About digital preservation

At Artefactual, we work in the context of archival standards. This context informs the decisions we make for the software we develop and maintain.

The resources listed here can be specific to our own context, since there are a diverse, broad range of archival traditions in the world. We believe that the list presented here is a good first step to get started in the digital preservation world. This list has been curated for beginners.

Digital preservation is for everyone

This document is on resources about digital preservation and archives in general. The goal is to help someone new to this world get familiar with the concepts and ideas, not to replace a formal education on the topic. This is not meant to be exhaustive.

What is digital preservation?

Digital preservation is the set of actions, standards and processes involved in making digital or digitized content available and authentic in the future

Digital preservation might involve standard IT storage solutions, with a layer of additional needs to be met.

Getting started

The Novice to Know-How: Digital Preservation for Beginners from the Digital Preservation Coalition is one of the most thorough yet concise training on the topic. It covers file formats, bitstreams, workflows for preservation, and how to give access to preserved digital content. It will help you understand the risks associated with preserving digital content in the long term, from the material point of view.

Note that there is also a DPC YouTube channel.

Standards

Our work is informed both by archival content standards and by metadata standards.

Metadata standards

Software developed at Artefactual is informed by the digital preservation standards, such as PREMIS and METS. Both these websites contain learning materials, such as this PREMIS list of tutorials as well as suggested readings for METS.

Archivematica documentation has pages on how PREMIS is supported in the software, and similarly for METS in Archivematica.

Archival content standards

Some of the archival contents standards we are interested in includes the Rules for Archival Description, or RAD, the DACS and ISAD-G. Other standards might be of interest which are not listed here.

Technical challenges

If you are curious about the technical challenges of preserving data and its metadata for the long term, consider reading about the challenges faced by the CERN Digital Memory Platform, such as scaling, hardware failures, losing data because of software errors, and other ways that digital preservation can fail to happen. This thesis make use of Archivematica.

Software for digital preservation

You are wondering which software are used in digital preservation? Which languages and tools would be the most useful? Here is one answer from the Society of American Archivists, as well as an insightful blog post on The Signal. Both contains general technologies used in digital preservation, as well as software and tools specific to the field.

Curious to see how programming is applied in practice? You might want to take a look at this PyCon Ireland 2019 talk by Kieran O’Leary, where the preservation of movie image heritage is discussed, presenting how Python was used to build tools.

The archival context

Digital preservation is closely related to the archives world. How do they relate? Here are a few resources to help you gain a better understanding of the general context.

In But Storage is Cheap: Digital Preservation in the Age of Abundance, Abby Smith Rumsey highlights general challenges in establishing and implementing good digital preservation practices.

The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation by Trevor Owens covers history of preservation and builds bridges to new media studies, acting as a guide to intentional, deliberate preservation. This book is also available en español, in digital open access version.

We would also like to highlight the DPC Digital Preservation Handbook, as well as a repository of case studies related to Archivematica.

Talks

Many interesting talks on digital preservation have been made vailable online, such as this one on the Learn with Scholars Portal on digital preservation and what it looks like, and this video of talk by Trevor Owens on communities and platform.

And… many more!

This list was not meant to be exhaustive - here a few other links as a conclusion:

If we missed something that was helpful to you on your digital preservation journey, consider opening an issue to add it.