Week 6: Challenges of Digital Preservation

1.     Easier to Create Content

It took two centuries for the Library of Congress to acquire its 29 million books and 105 million other items: manuscripts, motion pictures, sound recordings, maps, print, and photographs. 

Today it takes only 15 minutes for the world to produce and equal amount of information in digital form.

2.     Digital Obsolescence

Unlike traditional analog objects such as books or photographs where the user has unmediated access to the content, a digital object always needs a software environment to render it. Physical storage media, data formats, hardware, and software all become obsolete over time, posing significant threats to the survival of the content.

“Digital materials are especially vulnerable to loss and destruction because they are stored on fragile magnetic and optical media that deteriorate rapidly and that can fail suddenly from exposure to heat, humidity, airborne contaminants, or faulty reading and writing devices.” (Hedstrom and Montgomery. 1998)

3.     Changes in Technology

“Unlike the situation that applies to books, digital archiving requires relatively frequent investments to overcome rapid obsolescence introduce by galloping technological change.” (Feeney. 1999)

Because digital material is machine dependent, it is not possible to access the information unless there is appropriate hardware and software. Rapidly changing technologies can hinder digital preservationists work and techniques due to outdated and antiquated machines or technology. This has become a common problem and one that is a constant worry for a digital archivist—how to prepare for the future.

• 5¼ inch floppy disks have been superseded by 3½ inch floppy disks;
• Thousands of software programs common in the early 1990s are now extinct and unavailable.

4.     Scale

Although computer storage is increasing in scale and its relative cost is decreasing constantly, the quantity of data and our ability to capture it with relative ease still matches or exceeds it in a number of areas. Some repositories still face significant challenges in developing and maintaining scaleable architectures and procedures to handle huge quantities of data generated from sources such as satellites or the web.

For example, the Library of Congress currently amassed 170 billion tweets between 2006 and 2010 totalling 133.2 terabytes and each Tweet is composed of 23 fields of metadata.

5.     Other challenges:

•  Costs
•  Expertise
• Selection
• Legal Issues & Intellectual Property Rights