Digital preservation

Widely used hard drives can become unusable in a few years due to a variety of reasons such as damaged spindle motors, and flash memory (found on SSDs, phones, USB flash drives, and in memory cards such as SD, microSD, and CompactFlash cards) can start to lose data around a year after its last use, depending on its storage temperature and how much data has been written to it during its lifetime.

[citation needed] Currently, archival disc-based media is available, but it is only designed to last for 50 years and it is a proprietary format, sold by just two Japanese companies, Sony and Panasonic.

In digital preservation and collection management, discovery and identification of objects is aided by the use of assigned identifiers and accurate descriptive metadata.

Implementing a file naming protocol is essential to maintaining consistency and efficient discovery and retrieval of objects in a collection, and is especially applicable during digitization of analog media.

[16] However, filenames are not good for semantic identification, because they are non-permanent labels for a specific location on a system and can be modified without affecting the bit-level profile of a digital file.

[24][25] The ongoing maintenance necessary to digital preservation is analogous to the successful, centuries-old, community upkeep of the Uffington White Horse (according to Stuart M. Shieber) or the Ise Grand Shrine (according to Jeffrey Schnapp).

[28] Physical media obsolescence can occur when access to digital content requires external dependencies that are no longer manufactured, maintained, or supported.

[30] Factors that should enter consideration when selecting sustainable file formats include disclosure, adoption, transparency, self-documentation, external dependencies, impact of patents, and technical protection mechanisms.

[30] For example, the Smithsonian Institution Archives considers uncompressed TIFFs to be "a good preservation format for born-digital and digitized still images because of its maturity, wide adaptation in various communities, and thorough documentation".

Should an archive or library choose a particular strategy to enact, the content and associated metadata must persist to allow for actions to be taken or not taken at the discretion of the controlling party.

OAIS is concerned with all technical aspects of a digital object's life cycle: ingest, archival storage, data management, administration, access and preservation planning.

The research is being conducted by focus groups from various institutions in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, with an objective of developing theories and methodologies that provide the basis for strategies, standards, policies, and procedures necessary to ensure the trustworthiness, reliability, and accuracy of digital records over time.

[47] Under the direction of archival science professor Luciana Duranti, the project began in 1999 with the first phase, InterPARES 1, which ran to 2001 and focused on establishing requirements for authenticity of inactive records generated and maintained in large databases and document management systems created by government agencies.

[52] Physical storage media, data formats, hardware, and software all become obsolete over time, posing significant threats to the survival of the content.

Digital content can also present challenges to preservation because of its complex and dynamic nature, e.g., interactive Web pages,[53] virtual reality and gaming environments,[54] learning objects, social media sites.

[55] In many cases of emergent technological advances there are substantial difficulties in maintaining the authenticity, fixity, and integrity of objects over time deriving from the fundamental issue of experience with that particular digital storage medium and while particular technologies may prove to be more robust in terms of storage capacity, there are issues in securing a framework of measures to ensure that the object remains fixed while in stewardship.

One of the key strategic challenges to such programs is the fact that, while they require significant current and ongoing funding, their benefits accrue largely to future generations.

[2] Migration can be a very useful strategy for preserving data stored on external storage media (e.g. CDs, USB flash drives, and 3.5" floppy disks).

Data that exists as a single copy in only one location is highly vulnerable to software or hardware failure, intentional or accidental alteration, and environmental catastrophes like fire, flooding, etc.

Exact duplicates allow archives and libraries to manage, store, and provide access to identical copies of data across multiple systems and/or environments.

ASCII is considered to be the most durable format for metadata [77] because it is widespread, backwards compatible when used with Unicode, and utilizes human-readable characters, not numeric codes.

The catalogue, aiming primarily at German cultural heritage and higher education institutions, establishes guidelines for planning, implementing, and self-evaluation of trustworthy long-term digital repositories.

[84] The nestor catalogue of criteria conforms to the OAIS reference model terminology and consists of three sections covering topics related to Organizational Framework, Object Management, and Infrastructure and Security.

The primary goal for Planets was to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to digital cultural and scientific assets.

[93] This standard was published as ISO 16919 – "requirements for bodies providing audit and certification of candidate trustworthy digital repositories" – on 1 November 2014.

[118] According to an international survey conducted in 2010 of over 50 institutions involved with film and video reformatting, "the three main choices for preservation products were AVI, QuickTime (.MOV) or MXF (Material Exchange Format)".

For businesses and government entities, email preservation may be driven by the need to meet retention and supervision requirements for regulatory compliance and to allow for legal discovery.

The church was reconstructed and extended during the sixteenth (expansion of the nave) and seventeenth centuries (construction of tribunes), after the destruction caused by the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).

A number of open source products have been developed to assist with digital preservation, including Archivematica, DSpace, Fedora Commons, OPUS, SobekCM and EPrints.

The main players in LSDIs are cultural institutions, commercial companies such as Google and Microsoft, and non-profit groups including the Open Content Alliance (OCA), the Million Book Project (MBP), and HathiTrust.