The Preservation of Digital Items

The Preservation ofDigital Items

Reasons Digitization is Seen as an Effective Tool for Preservation

• Exact copies of digitized objects can repeatedly be made• Storing items in digital format requires very little space• Many copies of the same object can be stored in multiple

locations • Digitally stored objects can potentially be accessed by

anyone, anywhere in the world, and by more than one person at a time

• Some people feel that presenting people with digital surrogates of originals helps to protect the originals

Richness Digitization Affords 

                  Triangle Factory Fire Exhibit includes photos, links to original documents,lists of witnesses and victims, and transcripts of the trial.

Digital Items Live Short lives

• Average lifespan of a website is only 44 days• Lifespan of magnetic storage media about 10 to

30 years and then only if the media is stored under ideal conditions

• Magnetic media is highly susceptible to binder degradation, magnetic particle instabilities, and substrate deformation

• CDs and DVDs are susceptible to high humidity, rapid changes in temperature, and airborne particulates

Three Pervasive Problems

• Vulnerable storage mediums• Software and operating systems used to create

a digital object need to be preserved if the object is to be accessed in the future

• As technology rapidly evolves (rendering existing products obsolete), it is possible that in the future there will not be a machine capable of retrieving digital objects created in the past

High Density Read Only Memory (HD-ROM)

Trusted Digital Repositories (TDR)

"A trusted digital repository is one whose mission is to provide reliable, long-term access to managed digital resources to its designated community, now and into the future." Research Libraries Group

The seven attributes a TDR should possess: 1. OAIS compliance 2. Administrative responsibility 3. Organizational viability 4. Financial sustainability 5. Technological and procedural suitability 6. System security 7. Procedural accountability

Cornell University Library ------------------------------------------------------------------

PubMed

PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 16 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.

JSTOR

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. JSTOR offers researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated.

High Density Rosetta (HD-Rosetta)

High Density Rosetta (HD-Rosetta) provides analog storage of information and images on nickel plates that last for thousands of years.

HD-Rosetta nickel plate

The entire Bible on an HD-Rosetta plate

The entire Bible can fit on to a quarter-size metal plate.

While a Solution is Being Sought, Continue to Collect and Preserve

Materials of All Mediums

Thank you.

Peace out.