Digital Preservation: More Important Than Ever
by William E. Neale, eVisory

Records and information management professionals have for years understood the need for preserving our nation’s vital information. They have understood the need to store on media with long term keeping properties, and to provide disaster recovery and backup scenarios. This issue has never been more important than now that our country recovers from the attacks of September 11, 2001. While the loss of human life far outweigh the records issue, the sight of the millions of pages of paper cascading down in the wake of the World Trade Center collapse reminds us of our responsibilities to preserve the records of the institutions that rely on our expertise.

Preservation has always been thought of as a discipline for protecting vital records with long-term retention values. Microfilm has always been, and still is, a solid solution for documents with long-term value, requiring infrequent access. However, today’s document management systems provide quick access to images of scanned hardcopy, but also to born-digital documents such as Word and Excel files, Enterprise Reports, and even web pages. In addition, they provide tremendous productivity gains through process automation. The additional benefits must also be protected, not just for the long term, but for today’s active records as well.

Traditional thinking has been concerned with the media, and its keeping qualities. For this reason, microfilm is the media of choice since it has a known life of up to 500 years when it meets certain requirements. However, the obsolescence of today’s hardware and software has become a much bigger issue than has time and the deterioration of media. Digital documents, audio and video files are becoming increasingly threatened as new operating systems are released, new versions of Word and other applications replace the older, and as new storage devices are introduced. The usual way of illustrating this is “remember the eight-track tape?” Now it is more relevant to remind ourselves of 5 ½” floppy disks and, yes even 3 ¼” floppy disks that may go away as CD writers become more widespread. As records and information management professionals we need to find better ways to ensure that the information we protect outlive the technologies that are being replaced. Some of these steps should include:

• Plans for migration of documents to new versions of the application software as they are released.

• Open formats for image and born-digital files. Did you know that TIFF and PDF are proprietary to Adobe and that your records are in a non-standard format?

• Hardware upgrades to ensure that the media or drives that read them are kept current.

• Accurate capture and migration of the metadata for digital information, a key to records management since the metadata form a vital part of the audit trail for legal admissibility.

• Comprehensive retention schedules that ensure that the records are migrated to keep them for the requirement, or not kept if they are not needed.

• Constant monitoring of technology changes that can affect our preservation strategies.

• Revision of our strategies for preservation whenever appropriate. The preservation techniques we use today may not be the right solution next year.


Complicated? Yes!

Expensive? Yes!

Necessary? Absolutely!!

We are all learning from the September 11 attacks, about terrorists, and our vulnerabilities. It is our job to make sure that the institutions we represent recognize the threat to our nation’s information; not just from terrorism, but also from our own technology advances brought about by American ingenuity. And then take the appropriate steps to insure access for years to come.