Digital Archiving
The basics.
What Are Digital Archives?
Digital archives have the same purpose as traditional archives with the difference that digital archives consist of digitized or born-digital materials, such as digital images, audiovisual media, software, and research data, for example. As such, digital archives require a different set of skills in order to care for the materials and maintain accessibility to them.
PERSONAL DIGITAL ARCHIVING
Personal digital archiving is simply digital archiving at a human scale. So, the goal of personal digital archiving is to provide non-digital preservation specialists or folks with limited resources for digital archiving, with practical and accessible strategies with which to preserve their personal collections.
DIGITAL PRESERVATION
According to the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, "digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time." Some of these strategies include: refreshing, emulation, migration, and replication.
TL;DR: Digital preservation refers to a set of strategies and procedures employed to care for, treat, and ensure accessibility to digital files.
Why Is Digital Preservation Important to You?
- Digital preservation aims to ensure future access to your files.
- Digital media is fragile and completely dependent on software and hardware to make them accessible. There are many systems that have to come together in order to reproduce data encoded in digital media, which makes digital files especially susceptible to corruption and damage.
- Caring for digital media is very different than caring for physical materials.
- Digital preservation is an ongoing process. Therefore, knowing how to store your files does not make for a complete digital strategy. Digital archives require consistent care and it is important to know how to maintain your archive.
Some Useful Definitions
- Born-Digital: Refers to media that is originally created in digital form (as opposed to reformatted analog media).
- Digital preservation: Digital preservation refers to a set of strategies implemented to ensure future access to digital objects. Some of these strategies include: refreshing, emulation, migration, and replication.
- Refreshing: The transfer of data from one type of storage medium to another identical storage medium without altering the data. Refreshing is a useful strategy for dealing with at-risk storage media such as CD's. However, it will need to be combined with other strategies when the data is no longer readable from a particular storage medium.
- Emulation: A digital preservation strategy that employs software and/or hardware to reproduce certain characteristics of a digital environment from another, often obsolete, system in order to execute certain functions of the original system.
- Migration: The transfer of data to other (newer or more accessible) digital environments. E.g. format conversions such as MS Word to PDF, or from one programming language to another.
- Replication: The act of creating duplicates of your files and data.
- Digital Obsolescence: What happens when digital material becomes inaccessible because the software, hardware, or physical media (e.g. cassettes, floppy disks) is no longer available.
- Preservation or Archival Master: The original final work or a file used to preserve the original work, and from where other copies will be made.
- Exhibition/Research/Access Copies : Copies that are created from the preservation master and that are used to distribute or provide access to the work.
- Ancillary material: Ancillary material refers to the documentation created during production. It can also include directions for accessing the work and exhibition specifications.
See more definitions on our Digital Archiving and Preservation Management Glossary.
