What happens when the Internet and digital preservation coincide

What happens when the Internet and digital preservation coinicide. Jay Gattuso. jaygattuso's Blog, Open Preservation Foundation. 25th Sep 2016.
     A very thought provoking post that uses a job recruitment post as the basis for a discussion about the library's going digital preservation program, and what happens when they identify a gap in the capability that can’t be ignored. The primary purpose of the Digital Preservation Web Engineer is to "define, implement and support the efficient acquisition, preservation and discovery/delivery of web based digital content subject to the Library’s legislated mandate."  They understand that there is digital, and there is “online”, and sometimes digital is online. It is important to be able to confidently collect online digital content, maintain a sense of content, context and structure but there is a capability gap that they have been working around for a while. There are still many questions deliver content to a readership that is still establishing its own needs. And there is the challenge of doing this on a large scale.

They want the two processes, digital collecting and digital preservation to dovetail into a well-considered unified workflow.While they are all about collecting, storing and preserving important things that are precious to New Zealand, the same concepts hold true for others that collect to their own mission. "We don’t believe this point can be understated. We are slowly start to understand the cultural and research impact of web content, and this new post is a direct response to the challenge that sits behind national level collection building and the rapid uptake of Internet based content and information."

The content collected has an extremely important role in their National memory, and they have an obligation to operate with the care and expertise that this content demands. The collections help people understand their sense of place and history as well as informing research and creative outputs alike.

Their post addresses one of the problems facing digital preservation today. Digital Preservation is "an emergent discipline, finding our way through new challenges, and without specifically crafted routes into the work we expect to undertake. We are only just starting to see the edges of what’s possible, and unless we repeatedly open the door to complimentary professions we are going to struggle to address the contemporary challenge of collecting fast moving content, regardless of the ongoing care required when today’s harvests become tomorrow’s Preservation Masters with all the attendant questions of technical sustainability."

Digital Preservation Matters.