Protecting your digital sources.

• Author: Holland, Michael E.
• Position: Protecting Your Library's Digital Sources: The Essential Guide to Planning and Preservation (Book - Book Review

TITLE: Protecting Your Library's Digital Sources: The Essential Guide to Planning and Preservation

AUTHOR: Miriam B. Kahn

ISBN: 0-8389-0873-X

PUBLISHER: American Library Association

PUBLICATION DATE: 2004

LENGTH: 120 pages

PRICE: $40 U.S.; $36 ALA members

SOURCE: ALA Order Fulfillment, www.alastare.ala.org of 886.746.7252

Those familiar with library and archives literature over the past few decades will recall the vogue of disaster planning and disaster recovery plans in the 1980s. While a heightened awareness of the need to be prepared to deal with damaged collections was long overdue, it became a mark of sophistication to have a complex and comprehensive planning document in place.

Many of those documents languished and have little current applicability because of neglect and failure to update the plans and maintain contact with resource and service suppliers. Some disaster plans made their way into obsolescence through failing to inform and train new employees or simply by failing to include newer digital resources.

In Protecting Your Library's Digital Sources: The Essential Guide to Planning and Preservation, Miriam Kahn makes a useful effort to address the third reason for the obsolescence of disaster plans--failure to update plans so that they deal with digital as well as more traditional media. The book is written for the benefit of "less well-funded libraries and archives and other cultural institutions [that] need a practical 'how-to' guide to plan for the future of their data whether it be for access tomorrow, next year or in ten years." Kahn's 120-page guide addresses "prevention of loss, the restoration of data or digital materials, and planning for long-term access to these materials?' The well-written, comfortably paced handbook for libraries, museums, archives, and records centers is divided into two major sections. Section one deals with the common causes of data loss, such as system crashes, infrastructure failures, or hacking, and provides some insights on how to prevent and recover from digital data losses. Section two, the heart of this book, discusses policy decisions and procedures to increase the life span of digital resources. Section two also provides a series of 29 checklists that can guide the disaster-planning workgroup through a demanding and complex task with greater ease.

Kahn's style is dear and succinct and her advice is practical and highly applicable. Chapters one through six comprise section one and...