Special Interest Group Meeting Notes: Digital Preservation SIG 10/2/2024

Links shared during presentation:

• National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), Levels of Digital Preservation
• Digital Preservation Coalition report: Which Checksum Algorithm Should I Use?, by Matthew Addis
• QuickHash-GUI, file fixity software demoed during the meeting

Notes from discussion:

It’s so important to have multiple copies of materials. This enables you to replace files that have been corrupted. Damage to file storage can happen at any time. It even happened recently at Southeastern with a solid state drive.

Workflow question: was the method of keeping copies in three different storage locations in place when you came into the job?

• The process was started in 2021 and then expanded upon. They had files stored on a network drive (run by college IT) and in Drop Box, because they had Enterprise subscription with unlimited storage. Amazon Glacier was then selected as the third storage option.
• Glacier is widely used in Digital Preservation because it’s cost effective for long-term storage that you don’t need to touch often. (Southeastern is storing 22 terabytes for $80/month.)
• Glacier doesn’t have a built-in graphic interface. Some people use Cloudberry or Freeze to drop materials. (With Cloudberry, if you get a new computer, you have to release the license and then you can reactivate it on the new computer).

It is really difficult to get top-level data from Google Drive (number of files in a directory, for example), which makes it hard to know what you have and to create a good digital asset registry. Using Google Drive for Desktop helps. Cloudberry also helps.

Who makes the decisions about what needs to be preserved?

• Generally, all items that are in digital collections are preserved.
• DigPres role is not a curatorial/appraisal role, but when it comes to born digital materials, there is a meeting with the content creator, special collections and DigPres Librarian. Archival staff are usually aware of technical concerns regarding space and certain file formats

It makes a huge difference when administrators and others in your organization understand the issues with digital preservation and are supportive.

One library has oral history and other audio collections. There are WAV files and MP3s. A lot of work was done on the MP3s to improve the sound quality. The WAVs were untouched. Is it OK to prioritize the digital preservation of the MP3s over the WAV files, as the MP3 are more usable? Or should the WAV files be stored in multiple locations, as well?

• It's hard to do everything, especially with limited time and resources. You have to make priority decisions.
• If the MP3s have more long-term value - and it would take a lot of work to re-edit the WAV files - then it's OK to prioritize those for digital preservation. Documentation is key. Knowing what you have and where single or multiple copies are currently stored is important. Documenting your decisions is also important for those that come after you.

In some ways, the work archivists do to preserve digital materials isn’t all that different from preserving physical materials. If you have multiple copies of the same item, you preserve the ones that are in the best shape and discard the others. There are also limitations on how much can be maintained and how much space there is to maintain it.

One organization is exploring options because their current digpres service (MetaArchive) is sunsetting operations. Discovering that there aren't a lot of services that don't use AWS. Some suggestions to explore: Blackblaze or Wasabi.

People don’t always realize how easy it is to lose everything. In one recent example, someone came to a library and had lost photos on a phone that died. Since the photos were only stored there, they were lost.

There was a recent report about the loss of music industry data. Decades-old hard drives were being stored with Iron Mountain and the hard drives are failing.

We'll meet again in 6-8 weeks. Southeastern will setup a communication channel for conversations between meetings.