Part 1. Research Material: Challenges of Digital Preservation bringing forward into a Digital Dark Ages

Digital preservation does not only preserve the digital contents, in a sense that it actually preserves the culture, heritage and history. Public understand the important of our history and heritage and thus most of the heritage buildings are being well preserved. Public without realize that digital preservation is such important that it is closely related to our culture, heritage and history. If you had been wondered how digital contents nowadays are related to the history. Do not forget that the current will be the history in the future.

The purpose of preservation is to protect information of enduring value for access by present and future generations (Conway, 1990:206).

Monks and monasteries played a vital role in middle ages in preserving and distributing books, which provided much of our present knowledge of the ancient past and heritage. However, the historical record of text has been carried by librarians and archivists within private and public libraries nowadays. How we are to preserve the historic record in an electronic era where change and speed is valued more highly that conservation and longevity. We are moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever.

The following observations of our present environment showed that we are living in the midst of a digital dark age:

-          Enormous amounts of digital information are already lost forever. We are unable recreate a digital history because it was no archived properly, it is unable to access because the information is on out-dated word-processor files, and old database formats, or saved on readable media. Many large data-sets have been made obsolete by changing technologies, punch cards and 12’ floppy disks. -          Information technologies are essentially obsolete every 18 months. This represents a greater challenge than the deterioration of the physical medium. Many technologies often without backwards compatibility and ability to handle older technologies. -          There is a proliferation of document and media formats, each one potentially carrying their own hardware and software dependencies. Merely copying bits is not sufficient for preservation purposes; if the software for making sense of the bits is not available, then the information will be, for all practical purposes, lost. -          Financial resources available for libraries and archives continue to decrease, because not effectively made it into public policy. There is little enthusiasm for spending resources on preservation at the best of times and without a concerted effort to bring the issues into the public eye, the preservation of digital information will remain a cloistered issue. -          Increasingly restrictive intellectual property and licensing regimes will ensure that many materials never make it into library collections for preservation. Whether corporate owners will develop a public-spirited interest in providing this archival role for future generations and whether the resources will be accessible to the public. -          The Commission on Preservation and Access suggests that the first line of defense against the loss of valuable digital information rests with the creators, providers and owners of digital information. Preservation is a desktop issue, not merely an institutional one. -          The challenge in preserving electronic information is not primarily a technological one, it is a sociological one. Product obsolescence if often key to corporate survival in a competitive capitalist democracy.

Digital collections facilitate access, but do not facilitate preservation. Digital places greater emphasis on the here-and-now rather than the long-term, just-in-time information rather than just-in-case.