Developing a digital preservation strategy

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Developing a digital preservation strategy
Paul Mullon COR Concepts
www.corconcepts.co.za
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Agenda

• Background to digital preservation
• Rationale and requirements for digital
  preservation
• Developing a preservation strategy
• Legal requirements
• Preservation options

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Caveats and considerations

• My focus is from a records management perspective
• Issues are the same
• Value (Why keep it in the first place?)
• Period of preservation
• Taking appropriate actions
• Preservability actions may be more important than
  preservation actions

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Background A sad story
Why I threw my floppy disks out the cot.
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Digital Preservation challenges

• The floppy disk problem magnified 1000 times.
• Media stability (Less than 5 yrs for CD-RW?)
• Data degradation
• Media storage and handling
• Hardware/software/applications
• Risks in data migration
• Who has ownership of this problem in your
  organisation? Historian, Librarian, or IT?
• Authenticity and integrity checks?

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Factors contributing to obsolescence

• Decrease in physical size
• hard drives (24" gt 1" over a 40 year period)
• floppy disks (8" gt 5.25" --gt 3.5" over a 10 year
  period)
• optical media (14" gt 2" over a 20 year period)
• Increase in storage capacity
• hard drives (5 MB gt 400 GB, 1 TB plus .)
• tape cartridges (1 TB cartridges coming)
• 12 cm optical media (650 MB gt 54 GB, 100 GB plus
  ..)
• Declining cost per unit of storage
• hard drives (most rapid)
• tape cartridges
• optical media (least rapid)
• Other trends are less uniform for all media
• reliability (generally improving)
• fragility (variable)
• stability (generally improving)
• time to obsolescence (variable)

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Digital preservation challenges

• Need to ensure
• Readable
• Identifiable
• Retrievable
• Intelligible
• Reconstructable
• Understandable
• Authentic

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Developing a strategy and processes
APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY
Paper
Digital Repository
Microform
Emulation Machine
?
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Legal Deposit Requirements

• ensure the preservation and cataloguing of,
  and access to, published documents .
• 'document' object which is intended to store or
  convey information .through any medium .
• place of legal deposit shall
• receive, accession, retain and preserve
• catalogue or inventorise

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Legal Deposit Requirements

• The format and quality of any document shall be
  original format and quality .
• Softcover may be required in some instances
• In the case of a microform and a video, shall
  be of a quality appropriate for long-term
  preservation .
• . the State Library, which shall specify the
  format or modality of access that it requires.

Can we comply?
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Some preservation options

• Keep everything on disk
• Management becomes expensive
• Still at risk of software obsolescence
• Software obsolescence has become the biggest
  challenge
• Back-up/restore becomes unwieldy

In most cases your software formats will become
a problem before the media.
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Some preservation options

• Migrate periodically
• All records to newest technology
• Unwieldy, expensive
• Risk of data loss with any migration
• Proof of originality?

Probably still one of the best options for born
digital information.
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Some preservation options

• Emulation
• Building an emulation system capable of reading
  different formats over time.
• A lot of work has been done in this space but the
  jury is still out as to its long term viability

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Some preservation options

• Reference Archive Media (microfilm)
• Only suitable for archive data
• Originality can be proven
• Least risk of obsolescence
• Low-tech readers
• Skills availability
• No requirement for migration

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Some preservation options

• Standardisation (of software formats)
• Not a strategy on its own, but is definitely
  something to consider
• Limit the use of software formats to as few as
  possible.
• Use of PDF/A? (ISO 19005 Electronic file format
  for long term preservation

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PDF/A ISO 19005

• PDF/A objectives
• Device independence
• Can be reliably and consistently rendered without
  regard to the hardware/software platform
• Self-contained
• Contains all resources necessary for rendering
• Self-documenting
• Contains its own description (Metadata)

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Other Strategy considerations

• Records and information management strategy and
  policy
• Long term access policy
• Retention requirements
• Price
• Risk assessment
• Preservation Metadata
• Storage, media and technology considerations
• Environmental control
• Security physical and software access
• Quality control (especially in accessioning)
• Electronic records disposition
• Monitoring and audit trails
• Documentation

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Questions?