OpenCulture

The Digital Preservation Coalition was established in January 2001 to ‘foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base.’

The sense of urgency was born of the recognition that we stood at the dawn of the digital age, without the strategies, knowledge, tools or practices we needed in order to ensure the long-term preservation and access of what we were about to create.

Fast forward 8 years, almost a decade, and where are we? Are funders placing intelligent obligations on their recipients, requiring good practice and long-term thinking? Do museums, archives and libraries maintain Digital Preservation Policies that are connected to the management and development of their organisations? Are the Digital Assets themselves well described, using appropriate standards?

In a word, no. In two words, ‘not really’. The vast majority of cultural organisations are still dependent on ad-hoc practice, short term project methodologies or legacy systems. The picture overall (and it is admittedly anecdotal at the moment) is fragmented - certainly there are examples of excellent practice, but they appear as archipelagos in a sea of undifferentiated digital ’stuff’.

So what happened? Well, for one thing, Digital Preservation (capital ‘D’, capital ‘P’) became a thing, a practice, a professional discipline and a subject area. Worst of all, it became a subject of academic research and ultimately a set of products and protocols. And in so doing, it seems, it came loose from both the purpose of the thing and the realities of organisational practice and human behaviour.

So, if we forget for a moment about Digital Preservation and go back to first principles, what is it that were trying to achieve? I said at the recent JISC Digital Content Conference that ’sustainability is a by-product of success’. What I meant was that if a service meets a genuine lasting need, then it will be sustained because it continues to be used.

The same principle also holds for digital assets. The long-term viability of a piece of digital stuff (whether it is a dataset, an image, a document any other kind of file) depends on three factors:

1. How well the person who created it did their job
2. How viable the organisation is that is responsible for it
3. Whether it serves a useful purpose

You could summarise these three as ‘practice, economics and use’. But the interesting thing about them is that the long-term viability of digital material is only partly dependent on how well-made it is. The other, more important factor is nothing to do with the fact that it is digital, and everything to do with the organisational context, and how well it connects to the organisation’s core purpose.

Interestingly, this is a lesson we learned some time ago about physical collections of books, records or artefacts. The joint Collections Trust/BSI Code of Practice shows that Collections Management MUST be connected to organisational strategy and use if it is to be viable in the long-term.

The other thing to remember is that it is people, not robots, who will be doing all of this preserving. People are fallible, get bored, desire variety, make jokes, have political views`and a thousand other qualities which militate against the rote repetition of structured information in the way the current generation of Digital Preservation guidance demands. And yes, all of the guidance is just *incredibly* boring, even to those who care. Somehow we have taken a disaster plot worthy of a Hollyood movie and turned it into an abstract-theoretical treatise on organisational workflow.

So, what do we do? I think we need to turn the discourse on its head and abandon the phrase ‘Digital Preservation’ for ever more. Digital Preservation sounds like a tautology anyway - Digital is fast-moving, energetic, ever-changing, Preservation is, well, it’s dull, isn’t it?

I think we need to get people thinking about what they are doing when they are creating something digital and sharing it through digital channels, about the real long-term value of that thing, not from the point of view of some putative researcher or curator, but from the point of view of real consumers schooled in using real consumer online services.

We need intelligent decision-making that is based on a realistic understanding of the costs of maintaining access to digital stuff, and an understanding that often (always?) with content, less is more. Put it this way, if we are so worried about the long-term viability of this digital stuff, why on earth are we flooding the market (and our institutions) with so much of it?

I am asking all this because I have been tasked by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) with looking at achieving a transformation in the long-term viability of funded digital output. I have a feeling that the last way to achieve this transformation is to develop *another* Digital Preservation Strategy.

I think it is connected to a profound shift in the sector’s self-perception as it moves ever closer to being a public service broadcaster of digital content. If this is the new role for museums, archives and libraries then it isn’t digital preservation which will dictate whether that content is still around in 50 years time, it’s how well we do the job and how well we meet the needs of our consumers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.