Digital Preservation: A Global Information Management Problem.

• Author: STEPHENS, DAVID O.

In an e-mail, Svanhildur Bogadottir, city archivist of the Reykjavik Municipal Archives, Reykjavik, Iceland, writes:

At my archives, we are now receiving information in digital form almost every week. In endless sizes and formats, up to 15 to 20 years old. Most of it is impossible to read for us today and some of it has permanent value, but it is not available on paper, so it is really lost. It is a great and GRAVE problem how we can be sure to preserve our information today for the future. This is not a problem for the future but for today. This brief statement underscores digital preservation as a global information management problem. If the city of Reykjavik experiences problems reading and processing older digital media, what about the large archival repositories operated by national and state/provincial governments throughout the world? And what about the untold thousands of electronic recordkeeping systems in business corporations that have long-term retention requirements but no formal policy or practices in place to assure their preservation?

For many years, archival institutions throughout the world have operated programs to preserve records possessing archival value that are worthy of permanent preservation. These programs have been organized around physical records -- paper, microfilm, and other visible record media. Now, however, archival repositories worldwide find themselves in a long transition from paper to electronic records as the predominant recordkeeping medium, a transition that began during the '70s, accelerated during the '80s and '90s, and will not come to fruition for another decade or more.

Archivists, records managers, and other information management specialists throughout the world face reinventing their professional practices to ensure permanent or long-term preservation of electronic records. It is no hyperbole to say that this is the biggest challenge the records and information community has yet confronted.

The essence of the digital preservation problem is how to support the ability to digitally process and read many years from now the electronic records being created today.

The digital preservation problem is of greater magnitude than problems associated with preserving physical records. With physical records, the information is contained on media that are durable. Moreover, physical records can be read by sight or with relatively simple viewing devices. Generally, deterioration is visibly apparent, and there is a time window -- usually measured in years, if not decades -- during which conservation measures can be undertaken if required.

Technically, there is nothing particularly complex about preserving physical records. Once appraised as archival, they are accessioned into the archives, finding aids are prepared for them, and they are housed in environmentally appropriate space. When these steps are completed, the records should retain their integrity and usability for many decades, even centuries, under proper environmental conditions. Finally, assuming the steps have been properly completed, the preservation of physical records is generally a once-and-done task. No further measures should be required.

With electronic records, however, the situation is drastically different: the recording media are not durable, and the records are not human-readable. The hardware and software required to read electronic records have even less life expectancy than the media on which they are recorded. Thus, the tasks required to ensure long-term preservation of digital records are technically difficult -- specialized expertise as well as the requisite hardware, software, and systems documentation are required. Moreover, the data preservation tasks must be performed...