Preserving Digital Information: A How-To-Do-It Manual.

• Author: ADLER, MICHAEL
• Position: Review

TITLE: Preserving Digital Information: A How-To-Do-It Manual

AUTHOR: Gregory S. Hunter

ISBN: 1-55570-353-4

PUBLISHER: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc.

PUBLICATION DATE: 2000

LENGTH: 168 pages

PRICE: $59.95

SOURCE: Any bookstore

Our current capability to create a digital archive has been equated to technological quicksand (Rothenburg 1999). Anyone who has been working on computers for more than 10 years can relate to the pace of digital obsolescence. Just think about trying to read a 51/4-inch floppy disk, a DOS WordPerfect 4.2 file, or a document you have from the days when you had a Macintosh computer instead of a PC. Now challenge yourself to imagine not only how to technically preserve this information indefinitely, but how to choose what to preserve and how to guarantee the digital record's reliability and authenticity to generations of your descendants. How would you decide how many hyperlink levels down you should go when you preserve a Web page? How do you capture the names on an e-mail's distribution list?

The plethora of issues surrounding this topic can be overwhelming, as is conveyed in these words of William J. Mitchell: "The combined problems of immense volume, unstable storage media, and obsolete hardware and software add up to some very tough problems for archivists to deal with." (Mitchell 1996). The discussion of these challenges is the essence of Gregory Hunter's book Preserving Digital Information: A How-To-Do-It Manual.

Given this theme, the moniker of a How-To-Do-It Manual is inaccurate for the majority of this publication. The preponderance of the book is an excellent and well-organized survey of the research on the subject, which often raises more questions than it answers. The book provides a vast amount of background information critical to the topic. However, the greater part of the book is not a step-by-step manual on how to do digital preservation.

Hunter has been involved in multiple research programs regarding the preservation of digital information. He has been in close communication with many other investigation teams and is clearly very familiar with the literature and studies on the topic. Nowhere is this more evident than the bibliography, with more than 400 citations. Hunter is both a certified records manager and a certified archivist. As would then be expected, the perspective presented is largely that of an archivist or librarian, not a computer scientist.

The first two chapters are introductory. The...