Digital Preservation

The Current Literature

A point that is continually emphasized in the literature is that creators and publishers must take the burden of digital preservation more seriously (Beebe and Meyers, 1999, de Lusenet, 2002, Hodge, 2000, AHDS Executive, 1998). Jones and Beagrie note that "[t]he implications of allocating priorities are much more severe than for paper. A digital resource which is not selected for active preservation treatment at an early stage will very likely be lost or unusable in the near future" (Jones and Beagrie, 2002). Therefore, it makes sense that "creation is where long-term archiving and preservation must start" (Hodge, 2000). Creators and publishers, when selecting format and media, need to align their decisions with the support capacities of institutions which are charged with the task of their preservation.

Also consistent in the literature is the need for a distributed approach. A virtue of decentralized preservation is broader cost sharing and redundancy (Reich and Rosenthal, 2001), necessary given the enormous scope of digital preservation. Moreoever, expertise is unlikely to be concentrated in one institution but tends to reside over a broad spectrum of institutions and corporate entities. Indeed, the view of digital preservation as a distributed responsibility is strong enough that the National Library of Australia has enshrined in its statement of principles the idea that "location, selection, identification/cataloguing and retention of digital objects will be best achieved through the coordinated distribution of responsibilities" (NLA, 1997). As a result, most projects have emphasized cooperative approaches to digital preservation with interoperability critical to the solution.

A third area of emphasis is the necessity of preservation metadata. "Effective management of all but the crudest forms of digital preservation is likely to be facilitated by the creation, maintenance, and evolution of detailed metadata in support of the preservation process" (RLG, 2001). In the case of both the Cedars (Cedars, 2001) and the NEDLIB (Lupovici and Masanès, 2000) projects, one of the first tasks was to develop a preservation metadata standard to facilitate the rest of the work.

Finally, most digital preservation efforts model their activity on the Open Archival Information System reference model. Initially proposed by the Consultatitve Committee for Space Data Systems for use with space datasets, the reference model has been embraced by the broader digital preservation community as a way digital archives should work. Both Cedars and NEDLIB have adopted the OAIS model to build their research prototypes. In fact, the joint RLG/OCLC report on the attributes of a trusted repository (RLG/OCLC, 2002) goes so far as to make compliance with the OAIS reference model the first attribute of a trusted repository. However as the OAIS model is a high-level conceptual model, implementation details are not specified and institutions wishing to comply with the OAIS model must invest heavily to develop a local implementation as off-the-shelf OAIS compliant systems are not readily available.