What is Digital Preservation?
"Digital preservation is a continual process of understanding the risks you face for losing content or losing the ability to render and interact with it and making use of whatever resources you have to mitigate those risks." The Theory and craft of Digital Preservation, Trevor Owens.
Resources
- Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network
Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network (DPOE-N) is a program providing digital preservation education and resources to cultural institutions across the U.S. They also offer grants and micro-grants for training and hardware.
- Digital Preservation Handbook
A handbook on Digital Preservation provided by the Digital Preservation Coalition. Among other topics, it touches on institutional strategies, technical solutions / tools and content-specific preservation.
- Digital POWRR
Preserving Digital Objects With Restricted Resources (Digital POWRR) provides training and assessments around digital preservation, specifically for under-resourced cultural heritage institutions.
- Levels of Digital Preservation Tool
A tool from the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) that helps organizations to assess and plan their digital preservation workflows. The tool breaks down digital preservation systems into five areas: storage, integrity, control, metadata and content, and provides activity suggestions based on an organization's current level of digital preservation.
- Digital preservation recommendations for small museums
Recommendations and resources for digital preservation specifically geared towards small and medium-sized museums.
- NEDCC Digital Assessment Training
Digital Preservation Assessment resources provided by the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC). Resources include a Digital Preservation Assessment Handbook, which provides a framework for organizations to start evaluating their own digital preservation workflows.
- Library of Congress Recommended Formats
File format recommendations from the Library of Congress to ensure continued accessibility to materials.
- Three-legged Stool of Preservation
The three-legged stool theory suggests that there are three components to a successful digital preservation plan: technology, organization, and resources.
- Digital Preservation Policy Template from Orbis Cascade Alliance
Resources for organizations to start work on creating a digital preservation policy of their own. This includes a template, activities checklist, and examples of other policies, among other tools.
Other Definitions of Digital Preservation
- Association for Library Collections & Technical Services Definition of Digital Preservation
Short definition: "Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time."
Tools
- Github Data Accessioner
The Data Accessioner (DA) is a tool that facilitates migrating content to different media. It can also create / validate checksums, gather metadata and compile an XML metadata file.
- DROID: File format identification tool
A tool from the National Archives that can perform automated batch identification of file formats.
- Fixity Pro
A low-cost tool that monitors and reports on the data integrity of stored files.
- Library of Congress bagger
A tool created by the Library of Congress that can produce a package of data files according to BagIt specification.
- Bulk Rename Utility
Bulk rename Utility allows users to rename multiple files or entire folders at once. You can also insert text, remove text, add numbers to the end of files (and more!)
- How-to Bulk Utility VideoInformation on downloading the tool and basic workflows.