Last month, I attended the Digital Preservation Management Workshop through ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research). I didn't have a large knowledge base when it came to digital preservation beyond the basics. Upon completing the workshop though I understood that digital preservation needs to be an initiative with broad institutional support.
In the workshop we covered these topics: Five Organizational Stages of Digital Preservation; Legal Considerations; Working with OAIS; Repositories, Tools, and Workflow; Preservation Metadata, Identifying and Securing the Requisite Resources, Digital Preservation Program Readiness, E-Journal Arching Case Study, Where Do You Go from Here. Also, the workshop included a poster session with ICPSR instructors, a lecture with Brewster Kahle that was sponsored by the School of Information at MI, and a class project.
To prepare for the workshop, the participants read Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities, Reference Model for an Open Archives Information System (OAIS), and completed the Digital Preservation Tutorial. It was with this background that the workshop was framed. Most lectures dealt with topics according to three areas: organizational, resources, and technology. A digital preservation program cannot happen without all of these areas working together. So while we looked at the issues covered in these topics, it was always in reference to what is needed at your institution at the organizational resource or technology level. It was incredibly useful doing this because it provided a real world atmosphere instead of just talking about a theory. Everything felt geared toward giving participants tools they could take back to their institution. Some of these tools also included action plans which can be used to perform gap analysis and create a road map toward implementation.
While the workshop was inspirational, the instructors did a good job of keeping participants focused on setting realistic goals. I think most of us know this is an ongoing project with a lot of potential pitfalls. However, attempting to move toward creating a trusted digital repository is a goal worth having and small stages of progress is still progress.
One thing I found extremely helpful is the flowchart for an OAIS reference model; it breaks down the functional entities of Common Services, Ingest, Archival Storage, Data Management, Administration, Preservation Planning, and Access in ways that show how they relate to each other as well as how they relate to the producer and consumer of the data object.
The final item I want to touch on is how we think of digital preservation. Is digital preservation saving files on a server and not looking back or is it something more? A common misconception, I think, is that digital preservation is just storing files and it becomes hard to justify when budgets shrink. However, what was stressed again and again, is that digital preservation is really long-term access. When approaching interested parties do we want to say, we'll save your stuff for this amount of time? Or do we want to say, we'll provide long-term access to your research for the scholarly community? Considering costs, one has to think of the cost of not doing digital preservation? How much will it cost to replace that research or to rescan and recreate a digital collection? Isn't it better to protect an investment and have the ability to continue creating new collections and researching new areas than repeating the same thing or just completely losing the information? As we become even further enmeshed in a digital environment we need to plan and prepare for the upcoming challenges or accept having an ephemeral information base because digital preservation just seemed like too much work and effort at the time.
