Digital Preservation
The History and Genealogy Department has many resources to help digitize and digitally preserve your collections, including books, scanners, webinars, and guides on digital preservation and digital archiving.
Digital Archiving and Preservation Basics
Best Practices
- Understand the Scope: Define the scope of your digital preservation project, including the types of content you need to preserve, the associated metadata, and your long-term goals.
- Create a Preservation Policy: Develop a preservation policy that outlines your personal or organizational objectives, responsibilities, and strategies for digitizing and preserving materials.
- Maintain Multiple Copies: Create multiple copies of your digital assets and store them in different locations. Redundancy helps protect against data loss due to hardware failures, natural disasters, or other unforeseen events.
- Regularly Backup Data: Establish a schedule for backing up your files to ensure they are regularly copied and stored in secure locations. Test the backup and restoration processes to verify their integrity.
- Choose Sustainable Formats: Use open and non-proprietary file formats for your digital content whenever possible. These formats are more likely to remain accessible in the long term as they are not tied to specific software applications or vendors.
- Monitor File Formats: Stay informed about changes in file formats and standards. Monitor the obsolescence of existing formats and be prepared to migrate your digital assets to more sustainable formats as needed.
- Metadata Management: Implement consistent and comprehensive metadata practices. Metadata provides important information about your digital content, including creator/author, context, and structure. Well-documented metadata facilitates future discovery, access, and management of digital assets.
- Periodic Data Integrity Checks: Regularly verify the integrity of your digital files using checksums or other integrity validation methods. Detecting and correcting errors early can prevent further data loss or corruption.
- Plan for Technology Obsolescence: Develop a strategy for addressing technology obsolescence. This may involve migrating content to new formats, updating software, or implementing emulation or virtualization solutions to ensure continued access to legacy software and hardware.
- Preserve Contextual Information: Preserve contextual information about your digital assets, such as documentation, software, hardware, and user guides. This information is crucial for understanding and accessing the content in the future.
- Stay Informed: Stay up to date with developments in digital preservation. Attend conferences, participate in professional networks, and keep track of best practices and standards.
- Collaboration and Partnerships: Collaborate with other institutions, organizations, and communities involved in digital preservation. Sharing resources, expertise, and knowledge can enhance your preservation efforts and help address common challenges.
Tips for Choosing File Formats
Metadata
Definition: "A characterization or description of the identification, management, nature, use, or location of information resources (data)."- SAA, Dictionary of Archives Terminology
Administrative Metadata refers to the information that describes the administrative aspects of a digital resource or information object. It provides details about the creation, management, and maintenance of the resource, rather than its content. Administrative metadata is essential for effective information governance, resource management, and preservation.
Common Types of Administrative Metadata:
- Creation metadata: This includes information about the origin and history of the resource, such as the author or creator, creation date, and associated software or tools used.
- Versioning metadata: Tracks the different versions or revisions of a resource, including version numbers, dates of modification, and information about the changes made.
- Access and rights metadata: This metadata governs access permissions, rights management, and usage restrictions associated with the resource. It may include information about copyright, licensing, and access control policies.
- Preservation Metadata: Pertains to information about the long-term preservation of the resource, including details about file formats, migration strategies, backup procedures, and other preservation actions taken.
- Storage metadata: This metadata describes the physical or logical storage aspects of the resource, such as the location, file size, file format, storage medium, and data organization.
- Administrative history metadata: Provides a record of administrative actions performed on the resource throughout its lifecycle. This may include information about transfers, backups, migrations, deletions, and other changes made to the resource.
- Provenance metadata: Provenance metadata documents the chain of custody or ownership of the resource, including information about previous custodians, transfers, and any transformations or modifications it has undergone.
Descriptive Metadata refers to the information that describes the content and characteristics of a digital resource or information object. It provides details regarding what the resource is about, subject matters, and other attributes that aid in resource discovery and access. Descriptive metadata is typically used to support efficient searching, browsing, and retrieval of digital resources.
Key Elements:
- Title: The title of the resource, which provides a brief and meaningful name or label for identification purposes.
- Description: A textual summary or abstract that provides a concise overview of the resource's content, purpose, and scope. It helps users understand the nature of the resource.
- Subject: Keywords, terms, or categories that describe the topic or subject matter of the resource. Subject metadata aids in resource discovery and enables users to find relevant content.
- Creator/contributor: Information about the individuals or entities responsible for creating or contributing to the resource. This may include authors, artists, photographers, or other contributors.
- Date: The date or range of dates associated with the creation, publication, or modification of the resource. It helps establish the temporal context of the content.
- Format: Descriptive metadata may include information about the format or media type of the resource, such as text, image, audio, video, or a combination of these. It helps users understand the nature of the content and determine its compatibility with different devices or software.
- Language: The language(s) in which the resource is primarily expressed. This information assists users in identifying resources in their preferred language.
- Identifier: A unique identifier or reference number assigned to the resource, such as ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for books or a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for digital content. It helps in accurate identification and citation of the resource.
- Relation: Descriptive metadata may include information about relationships and connections between the resource and other related resources. This can include references to related works, versions, or supplementary materials.
- Source: Information about the source or origin of the resource, including details about the publication, collection, or archival context from which it is derived. This helps establish the provenance and authenticity of the resource.
Structural Metadata refers to the information that describes the organization, arrangement, and relationships between different components or parts within a digital resource or information object. It provides details about the structure and hierarchy of the resource, helping users navigate and understand its internal organization. Complex digital resources, such as multimedia files, documents with multiple sections, or databases with interconnected tables often benefit from structural metadata.
Key Aspects of Structural Metadata
- Hierarchical Structure: Structural metadata describes the hierarchical organization of the resource's components. It may include information about parent-child relationships, such as chapters and sections within a document, or folders and sub-folders within a file system.
- Sequence and Order: It provides information about the sequence or order of the resource's components. This is particularly useful for multimedia resources, where the structural metadata can indicate the order of video clips, audio tracks, or slides within a presentation.
- Navigation and Access Points: Structural metadata helps users navigate through the resource by providing access points or pointers to specific sections or components. For example, it may include bookmarks, table of contents, or hyperlinks that allow users to jump to specific parts of a document or multimedia resource.
- Relationships and Dependencies: Structural metadata describes relationships and dependencies between different components or parts of the resource. This includes information about how components are linked or interconnected, such as relationships between database tables or hyperlinks between web pages.
- Granularity: It indicates the level of granularity or detail at which the resource is divided into components. For example, a document may be structured into chapters, sections, and paragraphs, each representing different levels of granularity.
- Spatial and Temporal Context: Structural metadata may provide information about the spatial or temporal context of the resource's components. For example, in a geographic information system (GIS), it can describe the spatial relationships between different map layers or the temporal sequence of data in a time series.
- Annotation and Markup: Structural metadata may include annotations or markup that provide additional semantic information about the components. This can include tags, labels, or descriptions that help identify and categorize the content.
Storage
Access Copy
An access copy is a copy of the original file for sharing and easy playback. These copies can be smaller and compressed file types for easier sharing and storage.