Digital Preservation

Introduction

Since the advent of computers in the early part of the 20th Century, our society has been moving into the electronic world at an increasingly rapid pace. With this comes the transformation of our cultural materials from their traditional forms into digital forms, a change that has caused some alarm given the ephemeral nature of the digital environment. In 1994, the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group launched a task force on digital archiving whose mandate was "to investigate the means of ensuring 'continued access indefinitely into the future of records stored in digital electronic form'" (Waters and Garrett, 1996). The need for the taskforce grew from the realization that our culture and knowledge was in danger of being lost because of the short lifetime of the electronic environment (AHDS Executive, 2001, Hodge, 2000). Within a very short period of time, burgeoning collections of vital cultural artifacts have been created, stored and transmitted in digital form but are housed in cultural institutions ill equipped to preserve them.

The rapidly evolving nature of the electronic medium (Martin and Coleman, 2002) renders technologies obsolete in a remarkably short time and the ability to access older electronic documents disappears before our very eyes. As Besser points out, "[t]he artifactual value of electronic art is much different than the artifactual value of more conventional art forms. Because of changing technologies, electronic art originals can only be accessed/viewed/played for a very short time period" (Besser, 2001). Libraries in particular have struggled to address these issues given the ease of creating electronic texts driving the resultant growth of electronic scholarly publishing but these problems are rapidly catching up to museums as digitization projects take hold and creators begin to experiment with the unique properties and abilities of the digital medium.

Of particular concern are artifacts that are born digital and have no physical instance to transcend the digital limitations; that is, artifacts which are "created digitally and [have] functionality which requires use of appropriate hardware and software." (Hanna, 2001) To understand a born digital artifact is to rely heavily on its technological context for meaning (Lee, Slattery et al., 2002) and saving the digital bits while losing the technical context is still losing the artifact forever. Even the ability to save the digital bits is in doubt as the physical media on which they are stored may become obsolete in as little as five years (Rothenberg, 1995). And if it is difficult to save one format, consider how the difficulty is compounded when faced with the incredible array of formats that currently exist. This is a real problem for the majority of institutions surveyed in 1998 (Hedstrom and Montgomery, 1998) as most had 6 or more digital formats in their collections at the time of survey. Given the rapid increase in digital collections since 1998, it is not unreasonable to suggest the number of formats has also grown at a comparable pace.

Spurred by this, an assortment of national and international projects are trying to find viable solutions to the digital preservation problem. The Victorian Electronic Records Strategy project, PANDORA, Cedars, CAMiLEON, NEDLIB, Kulturarw Heritage, InterPARES and PRISM (Lee, Slattery et al., 2002, CLIR 2002) have all lead the way in exploring digital preservation. But in most cases, their attention has been focused on electronic records and documents and less on the types of digital objects that museums will encounter in the future. Therefore, we need to look at the breadth of the literature to understand the state of the art and practice in digital preservation before narrowing the focus to museum related issues.