"In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable."
The practice of ensuring the long-term accessibility and usability of digital materials, including web content, digital files, and databases.
Digital Preservation: This refers to the activities related to the long-term preservation of digital materials, including data, files, multimedia, images, and other digital assets.
Digital Asset Management: This topic covers the process of organizing, categorizing, and storing digital assets in a way that ensures easy and efficient retrieval and safekeeping.
Information Architecture: This topic is about designing and constructing the structure of digital information, including metadata, taxonomy, and ontology.
Metadata Standards: This topic covers the various metadata standards used in digital preservation, such as Dublin Core, PREMIS, and METS.
Digital Lifecycle Management: This topic is about managing the entire lifecycle of digital objects, from creation to disposal, and ensuring their long-term preservation.
Data Backup and Recovery: This topic discusses the importance of backing up digital data and the methods for restoring lost or damaged data.
Digital Forensics: This topic covers the methods and techniques used to investigate and recover digital data, including tools for data discovery, analysis, and preservation.
Digital Rights Management: This topic refers to the legal and ethical considerations related to digital preservation, including copyright, intellectual property, privacy, and security.
Preservation Planning: This topic is about developing and implementing preservation plans, policies, and procedures to ensure the long-term preservation of digital materials.
Standards and Best Practices: This topic covers the various standards and best practices in digital preservation, such as ISO 16363, TRAC, and DRAMBORA.
Migration: The process of migrating digital materials to new hardware, software, or file formats to ensure continued access and use.
Emulation: The process of creating an environment in which obsolete software and hardware can function, enabling access to digital materials created with those technologies.
Integrity checks: The process of verifying the authenticity, trustworthiness, and reliability of digital materials.
Backup and Disaster Recovery: The process of creating, storing, and maintaining redundant copies of digital materials in case of accidental or intentional loss or damage.
Metadata management: The process of creating, storing, and managing metadata associated with digital materials to ensure their preservation and accessibility.
Digital rights management: The process of managing and maintaining the integrity of digital materials' intellectual property rights and usage restrictions.
Digital forensics: The process of analyzing digital materials to determine their authenticity, chain of custody, and other related factors.
Legal and regulatory compliance: The process of ensuring that digital materials adhere to relevant laws, regulations, and standards, including copyright, privacy, and security laws.
Platform preservation: The process of preserving the software and hardware platforms necessary to access and use digital materials, enabling future access.
Open source preservation: The process of ensuring open-source software and hardware remains available, functional, and supported for the long-term preservation of digital materials.
"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."