Self-preservation: The Gibraltar National Archives uses cloud to safeguard its history

Self-preservation: The Gibraltar National Archives uses cloud to safeguard its history. Caroline Donnelly. ComputerWeekly. 13 September 2017.
     Many enterprises are familiar with the concept of retaining corporate data as part of their regulatory and compliance obligations. But some fail to understand that the data must be kept accessible. "While regulatory compliance is the key reason why many enterprises embark on this process in the corporate world, for the Gibraltar National Archives (GNA), digital preservation is an essential part of ensuring the annals of its cultural heritage and democratic history are safeguarded forever." After a long process of digitizing historical content, they realized that digitising content is not the same as preserving it. "The risk was we could have spent all this time and money doing digitisation only to lose [this information] a few years down the line because it is not preserved correctly.” Digital preservation is about:

• actively managing the file formats
• ensuring they remain readable in future
• being proactive and managing the content

Just as it is important to be able to prove the provenance of physical records, the fixity of the digital documents needs to be maintained.  “People often ask me when our digital preservation project will be finished. I tell them never, because every day we are collecting records. Every day we are archiving unique material from newspapers to government records all for generations to come.”

Digital Preservation Matters.