and offers a very useful introduction to the OAIS Reference Model which is being widely adopted by digital preservation projects. Robin Wendler in Chapter 3 leads us gently through the minefield of metadata for digital preservation, pointing out the importance of excellent documentation for digital files and the methods used to preserve them.