Article Summary: “Preservation Challenges in the Digital Age"

Archivists in the digital age are seeing an exponentially increasing amount of data with a decreasing lifespan. In “Preservation Challenges in the Digital Age,” Bernadette Houghton addresses this fundamental problem and ten challenges facing archivists. The difference between print technology and digital technology is that books both store and represent text and are relatively stable.  With digital technology, the storage and representation of text is done in separate operations, that is, text is encoded and then retrieved for use through various mediums. Robert Darnton talks about this concept in The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. Archivists must preserve digital material itself and the infrastructure that renders the material readable. Houghton also introduces a third aspect, that of preserving the original user experience. The first example I thought of was playing Sonic the Hedgehog on computers and keyboards from the late 1990s. Houghton’s ten challenges are summarized, as follows:


  1. With increasing data volume comes increasing cost of preservation and inevitable reliance on automation.
  2. Archivists must decide what is worth archiving (make value judgments), and then how to preserve the material, the medium, and the UX.
  3. With migration and multiplicity comes loss of quality, but also security that the file won’t be permanently lost. 
  4. Obsolescence of hardware, and increasing reliance on third parties for cloud storage. 
  5. Obsolescence of software, and requiring patrons use certain software to view materials (limiting access).
  6. Accessibility - proprietary vs open file formats. As of now, not all media types have an archival format. For example, there is no equivalent of tif for videos. 
  7. When creating metadata for digital material, archivists have to document changes made to files over time - changes made to the file constitute its provenance. 
  8. Legal issues - decision between owning and licensing content (again, an issue of access)
  9. Privacy! Digital data may be more vulnerable to hacking. Also, we may harvest and archive social media content that users thought was private.  
  10. With limited resources, archivists have to prioritize. Not all data can be preserved - we will get it right sometimes and get it wrong sometimes. 


My takeaway from this article is that we’re playing an (educated) guessing game when it comes to archiving digital materials. We are trying to see the future when deciding what will be important and not important in the future, and testing with the most stable ways to preserve what we decide to save.

Houghton, Bernadette. “Preservation Challenges in the Digital Age.” The Magazine of Digital Library Research vol. 22, no. 7/8, July/August 2016.  

Comments

  1. StevenFebruary 22, 2018 at 11:48 AM

    I like that comment about "educated guessing game"!! Another way to put that sentiment would be that each generation of librarian and archivist should do what they can to preserve and pass on as much as necessary ... that is, to address solvable problems today and let future generations consider solutions from their perspectives and using technology developed at later times, too.

    Dr. MacCall

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