The Digital Preservation Imperative: An Ecosystem View

Abstract

As the information universe becomes increasingly digital, there is a growing need to preserve digital assets that represent the intellectual capital of scientific disciplines, educational communities, and government and cultural agencies. This need is both quantitative and qualitative in nature. Digital resources, particularly digital data, are proliferating at a staggering rate. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the amount of data worldwide grew 48 percent between 2011 and 2012 to 2.7 zettabytes, or 2.7 billion terabytes. (1) Additionally, digital resources are qualitatively different from analog resources (print and media) in terms of fragility and complexity. Digital information resources are fragile in ways that differ from analog information resources, largely because they are far more dynamic. Consider the following: * they are easily and frequently revised/updated, linearly (v. 1.0, v. 2.0, v. 3.0, etc.) or cumulatively * they may be available in various views (e.g., a data set rendered in SQL looks very different from the same data set rendered in Visual Studio) * they can be more easily altered by someone other than the original creator * they are more susceptible to corruption over time * the storage media on which they reside typically have a far shorter life span than their analog storage counterparts However passe it may be, paper, for the most part, is pretty durable. The most immediate and significant consequence of the dynamic nature of digital information resources is that their preservation calls for a much more active process than that required for analog resources. Passive preservation (put it someplace cold and dark and throw away the key) simply will not work in the digital environment. The bits have to be kept moving and need to be checked and rechecked to ensure that they do not become compromised or succumb to data decay. Digital resources are not just more fragile than their analog counterparts--they are also more complex. In the analog world, a book appears to be a wonderfully simple thing. Scan it into digital form, however, and it becomes a digital object, full of individual elements (i.e., pages) that must relate to each other in a certain order, an order that must be preserved if the book is to be readable. Moreover, it is easy to link from one digital object to another, creating an even more complex digital object that raises questions about what exactly should be preserved. Some types of resources (multimedia, for example) are completely dependent on the software that renders them usable, yet others, such as e-books, are also dependent on the hardware required to make them accessible. While preservation has never been a single-agency undertaking, this combination of prolificacy, fragility, and complexity calls for an ecosystem approach to digital preservation, and to digital stewardship, in general. This approach includes three essential elements: access, management, and preservation. …