From the JISC-PoWR Project blog.
One of the goals of PoWR is to make current trends in digital preservation meaningful and relevant to information professionals with the day-to-day responsibility for looking after web resources. Anyone coming for the first time to the field of digital preservation can find it a daunting area, with very distinct terminology and concepts. Some of these are drawn from time-honored approaches to managing things like government records or institutional archives, while others have been developed exclusively in the digital domain. It is an emerging and evolving field that can take some time to get your head round: so we thought it was a good idea to offer a series of brief primers.
Starting, naturally, with digital preservation: this is defined as a “series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary” (Digital Preservation Coalition, 2002). It’s best to consider the scope of digital preservation as much broader than digital archiving, though the terms are often used interchangeably. Because, in computing generally, “archiving” is the process of backup and offline storage of data, the term “digital preservation” helps avoid confusion when referring to the broader issues of managing digital materials and information in and about them.
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a consortium of many leading institutions working in the field, including The British Library and The National Archives. Its online handbook contains much excellent information (though its online format could be improved), and includes a useful glossary.
A third term, digital curation, has recently gained prominence. This places greater emphasis on the activities required to maintain the integrity of digital collections over time, and keep them usable. It promotes a pro-active approach to managing digital resources and the use of technological solutions, like web services, to address the problems that technology itself has created. It also paves the way for the emergence of “digital curators”, continually monitoring collections and intevening when necessary – a role analogous to their non-digital counterparts. The best source of information about digital curation is the Digital Curation Centre, based at Edinburgh University.
In the next part we’ll look at some of the key concepts in digital preservation, including migration, emulation, and life-cycle models for digital objects. This will help us identify some of the things we should be considering when trying to preserve web resources.