I plan to take Digital Preservation next term, and these readings have just answered a nagging questions I have had about how the topic of Digital Preservation could fill an entire term. It turns out that digital preservation is much more difficult and tenuous than I imagined.
Begin with Technology Watch Report (2004): in which Brian F. Lavoie takes us through the creation of formal standards for long-term storage of digital data. Beginning with CCSDS's project for digital data generated from space missions, and ending with the impressive, but still rather tenuous Open Archival Information System (OAIS ) standard. Note the six OAIS criteria on page 3. On page 16 of the Technology Watch Report, Lavoie points out that the meaning of OAIS-compliant is "necessarily vague, but that "rigorous interpretation of OAIS compliance will likely emerge... In further readings, the looming problems of cost and human labor associated with digital preservation are keeping this topic on shaky ground.
In Research Challengs in Digital Archiving and Long-term Preservation, Margaret Hedstrom points out that "digital collections are vast, heterogeneous, and growing at a rate that outpaces our ability to manage and preserve them " (1) and that "digital objects require constant maintenance and elaborate life-support systems to remain viable" (2). Security against attacks and system failures pose further challenges to manage. As Lavoie and Hedstrom both point out, "there are no formal economic or business models for digital preservation activities" (2). On this issue of cost, in order to move forward in the world of digital preservation, Hedstrom explains that "there is a critical need to develop tools that automatically supply core metadata, extract metadat from resources at ingest, and restructure and manage metadata over time" (3). On one hand, the field of digital preservation seems almost too daunting; however, the silver lining could be in the obvious need for many jobs in this area as long as organizations can afford to pursue the goal of preservation this type of material.
In Actualized Preservation Threats: Practical Lessons from Chronicling America, Justin Littman gives a great account of some major challenges in digitization projects, as he identifies four preservation threats encountered on the NDNP project digitizing historically significant newspapers. These four categories are: media failure, hardware failure, software failures, and most of all - operator errors, which stands to reason. As Littman points out, hopefully we can all learn from these studies and work toward creating more stable digitization environments.
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