Digital Preservation: A Losing Battle?

For the Intro to Archives class, I researched digital preservation, the challenges it presents, and some of the ways in which archivists are trying to save digital and electronic records. It's something we talked about in class a little bit, but I wanted to share a little bit of what I came across while writing my paper.

So as Lisa Rickey told us in lecture a few weeks ago, the biggest enemy of digital and electronic records is new technology. Hardware and software systems get swept into obsolescence so quickly, and so often. Technologies are moving so rapidly into the future that it's hard to keep up. There are three main methods utilized to battle obsolescence: refreshing, migrating, and emulating. Refreshing and migrating both deal with transferring information from one system to another. Migration has the advantage of allowing transfer to new systems; refreshing does not. Emulation recreates the digital environment required to view the information; either by emulating the software needed, emulating the hardware needed, or by emulating the operating system necessary.

Sounds like they got things under control with all these options right? Well the problem lies in the fact that all three options leave the information vulnerable to corruption and does not guarantee that all the information will maintain its format. This means there's no guarantee that the information being saved will be done in their original form, which sometimes defeats the purpose. Plus, there are already digital and electronic records that may be lost because the hardware they were stored on--floppy disks, film reels, hard drives, or even websites--have not been able to maintain the data.

So what do we do? Ideally, every organization will be able to keep up with the technology and transfer and save information before their format becomes obsolete. However, it is expensive, especially emulation. Though it is the most effective, it is also the most complex, and therefore most costly. The reality of the situation is some information might just have to be chalked up as a loss, and focus turned to those that are the still able to be saved. As if an archivists job as a fortune teller wasn't difficult enough, they are not faced with the added pressure of having to decide what they have the monetary and technological resources to preserve at all. Paper collections can sit around for years without being processed, and most of the information will remain intact (barring any sort of catastrophe). Digital and electronic records don't work that way unfortunately, and decisions have to be made and money has to be spent to try to keep them at all.