Stumbled across this (anonymous – I have my theories!) posting, Getting to Grips with Digital Preservation, on the Collections Trust’s OpenCulture blog, and the point about abandoning the phrase ‘digital preservation’ has struck something of a chord. “Digital Preservation sounds like a tautology anyway – Digital is fast-moving, energetic, ever-changing, Preservation is, well, it’s dull, isn’t it?”
One of the most alarming pieces of feedback I’ve read from the recent Society of Archivists’ digital preservation roadshow series said something along the lines of ‘its a difficult subject to make interesting, but the speakers did quite well’. Why should it be a difficult subject to make interesting? Digital curation is a an innovative, fast-moving discipline, with a vibrant international research base, and nobody – if they’re really being honest – knows what the right answers are. Or at the most, they may have a few potentially right answers to a small subset of the questions. We’re living through the greatest revolution in recorded information creation and use since probably the invention of the printing press, and a professional archivist doesn’t find that interesting?!
One of the points I make in my roadshow presentation is that all the propaganda surrounding digital preservation – all that stuff about digital black holes in history – has actually been very effective. Only not perhaps, where we hoped it would hit home, amongst users and record creators, as amongst recordkeeping professionals ourselves. And then there’s the problem with digital preservation theory – unfortunately, you can learn to use all the jargon in the world but it won’t actually preserve anything.
If the digital preservation marketing strategy is working so well amongst archives and records professionals, then god help us when it comes to trying to persuade information creators and users to take an interest!
As campaigning organisations of various other kinds take a deliberate step away from thundering scare stories towards softer advocacy strategies promoting the benefits of their chosen cause, I agree with the OpenCulture blogger that the digital preservation community needs to become much more sophisticated in the way seeks to promote itself in the quest for longer-term sustainability of digital content.
Did you hear about the amazing success story of the re-created BBC Domesday project?
Around the World in 80 Gigabytes 
Dear 80GB,
I might as well come clean and unmask myself as the anonymous blogger on the Collections Trust’s OpenCulture blog!
I am reminded of a story I read once where a group of scientists succeed in pulling someone back from the future to our present. Hugely excited about the fact that our future society has cured all its ills, they ask him how we have ended the scourge of cancer. ‘I dunno’, he says, ‘it just works’.
And there, to me, is one of the central challenges to Digital Preservation. Currently, to be counted among the DP cognoscenti, you have to speak the language of institutional repositories, of open access and harvesting. You have to be confident in understanding workflows and interoperability and talking about open standards.
If you look at the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Handbook as one of the simplest ‘products’ in this area, it still presumes a huge amount of knowledge, and particularly background knowledge which comes from a specifically digital archiving context.
A lot of the rhetoric and guidance goes straight to the operational and procedural, and fails to address the human. The best process in the world will fail if it fails to speak to the human motivations and triggers which will impact on that critical and highly personal moment when a real human being decides whether they can be bothered or not.
I am not convinced that we can ever articulate a sufficiently compelling personal incentive that people will habitually take responsibility for creating preservable content. The only other option, and to me the more effective one, is to make Digital Preservation completely opaque to the end user. To get to the point where it is out-of-the-box functionality for consumer software and ‘just works’.
The argument, then, might be less to do with creating a better motivation for content creators, and more to do with focussing on the business drivers which would make commercial providers develop software within which Digital Preservation is an embedded function (like the embedding of accessibility features in PDF encoding).
Yes about ninety percent of digital preservation could be embedded at the agency level. Freeing archivists to be more
selective, reflective about what is worth preserving as a record of governance. Nick
The scary thing about modern culture is one minute an
industry or profession is talking to each other in a lingo
it has developed especially for the purpose and the next
minute it has been replaced by an out of the box solution from Microsoft (or Google)