"In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable."
The unique challenges and techniques for managing, preserving, and providing access to electronic records and born-digital materials.
Electronic Records Management (ERM): The practice of managing electronic records throughout their lifecycle, from creation to disposal or preservation. This includes policies, procedures, and technologies for capturing, storing, organizing, preserving, and providing access to electronic records.
Digital Preservation: The practice of ensuring long-term access to digital objects, such as electronic records, through the use of policies, procedures, and technologies that ensure their authenticity, reliability, and usability over time.
Information Governance: The process of managing information assets across an organization, including electronic records, to meet regulatory, legal, and business requirements.
Metadata: Data that describes and provides context for electronic records, including information about their content, structure, format, and context.
File formats: The specific way that digital information is stored and organized, including formats for documents, images, audio files, and other types of digital records.
Migration: The process of transferring electronic records from one system or format to another, typically to ensure that they remain accessible as technologies and systems change over time.
Emulation: The use of software to simulate older computer or software environments to ensure that digital records can be accessed and used as intended.
Authentication and verification: The process of verifying the authenticity and integrity of electronic records, including through the use of digital signatures, checksums, and other validation methods.
Access and privacy: The policies and procedures for providing access to electronic records while protecting personal or sensitive information.
Legal standards and requirements: The legal and regulatory requirements that govern the creation, management, and preservation of electronic records, including copyright, data protection, and freedom of information legislation.
Textual Records: This refers to records that contain primarily written or printed language.
Audio Records: Audio records are records that are in the format of sound recordings, which includes music, spoken word, sound effects, or other types of audio content.
Video Records: This type of record works for media that contains moving images, such as films, TV shows, home videos, and digital footage.
Image Records: Any type of image in digital format can be considered an electronic record, from photographs to written documents. This includes maps, charts, and other types of visual data.
Email Records: Emails are a type of textual record that includes both the body of the message and any attachments that are included.
Social Media Records: Social media records include content created on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., including posts, comments, and messages.
Web Records: These are records of web content such as websites, blogs, or online publications. They often include multimedia elements.
Database Records: Databases include electronic records that are stored in a structured format using a database management system. They are often used for organizing large amounts of data.
Software Records: Software records are the codes and programs used to create, manage, or store digital records.
Metadata Records: This is the information that provides context to digital records, including details such as authorship, date, and other descriptive information.
Geospatial Records: Electronic records that contain geographic information, including maps, aerial photography, and satellite imagery.
Scientific Data: This refers to electronic records that record scientific observations, measurements or experiments, typically in a structured dataset format.
Financial Records: These are electronic records related to financial transactions and accounting, including tax records, receipts, and invoices.
Legal Records: Legal records include electronic records created for legal purposes, including contracts, court records, and patents.
Museum and Archival Records: Digital preservation of things like museum and archival exhibits, historically significant and unique documents that may need preservation over time also fall into this category.
"It involves planning, resource allocation, and the application of preservation methods and technologies."
"It combines policies, strategies, and actions to ensure access to reformatted and 'born-digital' content."
"The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time."
"The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Preservation and Reformatting Section of the American Library Association defined digital preservation as a combination of 'policies, strategies, and actions that ensure access to digital content over time.'"
"The need for digital preservation mainly arises because of the relatively short lifespan of digital media."
"Widely used hard drives can become unusable in a few years due to reasons such as damaged spindle motors, and flash memory can start to lose data around a year after its last use."
"Currently, 5D optical data storage has the potential to store digital data for thousands of years."
"Archival disc-based media is designed to last for 50 years."
"It is sold by just two Japanese companies, Sony and Panasonic."
"M-DISC is a DVD-based format that claims to retain data for 1,000 years."
"Writing to it requires special optical disc drives."
"Reading the data it contains requires increasingly uncommon optical disc drives."
"Data stored on LTO tapes require periodic migration, as older tapes cannot be read by newer LTO tape drives."
"RAID arrays could be used to protect against the failure of single hard drives."
"Care needs to be taken to not mix the drives of one array with those of another."
"Widely used hard drives can become unusable in a few years."
"Flash memory can start to lose data around a year after its last use."
"5D optical data storage has the potential to store digital data for thousands of years."
"Archival disc-based media is designed to last for 50 years."