Do you like or work with cultural heritage sector? Do you enjoy watching your favourite old YouTube videos…? Then this post is for you.

In this post:

Physical preservation

With physical items “preservation” is relatively simple, basically you try to ‘do no harm’ and you:

• keep a room clean of dust and bugs,
• keep the humidity down in the storage room,
• keep the temperature cool in the storage room,
• keep the ultra violet light low in the storage room,
• ensure the physical items are up off the floor,
• ensure your shelves, boxes, binders and folders won’t produce chemical gases that could change the pH of your physical items or leave a residue on them,
• ensure any fire systems won’t get your physical items soaking wet,
• etc.

If you do that physical items will last a surprisingly long time without the need for expensive scientific conservation (excluding newer 20th century chemical and magnetic tapes).

Unless there’s a disaster that takes out the whole storage room… if that happens it’s game over because the unique physical items are gone.

Digital Preservation

With digital items you begin by applying the same kind of preservation thinking, to start you:

• keep your hardware clean of dust and bugs,
• keep the humidity down in the computer room,
• keep the temperature cool in the computer room,
• ensure your hardware is up off the floor,
• ensure your operating systems and applications (e.g. antivirus) won’t harm the digital items you’re preserving,
• ensure any fire systems won’t get your hardware soaking wet,
• etc.

If you do that digital items will last a short while without much expensive forensic intervention.

Unless you forget to practice your backups and restores, maintain your security settings and anti-virus software, check that you can still upgrade your software to read your file formats, etc., etc…. if that happens it may be game over because your files could be inaccessible.

So there is a whole second set of considerations for proper “digital preservation” thinking. Consider questions like: How will you ensure that the individual digital files saved on the hardware are not accidentally or intentionally corrupted? How will you ensure that you continue to have software to look at the different digital files over time? What logs will you keep to demonstrate that the content has remained unaltered as the file formats change? And so on.

Learn More

You can learn more about digital preservation with the following resources. Make time for a cup of tea and quietly read these links, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to start understanding this topic:

• National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Levels for a quick visual overview
• Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Handbook for a longer plain-language overview
• Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) overview for resources
• Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Curation Lifecycle for an in-depth visual representation of digital preservation
• Digital Curator Vocation (DigCurV) Curriculum Framework for a list of skills to develop
• BitCurator to download the ISO image for a digital preservation workstation
• Digital Preservation Storage Criteria on the Open Science Framework (OSF) for a deep dive on digital storage hardware

Once you’ve worked your way through that list then the digital preservation functionality available in systems like Archivematica and Preservica will make a lot more sense.