Digital preservation as a service

Digital preservation as a service. Steve Knight. National Library of New Zealand. March 30th, 2015.
Digital Preservation as a Service (DPaaS) is a joint project of National Library of New Zealand and Archives New Zealand to determine how to best approach digital preservation and leverage the government’s investment to date.

Digital preservation requires interaction with all the organisation’s processes and procedures and institutional support for appropriate resources. It is:

• the active management of digital content over time to ensure ongoing access
• a ‘series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary’ despite ‘the obsolescence of everything’

Digital preservation is not:

• backup and disaster recovery – these are short term business functions 
• only about access or ‘open access’ 
• ‘an afterthought’

We are trying to ensure against loss, against wasted time and money when systems are not built with long term needs in mind. We need a sustainable safekeeping model for digital assets – is a national level digital preservation service the answer? A nation-wide approach will:

• ensure the long term safekeeping of a greater range of New Zealand’s social, cultural, scientific and economic digital assets
• leverage investment to date
• reduce duplicate investment
• support a strategic response to issues related to data use and re-use 

By working at a national scale, we can provide the digital preservation capability and capacity that’s not currently available.

Digital Preservation Matters.