The challenges of building a digital preservation system

Abstract

In the last two decades, digital technology has enabled us to create, use, and be enriched by information in ways that were unthinkable a generation ago. The growth in the number of digital items in today’s library collections has led to an understanding that new actions must be taken to preserve these digital assets and make them available to future generations.

While many organizations have systems in place for storing and managing digital objects, these systems are not always designed with preservation in mind. Digital preservation is about guaranteeing the continued usability of and access to digital content tomorrow and well into the future. Although preservation focuses on risk management, we would be mistaken if we equated preservation with backup or disaster recovery.