"Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information," The Commission on Preservation and Access and The Research Libraries Group (Abstract)

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In order to lay out the framework for digital preservation that it has envisioned, the Task Force provides an analysis of the digital landscape, focusing on features, including stakeholder interests, that affect the integrity of digital information objects and which determine the ability of digital archives to preserve such objects over the long term. The Task Force then introduces the principle that responsibility for archiving rests initially with the creator or owner of the information and that digital archives may invoke a fail-safe mechanism to protect culturally valuable information. The report explores in detail the roles and responsibilities associated with the critical functions of managing the operating environment of digital archives, strategies for migration of digital information, and costs and financial matters.

Whatever the particular structural outcomes may be as stakeholders, new and old, interact and give shape to the distributed network of digital information, distributed responsibility for preserving that information requires commitment at least to the following set of organizing principles:

1. Information creators/providers/owners have initial responsibility for archiving their digital information objects and thereby ensuring the long-term preservation of those objects.

-- The creator/provider/owner may engage other parties, such as certified digital archives, to take over some or all of the archival responsibility.

-- Libraries and archival organizations may interact with creators/providers as subcontractors for maintaining digital archives during and after the active life of their information objects.

2. Certified digital archives have the right and duty to exercise an aggressive rescue function as a fail-safe mechanism to preserve information objects that become endangered because the creator/provider/owner does not accept responsibility for the preservation function and does not take steps formally to convey responsibility, or because there is no natural institutional home for the objects.

The conditions of creating digital information and giving it a useful life are essentially the same as those required for the information to persist over time. That is, it must be stored and maintained in an accessible form. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to assert, as the first principle does, that initial responsibility for preservation begins with creation of the information and rests with the creator, owner or provider of it. Individuals and public and private agencies already regard such a responsibility as a natural one for their critical internal records. Creators of knowledge in other spheres depend on past knowledge and regularly acknowledge their responsibility to add to the enduring record when they publish their own ideas and findings. As the properties and usefulness of other kinds of information objects become more widely known, the ability in the digital environment to reuse and repackage these objects may generate revenue or other benefits. Creators, owners or providers of these objects, including some publishers, who may not have otherwise counted longterm preservation among their key responsibilities, may thus be more inclined to do so and may either assume the responsibility themselves or find a qualified partner to do so. Among potential partners, they will likely find libraries, archives or similar agencies, which have specific collection agendas and will seek to take or share responsibility for preserving organized collections of digital materials.

The second organizing principle calls, in effect, for a fail-safe mechanism. A variety of factors -- budgetary constraints, reorganization of priorities or focus, change of business, the need to go out of existence, or expiration of copyright -- might prompt custodians to neglect, abandon or destroy their collections of digital information. No distributed system of digital archives will afford effective protection of electronic information unless it provides for a powerful rescue function ...

Given the principles articulated here, it follows that a commitment to preservation -- collecting digital information objects, protecting their integrity over the long term, and retaining them in an accessible form for future use -- is a defining feature of a digital archives, whether it is operating in normal or failsafe mode. This commitment is fulfilled in practice in any digital archives by the exercise of three crucial functions: managing the operating environment of the archives, the migration of the archives as the operating environment changes, and the costs and finances of the operating environment and of periodic migrations.

Archives cannot save all information objects; they must appraise and select for retention the most valuable items. Selection processes for archives of all kinds -- paper and digital -- are matters of intellectual judgment about what to include and save and what to exclude. Criteria for such judgments are largely tied to the intrinsic qualities of the material and many of the criteria that have proven useful in the paper world will no doubt translate to and prove equally effective in the digital environment. In general, selection criteria include an appraisal of the content of the object -- its subject and discipline -- in relation to the collection goals of the digital archives, the quality and uniqueness of the object, its accessibility in terms of available hardware and software, its present value and its likely future value.

Wherever digital archives may reside organizationally, their operation is highly distinctive in one crucial respect. That is, they need, at least now and for the foreseeable future, a high level of systems engineering skill to manage the interlocking requirements of media, data formats, and hardware and software on which the operation of the digital archives essentially depends.

One migration strategy is to transfer digital materials from less stable to more stable media. The most prevalent version of this strategy involves printing digital information on paper or recording it on microfilm. Paper and microfilm are more stable than most digital media, and no special hardware or software are needed to retrieve information from them. Retaining the information in digital form by copying it onto new digital storage media may be appropriate when the information exists in a "software-independent" format as ASCII text files or as flat files with simple, uniform structures.

In the long run, the cost factor that will most likely determine the success or failure of digital archives is the investment in the systems engineering and infrastructure needed to support highly distributed network-based functions.

... little systematic understanding has yet emerged of the actual costs of digital archiving. As a result, there is almost no sense of the detailed interplay of cost factors that might promote the kinds of specialization, division of labor and competition needed, in turn, to drive digital archives not just to manage costs against a standard of information quality and integrity, but to strive vigorously to lower those costs while maintaining and improving the standard of quality.

- "Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information," The Commission on Preservation and Access and The Research Libraries Group, May 1, 1996.

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File Name: archive_digital_information_report19960501.pdf

Post Date: March 10, 2005 at 6:00 AM CST; 1200 GMT